A Compressive Compilation of Cyber Security for Internet of Energy (IoE)

Introduction

In recent years, there has been a technological revolution in electricity grids mainly motivated by energy crisis, clean power generation, carbon emissions, ultra-high voltage, storage, distributed power generation and intelligent distribution networks. It is evident that these critical problems cannot be addressed with traditional electricity grid (World Energy Council, 2015).

The smart grid (SG) is the technological paradigm being proposed to satisfy the aforementioned challenges. SG aims to improve the reliability and quality of energy supply, incorporate clean energy sources and manage power plants efficiently; have fully automated distribution management; carry out the balance of the electrical system through the management of the demand and the storage of energy; allow customers to participate in the control of the conscious use of energy; incorporate distributed and connected energy storage; incorporate micro networks of connected communities; incorporate smart cities and electric vehicles; demand response through prices and contracts; and incorporate distributed generation schemes (Arroyo-Figueroa, Escobedo-Briones, & Santamaria-Bonfil, in press).

However, there still exist some gaps and limitations for the implementation of SG (K. Wang et al., 2018a). The electric infrastructure continues to move into a future where the modern grid driven by the combination of intelligent devices and high-speed communication with near real-time processing of the data (Carlson, 2019). This integration is called Internet of Energy (IoE) (Unterweger, 2018). The IoE is a new paradigm developing a revolutionary vision of smart grids into the Internet. IoE is perfecting the smart grid in an all-round manner, using wireless sensor networks, actuators, smart meters, and other components of the power grid together with information and communication technology (Ghasempour, 2019).

The aim of IoE is to collect, organize and make the information, from individual grid-edge devices across the network, available to all other grid management participants simply and quickly (Carlson, 2019). IoE technology includes utilizing smart sensors, common among other Internet of Things (IoT) technology applications, which allows such IoE-facilitated mechanics as power monitoring, distributed storage, and renewable energy integration. The fundamental issue is the volume of data and the time required to analyze the information. The data volume and scale can be overcome using secure communication networking of the devices, together with leading edge information technology (IT) like cloud computing. As device information is consumed by a cloud-based platform, the integration and sharing of information can be simplified using software applications running on top of the cloud platform. The cloud platform will become a data lake for different applications to utilize (Jaradat, Jarrah, Bousselham, Jararweh, & Al-Ayyoub, 2015).

The communication infrastructure is an essential component for implementing the IoE. A scalable and robust communication infrastructure is crucial in both operating and maintaining smart energy systems (Ebrahimy & Pourmirza, 2017). The growth and success of the IoE will rely on how we use cloud-based systems for integration and our willingness across the industry to co-create the systems and processes for management of the future grid. Achieving an IoE is not without its challenges. According to K. Wang et al. (2018b, p. 79276), one of the challenges that should be taken into account for the wide-scale implementation and development of IoE into smart energy applications is:

“Cyber Security and Privacy-aware Data Management for IoE: Among many applications in IoE, energy consumption data could be linked and mined to gain useful insights for optimization of energy utilization. At the same time, privacy and security concerns can prevent the information disclosure, energy waste and disaster. Further safeguards are needed to build trust in the data, which is instrumental for making critical decisions for the development of IoE”.