Toward Resilience of the Electric Grid

Electric grids play critical roles in urban operation, providing electricity to citizens and supporting other critical infrastructures. This chapter discusses various questions for building a resilient electric grid in smart cities by presenting both real examples and technical principles of power systems' response to cyber and physical threats. It also presents a comprehensive classification of cyber attacks: control attack, monitoring attack, control‐monitoring (CM) attack, and monitoring‐control (MC) attack. Defending against threats to electric grids includes three stages: detecting the existence of the threats, identifying the types and sources of the threats, and mitigating the negative impacts from the threats. The focus of technology development in each stage may depend on the nature of threats. Finally, the chapter distinguishes the concepts of reliability (which could be enhanced by optimally increasing the redundancy of power delivery equipment of the electric grid) and resilience (which requires more sophisticated and intelligent analysis and operation in real‐time).