Cornell University will be one of four institutions participating in the "Trustworthy Cyber Infrastructure for the Power Grid," a five-year National Science Foundation (NSF) project to design, build, and validate a secure cyber infrastructure for the next-generation electric power grid.

The goal is to design a power distribution system that is secure against breakdowns either from natural causes or hacker attacks.

William H. Sanders, professor of computer science at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, will lead the consortium, which also includes researchers at Dartmouth College, Washington State University, and Cornell. Robert Thomas, Cornell professor of electrical and computer engineering, will guide Cornell’s participation.

NSF will provide funding of $7.5 million over five years, with between $500,000 and $1 million coming to Cornell. The Department of Energy and the Department of Homeland Security have pledged to collaborate with NSF to fund and manage the power grid effort.

The project will address both the physical structure of the grid and the computer communications network that operates it, Thomas said. "Most people think of the grid as just the wires and transformers, but that’s not all of it," he said. The grid, he explained, includes automatic control systems as well as thousands of relays designed to take equipment out of service in case of physical or electrical problems. The relays are activated by sensor information and some computation, because problems arise so quickly that humans would not be able to respond in time.

Cornell’s share of the work will focus on determining what parts of the system are sensitive to failure and looking at marketing and technical aspects as well as computing.