This part of IEC 62351, which is a technical report, discusses cyber security recommendations and engineering/operational strategies for improving the resilience of power systems with interconnected Distributed Energy Resources (DER) systems. It covers the resilience requirements for the many different stakeholders of these dispersed cyber-physical generation and storage devices, with the goal of enhancing the safety, reliability, power quality, and other operational aspects of power systems, particularly those with high penetrations of DER systems.

The focus of this technical report is describing the impact of DER systems on power system resilience, and covers the cyber security and engineering strategies for improving power system resilience with high penetrations of DER systems.

While recognizing that many other requirements exist for improving power system resilience, this technical report does not address general power system configurations, operations, manual power restoration activities or the many other non-DER-specific issues. For instance, power system reliability relies on well-coordinated protective relays, stable power system designs, and well-trained field crews, while control center cyber security relies on many best practices for communication network design and firewalls. However, this technical report only addresses the additional reliability and resilience issues caused by 3^rd-party managed DER systems which may not be as well-secured or operated with the same reliability as the utility-managed power system.

This technical report discusses the resilience issues for cyber-physical DER systems interconnected with the power grid, building on the concepts and the hierarchical architecture described in the Smart Grid Interoperability Panel (SGIP) draft DRGS Subgroup B White Paper – Categorizing Use Cases in Hierarchical DER Systems 01-14-2014.docx².