Cyberattacks against Direct Load Control of Residential Electric Water Heaters in Smart Grids

The invasive deployment of digital technologies in power grids increases their exposure to cyber threats. In this paper, we study a type of load-altering cyberattack that targets peak shaving programs wherein a utility directly controls the loads of domestic electric water heaters. We consider a cyberattack scenario in which an adversary gains access to the advanced metering infrastructure and sends malicious activation commands to a large number of water heaters forcing them to simultaneously switch on in the midst of a peak shaving period, thus causing a sudden, large power demand that could lead to a system-wide blackout. We develop a simulation environment to simulate the loads of a population of electric water heaters under different operating conditions as well as under this type of cyberattack. Then, we propose a cybersecurity-by-design approach to mitigate the risk of such cyberattack. The efficacy of the proposed solution is analyzed using software experiments.