Abstract
Recent research has explored the potential for distributed, consumer-based equipment to participate in control action seeking to improve grid dynamic performance. Renewable resources are displacing synchronous generators, reducing the electrically coupled rotating inertia supplied to the system as a percentage of generation. However, this loss may be mitigated by feedback control emulating the dynamics of rotating inertia and so-called “emulated inertia” control may be implemented in distributed, consumer-based resources. The case study presented illustrates that emulated inertia feedback is also extremely well-suited to subversion by a cyberattacker. In particular, local inertia-emulating feedback can create wide-area instabilities with only slight modification of feedback parameters. The amount of affected load can be relatively modest and the attacker can “target” particular generators, producing oscillations that would likely trip rate-of-change-of-frequency protective relays within one minute. The authors believe this scenario is particularly troubling, because it is likely that distributed consumer-based control systems will lack the strong cybersecurity protection afforded large generation resources.