A Comprehensive Study of Cyber Attack Mitigation with the Exchange of Frequency Containment Reserves Control in a Multi-Infeed Direct Current Power System

By 2040, the Korean government aims for a penetration rate of 30–35% of the total power from renewable sources. Due to a lack of inertia, particularly in remote systems such as those on Jeju Island, these circumstances will reduce network stability. To maintain the diversity and unpredictability of RES penetration, HVDC systems with an exchange of frequency containment reserve control are utilized. An exchange of frequency containment reserves control (E-FCR) is one of the balancing arrangement concepts of HVDC systems. However, the development of E-FCR concepts is vulnerable to cyber attacks because this concept only considers one wide-area measurement for data exchange. This study established a simultaneous cyber attack operation, i.e., an attack was set at the same time as a contingency operation that affects the balancing arrangement between two regions. Multiple possibilities of cyber attack and mitigation operations were suggested according to their ability to access information in the MIDC system. Then, a cyber detection strategy was proposed through a normalized correlation concept to activate mitigation control that could enhance the frequency stability by adjusting the value of the ramp-rate deviation between two HVDC types. By simulating the Korean power system model that was implemented in PSS/E, along with a Python script, simulation results demonstrated that a cyber attack on missing data can cause severe low-frequency nadir responses, and the proposed methodology can practically detect and mitigate cyber attacks.