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• Information and Communication Technology (ICT)
  The Information and Communication Technology (ICT) program addresses these challenges by conducting research in the following areas:
  • Interoperability: The research accelerates the industry's migration toward interoperability by making technical contributions to standards development efforts, providing training to utilities, developing reference implementations and organizing interoperability tests of developing standards, and collaborating with utilities on demonstrations of emerging standards.
  • Telecommunications: The research provides leadership in communications standards development, provides tracking and analysis of communications technologies, develops the tools and techniques to effectively plan and design communications networks, and conducts laboratory and field tests to evaluate the performance of evolving and emerging technologies.
  • Enterprise Architecture and Integration: The research creates artifacts that improve the state-of-the-art in enterprise architecture and develops guides to help integration with standards-based systems.
  • Advanced Metering: The research leads an industry effort to develop open, interoperable, and advanced metering systems. It develops best practice guides for the operations and maintenance of advanced metering infrastructure (AMI) systems, and it maximizes the value of AMI systems.
  • Connectivity and Integration of Intelligent Edge Devices Consumer Internet of Things (IoT) Devices with Utility Systems: The research develops requirements and informs standards-making efforts for integrating and managing grid-edge devices with utility systems.
  • Data Management: The research documents industry best practices for how data are acquired, validated, stored, protected, and processed—and how accessibility, reliability, and timeliness are ensured. The program also is advancing the Common Information Model (CIM) standard.
• Cyber Security for Power Delivery and Utilization
  Cyber security has become a critical priority for electric utilities, which are increasingly dependent on information technology and telecommunication infrastructure to ensure the reliability and security of the electric grid. Specifically, measures to ensure cyber security must be designed and implemented to protect the electric grid from attacks by terrorists and hackers, and to strengthen grid resilience against natural disasters and inadvertent threats, such as equipment failures and user errors.
  
  EPRI's Cyber Security Program focuses on addressing the emerging threats to an interconnected electric sector through multidisciplinary, collaborative research on cyber security technologies, standards, and business processes.
• Research Value
  The rapid pace of change in the electric sector creates a challenging environment for asset owners and operators to monitor the cyber security activities of industry groups, develop an understanding of how new technologies affect security, and maintain the right internal resources for assessing those technologies. EPRI employs a team of experts with comprehensive backgrounds in cyber security who address these challenges by providing insight and analyses of various security tools, architectures, guidelines, and results of testing to program participants.
  
  EPRI's Cyber Security Program can provide the following benefits to members and the public:
  • A better awareness of industry and government collaborative efforts, where members can "plug in" to current activities.
  • Techniques for assessing and monitoring risk.
  • Tools and metrics to better assess security posture and return on investment.
  • Practical approaches to mitigating the risk of operating legacy systems.
  • Early identification of security gaps through laboratory assessments of security technologies.
  • Technologies that support the management of cyber incidents and increase the cyber security and resiliency of the grid.
• For more information contact: Chuck Wentzel, 618.320.0011 or Tim Anderson, 704.595.2054.