Smart Energy & Smart Water Critical Infrastructures

Trial#2 will be implemented by ASM, a multi-utility company in Umbria region, jointly owned by the Terni municipality and a consortium of private stakeholders. ASM operates electricity, water and gas distribution networks all over Terni city and major part Terni province. In Trial#2, the following infrastructure will be considered:

Hydroelectric Power plant (HPP): CyberNEMO will utilize the HPP of Alviano 2 (owned by ASM), which is located within the Tiber River Park. The Alviano 2 plant is part of the national energy plan, the regional plan and the territorial urban plan aimed at encouraging the production of electricity from RES and produces a power
average rating of 3 MW. Though not directly connected to the ASM network, Alviano 2 will participate to the trial#2 ecosystem by making available its SCADA logs.
Electricity Distribution Network and Substations: ASM owns and operates the local power distribution network, covering a surface of 211km2 and delivering annually 400 GWh to 65.000 customers. The ASM power network features: a) 4 primary substations, b) 700 secondary substations, each one equipped with a 450kVA transformer, a RTU and SCADA for remote monitoring and control, and c) several LV network branches.
Decentralized Energy Resources (DER): includes 41 micro plants and 690 solar PV, reaching the load of 700 kW. DER also includes a hybrid AC/DC grid based on the ASM’s headquarters with 200 kW PV, heat pumps for ASM offices space heating and cooling (140 kW), a Li-Ion battery storage, a biodiesel-cogenerator and a fast-recharging station for EVs (mode 4.65 kVA). Finally, more than 200 IoT smart meters distributed in the city to monitor residential energy consumption in near real time. Moreover, in 2023 ASM has replaced 65,000 1st generation smart meters with 2nd generation SM which enable new functionalities beneficial for DSO (automatic anomaly notification), retailer (tariff change) and end-user.
Supply and Wastewater Network: Beyond electricity, ASM handles the water supply network and the wastewater treatment, serving 86,000 customers. On average 23,000 km3 of clean water are pumped into 1,400 km of pipe and 180 reservoirs annually. The network is operated by a remote-controlled system. As wastewater treatment, ASM manages 2 Sewage Treatment Works in the city of Terni, 2 in the surrounding area and 130 tanks.

Use case Applications

Trial#2 will validate geographical horizontal regional-scale cyber-threats scenarios and privacy/data breaches governance management, operated in Umbria by ASM multi-utility as decentralized local CERT & ISAC service provider, which spans over:

Smart Grid Cybersecurity: Within CyberNEMO, ASM will realise advanced cybersecure protection for MV/LV substation breakers and smart meters offering cyber-protection to DER, RES, buildings and offices to measure and balance electricity generation/consumption. CyberNEMO will also analyse logs from primary/secondary substations, aiming to detect cyberattacks to power network, control centres and IT subsystems, and potential system failures and human errors in controlling the network, including maintenance and firmware updates. Finally
will evaluate how a cyberattack to the electricity assets will generate cascading effects to water and gas networks, along with water storage tanks, acting as well as energy storage devices.
Privacy and data breaches: Analysis of anonymized consumption records from smart meters, RES and flexible generation/loads (e.g. local microgrid) to mitigate abnormal, significantly increased energy demand. Special emphasis will be in privacy on data associated with individual energy consumption and citizens behaviour.

In both cases, we will investigate advanced cybersecure analytics to train AI models at different levels:

        ~At AIoT level, for identifying potential local energy grid discrepancies using already trained ML models
        ~At Edge cloud, for applications such as protection, power quality and partial discharge detection.
        ~At Cloud level to elaboration of streams or pre-elaborated data coming from different locations.

The trial will utilise a novel twin Green Data Centres infrastructure (in Italy by ASM and in Germany by RWTH) to utilize energy consumption and green (RES based) microservices execution using CO2 footprint as one of the KPIs.