Cybersecurity for Resilient Energy Communities of the Future

Purpose and goal:

The aim of this project is to enable secure deployment of energy communities. We will develop new security methods that meet the problems that arise when combining operational technology (OT) with cloud and IoT systems. We will also develop new security methods for cloud-based energy systems and develop new collaboration models that take into account the possibility of stakeholders to contribute to cyber security as well as market conditions in the context of energy communities.

Expected results and effects:

We will develop several solutions that address these challenges taking advantage of the complementary types of expertise available from the project partners:

A collaboration model focusing the shared security responsibilities and shared values that is needed in the energy communities.

A demonstrated prototype for improving and verifying the robustness of cloud-based control systems with respect to cyber-attacks in the context of energy communities.

A threat analysis and risk assessment method that considers both safety and security in the context of energy communities. Approach and implementation:

We divide the work in this project in six work packages. WP1 defines the scope and relevant use cases together with stakeholders, WP2 develops new models for collaboration to create secure energy communities, WP3 investigates technical solutions for securing energy communities through isolation and dependency management, WP4 expands on risk assessment methods developed in the SEAS project with safety-awareness, and WP5 develops a testing framework with anomaly detection that will be applied in one of the use cases. Finally, WP6 is devoted to disseminating project results.