Malicious Control of an Active Load in an Islanded Mixed-Source Microgrid

Power-electronic connected resources are slowly shifting power system dynamics from being dominated by the physics of synchronous machines to being determined by human-designed control loops within power electronic converters. This transition offers new flexibility in control design which, consequently, also increases the cyber-physical attack surface. Within this work we consider the use of eigenstructure assignment, i.e. both eigenvalue and eigenvector design, for the purpose of designing a destabilizing linear state-feedback controller for an active load. To this end, we show that at high levels of converter penetration there may exist an electromagnetic mode, in addition to the electromechanical mode reported in prior literature, that an adversary might seek to destabilize. In addition, we consider two levels of controllability that an adversary may have for an active load and show that, dependent on the mode the adversary is seeking to destabilize, the resulting manifestation of the attack on the grid may be different.