The Impact of Cybersecurity on Siting Distributed Generation Units in AC Power Systems

The vulnerabilities of the smart grid to cyberattacks can pose dangerous threats to the assets connected to the power network. It is important to identify cyber vulnerabilities in power systems and implement effective defense mechanisms to prevent cyber threats on these assets. Existing research works have not shown effective techniques for the vulnerability assessment and countermeasures against cyberattacks for the AC power systems. In this paper, we emphasize the impact of cybersecurity on siting distributed generation (DG) units in the AC power grid. We present an AC-based false data injection (FDI) attack model to analyze the cyber vulnerabilities of the system and propose an optimal defense strategy to prevent cyber incidents on these units. We perform experiments on the SaskPower network of Saskatchewan, Canada, to demonstrate the optimal siting for DG units under the cybersecurity constraint. Our simulation results obtained for the SaskPower grid show the effectiveness of our proposed approaches to analyze the cyber vulnerabilities of the power grid and find secure sites for the DG units in Saskatchewan.