Through a grant from the Department of Energy’s Office of Cybersecurity, Energy Security, and Emergency Response, CISI Director Stephen Bayne and his team are developing a framework that focuses on rural utilities within the Texas power grid addresses the various stages of cyber-physical attacks, including attack detection, prevention, impact analysis and recovery plans.

The Global Laboratory for Energy Asset Management and Manufacturing (GLEAMM) testing facility and microgrid is located on more than 60 acres of land at Reese Technology Center, a former US Air Force Base, that provides space and access to an isolated power source for intensive testing. The microgrid is connected to wind turbines, a solar array, diesel generators, invertors, batteries, and an electric vehicle simulator. GLEAMM researchers operate a cyber-physical test platform to test mitigation measures prior to field deployment. GLEAMM advances demonstration of university innovations and accelerates commercialization of next-generation industry technologies for enhancing the existing electricity grid towards a smart, secure, and resilient energy system.

One of GLEAMM's chief priorities is assessing resilience of the grid. Researchers are exploring ways to ensure the grid quickly recovers from failures related to cybersecurity attacks, mechanical failures and extreme weather events.

In addition to security training programs for current professionals and students, researchers are exploring ways to detect failures quickly with UAV-based renewable energy inspection systems. They are also implementing autonomous grid-forming inverters with an always-on function to avoid trip-off and blackouts in the event of grid faults.

Before field deployments, there is no substitute for testing cybersecurity tools at full power and actual load levels. GLEAMM's cyber-physical research and test platform reduces deployment risks and helps optimize the performance of hardware, communications, and security tools. It is important to simulate the dynamics of both the physical devices and the underlying communication networks, i.e., the communication system used by the cyber-physical system, which can be the target of cyber-attacks.

Hardware-in-the-loop simulators allow researchers to simulate entire grids in real-time, which provides valuable modeling information for new technologies as well as the ability to safely simulate cyber-attack scenarios for training purposes.

Texas Tech’s Center for Pulsed Power & Power Electronics, the largest lab of its kind at any university in the nation, has a long history of developing applications in high-power microwaves, directed energy and other high-voltage research, and we are much closer to the application of technologies than virtually any other institution in the US.