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.