Monitoring and actuation represent critical tasks for electric power utilities to maintain system stability and reliability. As such, the utility is highly dependent on a low latency communication infrastructure for receiving and transmitting measurement and control data to make accurate decisions. This dependency, however, can be exploited by an adversary to disrupt the integrity of the grid. We demonstrate that Denial of Service (DoS) attacks, even if perpetrated on a subset of cyber communication nodes, has the potential to succeed in disrupting the overall grid. One countermeasure to DoS attacks is enabling cyber elements to distributively reconfigure the system's routing topology so that malicious nodes are isolated. We propose a collaborative reputation-based topology configuration scheme and through game theoretic principles we prove that a lowlatency Nash Equilibrium routing topology always exists for the system. Numerical results indicate that during an attack on a subset of cyber nodes, the proposed algorithm effectively enables the remaining nodes to converge quickly to an equilibrium topology and maintain dynamical stability in the specific instance of an islanded microgrid system.
Unlike prior work on demand management, which typically requires industrial loads to be turned off during peak times, this paper studies the potential to carry out demand response by modifying the elastic load components of common household appliances. Such a component can decrease its instantaneous power draw at the expense of increasing its duration of operation with no impact on the appliance's lifetime. We identify the elastic components of ten common household appliances. Assuming separate control of an appliance's elastic component, we quantify the relationship between the potential reduction in aggregate peak and the duration required to complete the operation of appliances in four geographic regions: Ontario, Quebec, France and India. We find that even with a small extension to the operation duration of appliances, peak demand can be significantly reduced in all four regions both during winter and summer. For example, during winter in Quebec, a nearly 125 MW reduction in peak demand can be obtained with just a 10% increase in appliance operation duration. We conclude that exploiting appliance elasticity to reduce peak power demand should be an important consideration for appliance manufacturers. From a policy perspective, our study gives regulators the ability to quantitatively assess the impact of requiring manufacturers to conform to "smart appliance" standards.
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