NREL’s Energy Security and Resilience Center

This webinar discusses the National Renewable Energy Laboratory’s ongoing work to ensure energy security and resilience in today’s interconnected and interdependent world. Today, widely available software applications and internet-enabled devices have been integrated into most industrial control systems, delivering many benefits, but also increasing system vulnerability, thereby putting sectors of critical infrastructure at risk. NREL is working to incorporate intrinsic security in evolving technologies and is proposing evolutionary approaches to making energy and communications systems resilient to a disruption, no matter the cause, and having the ability to identify, detect, respond, and recover in large part on their own. Through NREL’s Virtual Cyber Research Platform, researchers can evaluate the responses of interdependent and interconnected components in a multilayer emulated grid environment to better understand how to improve the security, resilience, and blackstart recovery of today’s critical infrastructure. This capability allows researchers to safely launch attacks in a virtual world on both emulated and actual physical devices and evaluate how they would respond to an attack in the real world.