Electricity infrastructure enhancement for the security of supply against coordinated malicious attacks

The impact of coordinated malicious attacks may be dramatically severe and may yield a wide area blackout. A preventive measure is enhancing the infrastructure through investment. Due to limited budget, a decision making is required to select the best possible options, considering cost/benefit ratio. We designed a time-step simulation framework representing the evolution of post-contingency failures and load/system restoration. System unserved energy is translated into economic losses. Different enhancement options can be compared in terms of benefit (reduction in the cost of unserved energy) and of cost (investments needed) to eventually rank them. The simulation framework also provides a way to derive an optimal lost load recovering strategy to accelerate system restoration. In this paper the simulation framework is applied to a real network (Austrian transmission grid) to evaluate the technical and economic impacts of a coordinated malicious attack.