| Abstract: | The power transmission grid plays a pervasive role in modern society and its failure has a significant impact. In the past, the grid has been subjected to malicious attacks. With the increasing prevalence of distributed energy resources (DERs) and other renewable energy generation sources, there is a need to better understand the potential risks that arise due to the interdependencies and to develop mitigations. Hence, the objective of this work is to develop a methodology for modeling and analyzing DER threats, leveraging realistic electric grid models. This work develops a case study that models and evaluates situations of malicious DER failures and examines their impacts on steady state stability, voltage drop, and production and marginal costs related to analyzing the effects of DER failure. In this study, we consider the next-generation Low Voltage Ride-Through requirements for DERs as established by (North American Electric Reliability Corporation) NERC. These requirements dictate plausible DER modeling standards for bulk system stability studies. Further, we analyze the standard practices prevailing in the power system industry and use these to measure how to mitigate DER security and reliability challenges, as well as how to reduce the vulnerability of the system to blackouts during instances of cyber-attacks on increasing DER integration. Hence, this research provides a holistic study for the integration of DERs to the grid, analyzes the impact of cyber threat to DERs on the grid, and offers a simulation environment for further studies of DER interference to electric grid. The electronic version of this dissertation is accessible from https://hdl.handle.net/1969.1/197430 |
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