Resilient, Cyber Secure Centralized Substation Protection (rCSP)
PSCAL research team will develop “Resilient, Cyber Secure Centralized Substation Protection (rCSP)” funded by ARPA-e.
Summary: An autonomous, resilient and cyber secure protection and control (P&C) system distributed to each substation of the power grid will be presented. The proposed system integrates recently introduced setting-less protective relays into an resilient and cyber-secure centralized substation protection (rCSP) scheme that relies on existing high data redundancy in substations to (a) validate data; (b) detect hidden failures and in this case self-heal the P&C system by replacing compromised data with estimated to insure that relays always operate with correct data; (c) detect cyber-attacks (focus on false data and/or malicious control injection) and identify the source (IED or port) for attribution (cyber secure); and (d) provide the full state of the system with minimal delay for optimal full state feedback control.
Project Team: Georgia Institute of Technology, EPRI, NYPA, and Southern Company.
Autonomous, Adaptive and Secure Distribution Protection (a2SDP) 
PSCAL research team will develop “Autonomous, Adaptive and Secure Distribution Protection (a2SDP)” funded by SETO.
Summary: The application of setting-less relaying to distribution systems with high penetration of PV systems and other DERs will be presented. The proposed work will result into an autonomous, adaptive and Secure Distribution Protection (a2SDP) system to meet the protection challenges created by extra high penetration of PV and other DERs. The setting-less relay is naturally the ultimate adaptive protection system, immune to the direction of fault current flow or the level of fault currents, waveform distortion and any changes outside the protection zone; thus providing a complete solution to the two main challenges in protecting distribution systems with high penetration of DERs: (a) varying/reduced fault currents and direction and (b) changing topologies and characteristics as resources are switched in and out.
Project Team: Georgia Institute of Technology, Washington State University, Southern Company, Dominion Energy, and AVISTA.