Prompted by the need to comply with environmental and societal concerns, Electrical Power and Energy Systems are undergoing an unprecedented transformation, demanding urgent upgrades to make them more reliable, resilient and secure. Modernization of current grids will greatly reduce the frequency and duration of power blackouts, diminish the impact of disruptive events and restore service faster when outages occur, creating broad benefits to society and economy. eFORT approach will enable the further upgrading of the energy grid without affecting the security of supply and increasing their reliability and resiliency against extreme weather events, man-made hazards and equipment failures. eFORT addresses this complex challenge by gathering a consortium of 24 partners, from 10 EU countries, that provides the needed expertise. The project will put in place a set of solutions at the cyber and physical layers for detecting, preventing and mitigating vulnerabilities and threats. Among them, an interoperable Intelligent Platform will set a common foundation for grid characterization and vulnerability overseeing, as well as gather information from smart grid components and apply heavy-duty algorithms, whereas Asset Management developments will strengthen grid infrastructure robustness, which will be empowered by the addressed Digital Technologies. All these elements will be validated in relevant environments coming from 4 demo cases covering the whole grid value chain: (i) a transmission network (The Netherlands); (ii) a remote distribution grid (Italy); (iii) a digital substation in Ukraine; and (iv) a micro-grid in Spain. Moreover, eFORT relies on several horizontal actions aiming at empowering EPES players by establishing a common regulatory and standardisation framework, performing technical and cost-benefit analysis, and evaluating new related business models and replication potential, in the pathway towards a more sustainable energy system.

The convergence of Information Technology (IT) with Operational Technology (OT) environments for digitising mission-critical stability and flexibility of Electrical Power and Energy System (EPES) operations as well as new Ancillary Services (AS) business markets through Distributed Renewable Energy Sources (DRES), has undoubtedly expanded the cyber-attack spectrum in modern power grids with intrinsic cyber-physical properties. To achieve a pragmatic and cooperative cyber-physical protection, COCOON brings an inter-disciplinary approach consisting of the synergy between networked systems and power systems engineering research with system operations over real setups. Through COCOON, cyber protection in EPES should a) function optimally and securely, b) natively provide inter-domain secure information exchange, c) address real-time power systems requirements for timely cyber-physical threat detection and mitigation, d) enhance operator training for grid protection operations. The bottom-up systems-oriented approach offered by COCOON will enable the composition of practical data-driven cyber-physical protection mechanisms to operate if needed on real-time and enhance (i) cyber-physical anomaly diagnosis, (ii) vulnerability assessment and risk profiling, (iii) cyber threat mitigation and (iv) trustworthy information exchange. COCOON will be demonstrated in four distinct pilot studies focusing on detecting, classifying and mitigating composite cyber-vectors targeting (i) AS instrumentation in energy communities through their interface with a DSO (Greece), (ii) cross-TSO grid stability data updates within the EU South East network coordinator (regional, based in Greece), (iii) DSO substations (Netherlands), and (iv) DRES aggregators interfacing with a DSO (Spain).