IEC 61850-Based Renewable Energy Systems: A Survey on Cybersecurity Aspects

IEC 61850-7-420 was formed as an extension to IEC 61850 to include data models for distributed energy resources (DERs). Despite having many advantages, IEC 61850-7-420 has not been widely used for DERs, including renewable energy systems, due to cybersecurity concerns. This paper discusses the different communication protocols that enable the interconnection of DERs and introduces the differences between them. This paper, then, explains how the IEC 61850-7-420 models DER data via logical devices and logical nodes. Next, the security shortcoming of the standard is analyzed, and the different cyber attacks on renewable energy systems in the recent literature are surveyed. Finally, this paper proposes future work about analyzing IEC 61850-7-420 based renewable energy systems to further the research in this field.