Campus Chronicle

Issue date: 8/23/05 Section: News

University of Illinois research will help the electricity company to improve the reliability and security.

University of Illinois researchers will work with electricity companies over the next five years on new hardware and software to improve the reliability of the nation's vulnerable power grid and make it secure from attack by computer hackers or terrorists.

The new project, backed by a $7.5 million National Science Foundation grant, arrives two years after the largest blackout in U.S. history left millions of people in the Northeast and southern Canada without power.

"That network is inadequate," said William H. Sanders, director of the university's Information Trust Institute. "Today, people are trying to patch it. But those patches will not get us to where we need to be."

The Trustworthy Cyber Infrastructure for the Power Grid project will be centered at the UI's Urbana-Champaign campus. Researchers from Cornell University, Dartmouth College and Washington State University will work with UI scientists and power industry representatives on the project.

"It addresses what we feel is a significant national problem," said Carl Landwehr, director of the NSF's Cyber Trust program, which provided the grant that was awarded Monday. "I believe the solutions that will be addressed will apply not only to the power grid but to the entire problem of implementing secure computer systems."

About 15 utilities and other companies in the power industry will advise the research team "to make sure the research stays relevant," Pete Sauer, a UI professor who is the project's liaison to industry, said Wednesday.

"This is really an opportunity to take some significant funding coming from NSF and put the industry perspective on it," said Jim Crane, manager of research and development for Exelon Energy Delivery LLC. "So the money's not wasted, and it ensures that the work that's done is practical and can be embedded into the tools we're developing for use on our systems."

The Aug. 14, 2003, blackout was blamed on a tree that shorted out a power line in Ohio and began a cascade of failure that affected people as far away as Connecticut and exposed the vulnerability of the nation's power distribution system.

That system was interconnected piece by piece over decades, leaving weaknesses and gaps in control. After the 2003 blackout, President Bush called the system "antiquated."

Continued...

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