Enel in the SPEAR project

5/28/2020

The Smart Grids, among other things , remotely manage the elements maneuvers on the electrical substations that allow to transport and to distribute the electric power of the network. This enables control in different environments like the System of Control of Supervision and the Acquisition of Information (SCADA), Distribution Manager Systems (DMS), and other small configurations of control systems as Programmable Logic Controller (PLC) or Remote Terminal Unit (RTU) often found in the critical infrastructures sector.

The Smart Grids are exposed to a great number of threats, internally or externally, with the consequent risks. The materialization of the mentioned threats, done by negligence or mistake (voluntary or involuntary), cyber-attacks etc. can instigate all kinds of security incidents that affect the assets of information owned by the organization, or even to the safety of the persons who could be in the field facilities.

Despite the revolution of new cybersecurity topics, it is evident that know-how and expertise from of related domains information security, telecommunications, is essential for the development of cybersecurity and resilience in the future.

Enel as a multinational energy company and one of the world’s leading integrated electricity operators, collaborates in the H2020 SPEAR project with the main objective to plan, validate and evaluate the four proof-of-concept SPEAR use cases. Four scenarios under protection of the SPEAR platform will be tested in order to assurance the smart grid robustness:

Enel is responsible to elaborate the experimental planning of this project. This is necessary for executing the required tests and finally for having a complete result of this cybersecurity project. After this phase, Enel will also participate in the use cases validation, carrying out the experiment running of the four use cases with the expected results according to the detailed planning report. All the use cases will run concurrently.

The last main task for Enel will be the evaluation analysis of the SPEAR platform, making an evaluation of the four use cases validation. Enel will describe the lessons learnt oriented for the exploitation plans of the SPEAR project. Enel expects to perform all these phases correctly in order to validate this cybersecurity development. We are very interested to have an additional tool in the smart grids available in the next future, that could help us to response properly in case of cyberattack.

Enel expectations in this project are to improve the knowledge on cyber-security, learn new methods of defense against cyber-attacks and develop a new robust platform to protect the Smart Grids, guaranteeing systems confidentiality, availability and integrity. Await to improve the protection and defense against cyber-attacks in critical infrastructures through last generation tools and techniques and share knowledge and experiences related to cyber-security with the project partners are also objectives of the project.