Energy Internet (EI) is proposed as the evolution of smart grid, aiming to integrate various forms of energy into a highly flexible and efficient grid that provides energy packing and routing functions, similar to the Internet. As an essential part in EI system, a scalable and interoperable communication infrastructure is critical in system construction and operation. In this article, we survey the recent research efforts on EI communications. The motivation and key concepts of EI are first introduced, followed by the key technologies and standardizations enabling the EI communications as well as security issues. Open challenges in system complexity, efficiency, reliability are explored and recent achievements in these research topics are summarized as well.

A Survey on Energy Internet Communications for Sustainability

The smart grid (SG) is a promising platform for providing more reliable, efficient, and cost effective electricity to the consumers in a secure manner. Numerous initiatives across the globe are taken by both industry and academia in order to compile various security issues in the smart grid network. Unfortunately, there is no impactful survey paper available in the literature on authentications in the smart grid network. Therefore, this paper addresses the required objectives of an authentication protocol in the smart grid network along with the focus on mutual authentication, access control, and secure integration among different SG components. We review the existing authentication protocols, and analyze mutual authentication, privacy, trust, integrity, and confidentiality of communicating information in the smart grid network. We review authentications between the communicated entities in the smart grid, such as smart appliance, smart meter, energy provider, control center (CC), and home/building/neighborhood area network gateways (GW). We also review the existing authentication schemes for the vehicle-to-grid (V2G) communication network along with various available secure integration and access control schemes. We also discuss the importance of the mutual authentication among SG entities while providing confidentiality and privacy preservation, seamless integration, and required access control with lower overhead, cost, and delay. This paper will help to provide a better understanding of current authentication, authorization, and secure integration issues in the smart grid network and directions to create interest among researchers to further explore these promising areas.

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State of the Art Authentication, Access Control, and Secure Integration in Smart Grid

Cybersecurity and privacy in standards for smart grids A comprehensive survey

Standards on Cyber Security Assessment of Smart Grid

In this paper, we propose an efficient distortion-based privacy-preserving metering scheme that protects an individual customer's privacy and provides the complete power consumption distribution curve of a multitude of customers without privacy invasion. In the proposed scheme, a random noise is purposely introduced to distort customers' power consumption data at the smart meter so that data recovery becomes infeasible. Using the power consumption data and prior knowledge about added random noise, we develop an efficient algorithm for power consumption distribution reconstruction needed for power demand analysis and prediction. As a complete solution, our scheme also supports a privacy-preserving billing service. Using experimental results from real world single household power consumption data set and synthesized data of a large number of households, we demonstrate that the proposed scheme is robust against known attacks. Since it does not demand new facilities on existing smart grids, the proposed scheme offers a practical solution.

/pdf/a-distortion-based-approach-to-privacy-preserving-metering-4q481rpepi.pdf

A Distortion-Based Approach to Privacy-Preserving Metering in Smart Grids

The trend of integrating power systems with advanced computer and communication technologies has introduced serious cyber security concerns, especially in a smart grid environment where the cyber system is no longer regarded as 100% reliable to support power system communications and control as before. Power system security therefore extends to potential cyber security domain in the smart grid era. Risks from the cyber system as well as non-conventional physical power system contingencies start to contributing to the overall grid security. This will be particularity important considering the potential risks from targeted attacks on vulnerable system components which may bring done the overall system. The presentation gives an overview of the work done by the research team on power system security, including conventional stability as well as cyber security assessment. A framework for smart grid cyber security and vulnerability assessment will be illustrated as well. The framework includes two main components, which are respectively cyber system security assessment and fast power system security assessment. Complex networks theory and data mining based approaches are also employed to identify the vulnerable components of the physical power system. The proposed cyber system models can be integrated with existing power system models to study the complex interactions between the cyber and physical parts of the smart grid. Advanced modeling tools are proposed to model cyber attacks and evaluate their impacts on smart grid security have been developed as well.

Dong Zhaoyang

Papers

Smart grid cyber security