An Electric Vehicle Control Strategy to Mitigate Load Altering Attacks Against Power Grids

Due to growing environmental concerns, the world’s governments have been encouraging the shift of the transportation sector towards the adoption of Electric Vehicles (EVs). As a result, EV numbers have been growing exponentially and are expected to continue growing further which will add a large EV charging load to the power grid. To this end, this paper presents an EV-based defense mechanism against Load-Altering (LA) attacks targeting the grid. The developed mechanism utilizes H-∞ controllers and Linear Matrix Inequalities (LMIs) to mitigate LA attacks. After the controller synthesis and presentation of the attack scenarios, we demonstrate the effectiveness and success of our defense mechanism against the three known types of LA attacks. The scenarios include three 800 MW LA attacks against the New England 39-bus grid. The results demonstrate how our EV-based mitigation scheme eliminates the attack impacts and maintains the grid’s stability in face of an unknown persisting attack.