IRENE: Improving the robustness of urban electricity networks

Most critical urban infrastructures like water supply, infrastructure monitoring (e.g. tunnels) and emergency communication services depend on electricity. For smart cities, this dependency will only grow. This means that societal and economic consequences of power outages, especially for longer outages, can be severe. The future smart city scenario will be powered by a highly decentralized energy system where energy demand is partially supplied by decentralized renewable energy resources from wind, sun, and cogeneration. To maximally utilize the renewable energy in the urban environment and optimize costs, a significant amount of buildings will be equipped with generation and even energy storage capabilities. This approach radically differs from existing energy systems which are based on highly centralized energy provisioning. The decentralized energy system will depend on a large scale complex ICT system to control energy demand and supply; jointly, this system is known as the smart grid. The result is on one side a system which is vulnerable to faults in the increasing amount of ICT and grid components, especially from malicious attacks on ICT components. On the other side, the system is more flexible as demand and production can be controlled and decentralized production enables to mitigate single-point-of-failure aspects.

IRENE focuses on utilizing the decentralized nature of future energy generation to make them more robust to attacks, and on minimizing impact of power outages on associated critical infrastructures such as water and gas supply, communication systems, public transport, and road traffic control. The aim is to understand what social and technical measure should be considered when implementing these new technologies for the benefit of all stakeholders. The main outcome of IRENE is integrated into the collaboration framework that allows cities for different faults/attacks to collaborate with their stakeholders to mitigate security risks in energy systems, understand minimum operational power requirements and system dependencies, create decentralised energy inventory and support the sharing of power at times if need in an equitable and fair way for all city stakeholders.

Cyber security defence mechanisms and strategies for Smart Grids must be developed, as the impact of any malfunction directly reflects on society and its well-being. Hence a secure and reliable Smart Grid is needed. The solutions developed by IRENE will help city administrations, DSOs and operators of other critical infrastructures to develop, plan and evaluate appropriate measures for mitigating power outages. IRENE does not only take into consideration short-term outages with limited impact but also long-term outages with severe impact on critical urban infrastructures. It supports the development of social and technical methodologies that will assist stakeholders to collaborate and increase the resilience of the future power networks and significantly reduce the impact on urban society and economy. IRENE will assist member states to develop policies that will protect European citizens from attacks or disruptions on the power network. The IRENE open collaboration framework available to any potential user supports an increase in social engagement between local power generators and the surrounding urban community. Thus IRENE will improve the way the existing Smart Grid complex system is managed, monitored and integrated with groups, public bodies and enterprises,
Research steps and business innovation that IRENE will foster towards its goal are several:
a) Threats and vulnerability analysis methodologies and techniques, as well as societal impact of attacks and profiling of attackers.
b) Cyber-security assessment methodologies, with emphasis on quantitative security assessment.
c) Define cyber-attacks that can be reconducted to the appearance of emergent phenomena, and will present a clearer view to policy makers and other stakeholders of the possible threats of cyber-attacks on Smart Grids.
d) Development of collaboration frameworks for city stakeholders
e) Draft set of policy, process and procedure requirements for smart grid protection
In order to assure the above impact, the consortium contains research partners with complementary expertise covering communication (FTW), security and dependability design and assessment (UNIFI), requirements engineering and socio-technical security assessment (UT), Supply demand prediction and balancing (QMUL).
Ethos, who is a member of the British Standards Institute Smart City Technical Advisory Committee (part of a wider global Smart City initiative), will promote the results of IRENE within Smart City standardization bodies.