Reliability Assessment of a Power System with Cyber-Physical Interactive Operation of Photovoltaic Systems

With an increased transition towards low carbon technologies and their interactions with information and communication technologies (ICT) in a smart grid environment, reliability performance studies should essentially be incorporated with cyber-physical systems interactions. Such an integrated operating environment is inevitably exposed to cyber-physical system threats, particularly, with the increased presence of new and smart components. In the purview of the above, this paper proposes an innovative algorithm to determine the availability and unavailability of cyber physical interactive system components for quantifying the level of risk posed by random cyber threats. This paper also provides the pathway for the power system reliability assessment of a cyber-physical integrated system operation with multiple photovoltaic (PV) system configurations by incorporating Markov-Chain transitions for PV system components. A set of case studies were performed by simulating the cyber-physical integrated operating environments and the results suggest that impacts from cyber threats on interactive PV operation are considerable and a quantitative assessment is required to determine real impacts on a specific power system.