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• The Information and Communication Technology (ICT) program addresses these challenges by conducting research in the following areas:
  • Interoperability and Integration. The program accelerates the industry's migration toward integration by making interoperability-related technical contributions to DER communications standards, providing training to utilities, developing reference implementations and tools, organizing interoperability tests of developing standards, and collaborating with utilities on the demonstrations of emerging digital technologies.
  • Telecommunications. The program 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 and Grid Architecture. The program creates artifacts that help to improve the state of the art in enterprise architecture and develops guides to help utilities with standards-based systems integration.
  • Advanced Metering. The program helps to lead 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 investigates approaches for maximizing the value of AMI systems.
  • Geospatial Informatics. The program focuses on the science and technology of acquiring, storing, cleaning, modeling, analyzing, producing, presenting, and disseminating geospatial data sets. Collaborative research projects in this program will enable utility geographic information system (GIS) professionals to master GIS data quality and data management challenges and deliver new geodata services for advanced planning and operations applications.
  • Information and Communication Technology for DER. The program advances technologies for utilities and customers toward a fully integrated and interoperable grid. The program develops tools and processes, and contributes to and harmonizes communication standards, and develops the requirements for communications infrastructure, smart technologies, etc. The outcomes advance DER applications for demand response, energy storage, electric vehicles, and distributed generation.
• Cyber Security for Power Delivery and Utilization (P183) Overview
  Program Description
  Cyber and physical security have become critical priorities 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.
  
  The Cyber Security Program of the Electric Power Research Institute (EPRI) 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 East: Chris Kotting, 980.219.0146; West: Annette Mosley, 972.556.6507.