‘ BREEDING GROUND FOR THE FUTURE ELECTRICITY GRID’
On 1 October, the Control Room of the Future was opened in TU Delft’s Electrical Sustainable Power Lab. This ultramodern control room can simulate any disruption to the power grid in a controlled research environment, from lightning strikes to cyberattacks.
Text: Bennie Mols
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n the Control Room of the Future, simulating a cyberattack on the power grid is a piece of cake. “We will show you how we research cybersecurity”, says Alex Stefanov, assistant professor in Intelligent Electrical Power Grids at TU Delft’s Faculty of Electrical Engineering, Mathematics and Computer Science. One of his PhD candidates changes ‘false’ to ‘true’ somewhere in the computer code. “Several circuit breakers in the network are now being tripped”, says Stefanov. On a large screen, which depicts the main power lines of the power grid, it now starts happening at breakneck speed. First, one of the main power lines fails. An alarm starts to ring. Then another main line drops out. It is followed by a domino effect as multiple lines fail. All the alarms sounding off simultaneously create an infernal noise. Much of the electricity grid is now down. Fortunately, this catastrophe is only happening in the virtual world.
MANY SCENARIOS It is just one of many possible scenarios being investigated in the Control Room of the Future. “Hacking a power plant is difficult”, says Peter Palensky, professor of Intelligent Electrical Power Grids, “but hacking thousands of electric cars connected to the electricity grid is much easier. We’d better assume that the power grid is going to be hacked and work out how we can detect and curtail cyberattacks and how we can resolve the potential consequences. The idea of perfect protection is illusory.” Palensky leads around ten researchers who are working with the Control Room of the Future. In reality, cyberattacks are constantly happening on electricity networks across the world. Most of them are nipped in the bud and never make it onto the news. Occasionally, however, things really go wrong. In 2016, for example, cyberattacks on grid operators in Ukraine
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