Power System Operations against False Data Injection Attack presented by Qiwei Zhang, Power Systems Faculty Candidate
About the event
Dr. Qiwei Zhang, Johns Hopkins University & EECS/ESIC Power Systems Faculty Candidate, will present “Power System Operations Against False Data Injection Attack”
Overview
Advances in grid digitalization, while beneficial, have also exposed power system operations to increased cybersecurity threats. Several profit-oriented cyberattacks targeting the energy sector (e.g., 2021 Colonial Pipelines) show financial incentives are one of the most important drivers. Such a scenario echoes the California blackouts in the early 2000s, where power companies purposely created shortages of supply to drive up electricity prices. This made us wonder if cyberattacks, such as false data injection attacks (FDIAs), could purposely distort power system operations to benefit certain participants. Our results show that the answer is yes. Therefore, the operator needs a comprehensive understanding of such FDIAs to safeguard the operations. This presentation will discuss two research questions along this direction: (1) What are the most probable points of such FDIAs within power system operations? (2) What would constitute a ‘worst-case’ scenario for such FDIAs? The first part of the presentation will cover two of our research works to answer these research questions. The second part of the presentation will discuss potential research directions on power system cybersecurity.
Bio
Qiwei Zhang is a Postdoctoral Research Fellow at Johns Hopkins University. Prior to Johns Hopkins, he was a research scientist at the University of Tennessee, Knoxville (UTK), where he obtained his Ph.D. and M.S. degrees in 2022 and 2018. He received his B.S. degree from North China Electrical Power University in 2016, and he worked as a power engineer intern at GEI North American Research Institute in 2018 and 2019. His research interests include power systems cybersecurity, power system optimization, and managing renewable uncertainties. He received the 2023 Outstanding Reviewer for the IEEE Open Access Journal of Power and Energy, the Best Paper award at the 2023 North American Power Symposium, the Outstanding Research Assistant award, and the Min Kao fellowship at UTK. He is also a contributor to the Large-scale Testbed (LTB) project, which has won the R&D 100 award. He has published more than ten first-authored journal papers in IEEE Transactions, Applied Energy, iScience (Cell Press), and Scientific Data (Nature Portfolio).