Interdependent critical infrastructure and generation assets tend to cluster around communities (i.e., load centers) and can be combined to be served by a Resilient Community Grid as shown in the graphic above.
Resilient Community Grids can support facilities on either the transmission or distribution grid including at transmission voltages. Microgrids, by contrast, are typically connected through Points of Common Coupling only to the distribution network at lower voltages. Microgrids within a community, however, can be embedded within a Resilient Community Grid.
Resilient Community Grids provide several unique security advantages:
- Resilient Community Grids enable creation of layered and diverse defenses to multiple threats requiring penetration of multiple defenses.
- Cyberattacks are more difficult. Resilient Community Grid OT is independent of the OT used during normal operations, and its presence is hidden and provides no access points during normal operation. The Resilient Community Grid itself has strong, independent cyber protections and system diversity means any adversary needs to attack more than one system.
- Broad community-wide protection is more secure since critical infrastructure serving the community during a regional outage remains in operation and vulnerabilities due to interdependence are reduced.
- Multiple resources, loads, and circuits give the Resilient Community Grid operators continuous flexibility to balance loads and resources.
- New and enhanced black start opportunities beyond those otherwise in use are created.
- Hardening of the most important circuits serving critical infrastructure can be cost-effective.
The potential for a layered defense goes even deeper than the regional grid and a Resilient Community Grid. It could also include microgrids within the Resilient Community Grid as well as hardening of facilities, especially critical infrastructure, served by the Resilient Community Grid.