Pre-Conference Workshop

Tuesday, March 19, 2024

8:00 - 9:00 am
Welcome Coffee and Registration

9:00 am - 4:00 pm
Preparing Cyber Defenders and System Operators for an Inverter-Centric Electric Grid

The 9/11 commission concluded "We believe the 9/11 attacks revealed four kinds of failures: in imagination, policy, capabilities and management. It is therefore critical to find a way of routinizing, even bureaucratizing the exercise of imagination."

This pre-conference Workshop is designed to build teamwork and cooperation between Cyber Defenders, Protection Engineers, System Planners and Inverter Control System Developers with input from NERC Certified System Operators. The lack of coordination between these different disciplines is leading to a power system that is vulnerable to systemic events with and without malicious actors.

This SIM-X Workshop is an innovative and unique training opportunity for Cyber Defenders to work with NERC Certified power system operators to understand in depth how to provide services and products that can prevent widespread damage to critical equipment and lead to massive long term power outages that could impact millions of people over many months.

The fundamental nature of power systems is changing: large rotating coal and gas fired synchronous generators that provide MW / frequency response, dynamic MVAr response, short circuit capacity for fault clearing and synchronizing / torques for grid stability are being retired. These are being replaced with wind, PV solar and battery systems with much less mechanical and thermal inertia - they respond to power and voltage swings averaged over several milliseconds with inverter-based resources that respond within a few microseconds.

As a result of barriers in communications between different disciplines, poorly designed PV solar farms and wind farms have been tripping inadvertently within a 300 mile radius of single phase faults at the terminals of synchronous generators.

The same hypothetical Cascadia Power System that is used to train NERC Certified System operators with organizations which are keeping the lights on for over 100 million people will be used in this workshop.

Frederick the Great stated: "He who defends everything defends nothing." The red hat attack and blue hat offense and defense strategies will be analyzed using the military CARVER analysis.

Please Note:

-- To attend the training, participants will need to provide evidence that they work as employees of, or as product and service suppliers to, a NERC-registered entity.

-- For NERC System Operators, 6 Hours of NERC Continuing Education Hours will be provided.

Fee: $495.00 >> Register

Workshop facilitator:

Dr. Robin Podmore IEEE Fellow, Member NAE NERC Certified System Operator President IncSys

Dr. Robin Podmore received his Bachelors and Doctorate degrees in Electrical Engineering from University of Canterbury, New Zealand. Dr. Podmore has dedicated his career to development of computer applications for power system operations with a strong focus on Operator Training Simulators. Dr. Podmore founded Incremental Systems Corporation (IncSys) in 1990 and has been working with the EPRI Operator Training Simulator (OTS) since 1991.

Dr. Podmore has worked in a wide range of areas and disciplines in order to ensure the success of PowerSimulator. These include prototyping new power system algorithms, specifying and testing software functions, promoting adoption of common information models, developing restoration plans, capturing knowledge and training power system operators and trainers. He is the primary author and video presenter for 40 hours of Power System Operation and Control on-line tutorials and simulator based exercises.

Dr. Podmore has championed Generic, Custom, and Replica Simulators as effective training tools for power system operators since 1978 when he made a presentation at an EPRI meeting in the Con Edison control center following the New York black out of 1977. The ESCA (now Alstom) DTS was developed under his direction. Since obtaining the license to commercialize the EPRI OTS in 1991, Dr. Podmore has continued to drive down the cost and increase the availability and usability of operator training simulators.

Dr. Podmore spent 3 months in Iraq over fours visits between January 2008 and June 2009 training Ministry of Electricity engineers and system dispatchers with PowerSimulator. He is a NERC Certified Reliability Coordinator and in 2013 was elected to the National Academy of Engineering for development of modeling and simulation tools for power system operation.