NREL Explores Setup and Security of 5G for Microgrids With a 5G Sandbox
controls, assess how 5G can improve microgrid operational efficiency and latency,
and test its resilience against cyber threat scenarios. Photo from Getty Images
Whether it is coincidence or careful planning, the infrastructures of both power systems
and telecommunications are heading in a similar direction: toward the edge. Solar
panels on a roof are like 5G towers in a neighborhood—in both cases, distributed assets
increasingly underpin these important systems.
To study the newest generation of wireless communications and what it offers power
systems, the National Renewable Energy Laboratory (NREL) built a 5G research platform
inside a replicated military microgrid and put it through resilience scenarios and
cyberattacks, publishing their results in a report titled “5G Securely Energized and Resilient.” They found that 5G features can support distributed controls and configurable security
and resilience for power systems.
The project was funded by the U.S. Department of Defense (DOD) Office of the Under
Secretary of Defense for Research and Engineering as part of the FutureG program, which aims to ready the nation for next-generation telecommunications platforms,
especially for the security, automation, and resilience aspects. But the results go
well beyond defense: NREL showed how utilities might use 5G to the benefit of network
security, recovery, and costs. And now with a realistic communications testing ground
at NREL, partners can ensure utilities will function when most needed in contested
environments.
No Wires, No Problem
A little lag is annoying during a stream, but it can be debilitating during critical
energy operations. The target speed for autonomous power restoration is eight milliseconds—that
is extremely fast. Hardwired fiber optics are the go-to alternative, but with such
growth in distributed energy devices, laying fiber throughout a microgrid quickly
becomes cost prohibitive. Instead, the project team explored how 5G ultralow latency
might fill the gap.
“From a grid integration standpoint, many devices will need low latency and high reliability
to successfully coordinate,” said Tony Markel, an NREL senior researcher and project
lead. “A fundamental difference between 4G and 5G is the way the data moves; data
resources can be closer to the edge. What if we harness the power of edge compute
and reduced latency to make the grid components a more effective system?”
microgrids and edge controllers. Photo by Brian Miller, NREL
NREL researchers achieved some of 5G’s effectiveness by designing the microgrid to
maintain power to both communications and critical loads. This included a layer of
resilience that was added by using edge controllers to maintain microgrid component
operation, even if some communications were unavailable.
With resilience and energy management both critical to NREL and DOD missions, this
work found the combination of 5G, distributed controls, and a renewables-based microgrid
to be a powerful combination.
Network Resilience, Priority Traffic, and Private Slicing: Some 5G Benefits
To evaluate 5G in credible operating conditions, NREL modeled its microgrid to reflect
a military base in California. Identical solar arrays, battery systems, vehicle chargers,
and protection equipment were modeled with interfaces via the 5G network. Many scenarios
were tested including grid outages and various cyber intrusions.
“Our test scenarios were not only about controlling the power grid and microgrids
for resilience but also about powering the 5G network itself. If we can keep the grid
running for resilient power, that in turn keeps the communications network operational,”
said Brian Miller, electric power systems engineering lead.
The scenarios included failure of a cell tower, a microgrid controller crash and recovery,
unsecure foreign-operated network traffic, and congestion from other network devices.
“Edge computing, network traffic prioritization, and private slicing all worked out,”
Miller said, discussing 5G features that they implemented in the test microgrid. “We
could operate flawlessly with this network; for example, prioritization allowed us
to preempt even when communication traffic was maxed out, so that it’s like having
dedicated access to critical systems.”
Latency, however, was less impressive. Perhaps with millimeter wave 5G bands the researchers
would achieve significantly faster exchanges of data, but the geographically dispersed
microgrid required the longer range of sub-6-GHz bands. Latency was low, but not ultralow
enough to smoothly coordinate power restoration without even a blip in power, as a
battery backup unit would typically provide.
With regards to security, researchers focused on each 5G component and found many
ways to make the network more secure against attackers with a foothold. As 5G is built
on commodity server hardware and virtualized tools and functions, each component requires
a thorough cyber assessment and tuning to prevent threat actors changing data or reading
parameters of energy systems. Knowing that the network components and data flows are
secure is step one in being able to trust 5G for future uses with distributed assets.
A New Lab Capability
This 5G lab capability exemplifies collaboration across government agencies for a
technology that achieves mutual resilience. 5G has special importance to DOD with
its possibility to support numerous rapid deployment scenarios such as expeditionary
air base operations, agile combat employment, and more. With further testing, these
results will serve as a foundation for military services to enhance infrastructure.
In the broader picture, 5G research contributes to resilient homeland electrical grids
and U.S. innovation.
“We plan to use this project as a development platform for research capabilities that
can be replicated in the Advanced Research on Integrated Energy Systems (ARIES) Cyber
Range,” Markel said. “The 5G core, multi-access edge compute, private slices—provides
the foundation for research plans in large-scale secure integration of renewables.”
to replicate complex energy system challenges. Photo by Josh Bauer and Bryan Bechtold, NREL
ARIES is the ideal research environment for utilities, device developers, energy service
providers, and any grid researcher to stage their own systems and validate 5G solutions
without the limitations of doing tests directly on the public grid.
“Industry led these efforts by planning a modular and open 5G architecture, and we
are researching new ways to use its features in the electricity grid,” Markel said.
“Millions of energy devices will become interconnected, and our research is showing
the path to distributed, resilient, secure, and energy-efficient operations building
on the 5G foundation.”
Learn about NREL job opportunities in 5G for cybersecurity.
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