Clean Energy Technology Aims to Secure Grid Edge Communications

The “grid edge” sounds like a mysterious and potentially risky place, but it’s not necessarily so. The grid edge encompasses software, devices, and technologies owned by the customer, usually homeowners, businesses, or commercial facilities. Distributed energy resources (DER) are evolving quickly at the grid edge, and unless they are securely integrated into grid operations and management, they could impact grid reliability. Communicating with equipment and devices at the grid edge is becoming increasingly important as DER, like rooftop solar systems, rise in popularity.  

A new technology developed by Sandia National Laboratories, called SolarSnitch, aims to address this emerging cybersecurity gap by securing photovoltaic (PV) communications within DER systems at the grid edge. It uses inspection tools to analyze cyber and physical data in PV smart inverters and custom machine learning (ML) algorithms to detect potential cyber attacks.  

SolarSnitch is one of 50 clean energy projects selected in the Fiscal Year 2024 Technology Commercialization Fund (TCF) Base Annual Appropriations Core Laboratory Infrastructure for Market Readiness (CLIMR) lab call. These CLIMR lab call projects, coordinated by the Department of Energy’s (DOE) Office of Technology Transitions and funded by several DOE program offices, are dedicated to advancing technologies and strengthening existing practices to deliver innovative clean energy solutions to the market.  

The funding for SolarSnitch, awarded by DOE’s Office of Cybersecurity, Energy Security, and Emergency Response (CESER) and the Energy Efficiency and Renewable Energy’s Solar Energy Technologies Office (SETO), will help mature the technology and ready it for commercialization. Over the next 24 months, project partners will be able to conduct ML-focused testing of the SolarSnitch solution within multiple real-world environments, enhancing its maturity, detection accuracy, and deployment readiness.   

Read about all the projects selected in the FY 24 TCF Base CLIMR lab call. Learn more about CESER and SETO.