Manipulating Residents’ Behavior to Attack the Urban Power Distribution System

The reliable operation of the power distribution system is a matter of national security. Increasingly, urban distribution systems rely on communications between customers and the utility to implement consumer-centric programs such as demand response that enhance the grid resilience. This paper reports an unconventional and previously unexamined mode of malicious attack on the power distribution infrastructure of cities. It demonstrates that consumer behaviors in such a system could be manipulated by an attacker using false communications, which could significantly impact the system reliability. Using a novel decision-making model for consumer response, possible network impacts of such an attack are examined, which include reduction in system reserves, increase in peak demand, lower voltage profiles, and potential system blackouts. These detrimental effects are shown to worsen in the future as more consumers join such programs and adopt flexible high-power loads. Furthermore, though the system is resilient to random errors or failures, it remains highly vulnerable to strategic attacks such as those demonstrated here. These results recommend urgency in developing solutions to detect and tackle possible injection of fake information into such critical systems, which, as shown here, can have a very real impact on the energy infrastructure reliability.