Sustained System Oscillation by Malicious Cyber Attacks on Distributed Energy Resources

In conventional power grids, the power system stabilizer (PSS) is designed to damp low-frequency oscillations. With the increasing penetration of distributed energy resources (DER), the power system dynamics is continuously changing and the damping control design for PSS should be reconsidered. This paper demonstrates a cyber attack scenario in which the design flaws of the PSS are exploited and the power output of the DER is manipulated to cause sustained oscillations or even system instability. Test results on the Kundur two-area system with aggregated DER have shown that the proposed attack scenario can cause high-amplitude sustained oscillations. As a sustained oscillation mitigation methodology, dissipative energy flow (DEF) based technique has been implemented to detect the source of forced oscillation.