A Testbed Environment for Buildings-to-Grid Cyber Resilience Research and Development

The smart grid is characterized by the proliferation of advanced digital controllers at all levels of its operational hierarchy from generation to end consumption. Such controllers within modern residential and commercial buildings enable grid operators to exercise fine-grained control over energy consumption through several emerging buildings-to-grid (B2G) applications. Though this capability promises significant benefits in terms of operational economics and improved reliability, cybersecurity weaknesses in the supporting infrastructure could be exploited to cause harm, and this necessitates focused research on two fronts. First, understanding how cyber attacks in the B2G space could affect grid reliability and to what extent. Second, developing and validating cyber-physical application-specific countermeasures, complementary to traditional infrastructure cybersecurity mechanisms, for enhanced cyber-attack detection and mitigation. Pacific Northwest National Laboratory is currently developing a B2G testbed to address these core research needs. Specifically, the B2G testbed combines high-fidelity buildings+grid simulators, industry-grade building automation, and supervisory control and data acquisition (SCADA) systems in an integrated, realistic, and reconfigurable environment capable of supporting experiments on attack detection, impact assessment, and mitigation. In this paper, we articulate the need for research testbeds to model various B2G applications broadly, by looking at the end-to-end operational hierarchy of the smart grid. Finally, the paper describes the architecture of the B2G testbed in detail, and also addresses the broad spectrum of B2G resilience research it is capable of supporting.