Challenges, Risks and Rewards of Energy Grid Smartification

Good afternoon everyone. We did IGA in 20 minutes. Now we do the energy transformation in 20 minutes. Let's start with a question. Who of you is involved in the energy transformation already? So who's producing a lot of PV into our grids as an example?

One, two. One. A few at least.

Yeah, because that is actually the first thing that keeps my colleagues and myself busy because we have to extend our grid capacity like hell. The numbers that you are seeing here on this screen are the numbers that came up with several acts of the German government. We have to extend our renewables capacity by 200 twen, 210 gigawatts. We have to connect 10 times more distributed energy resources like charging stations, PV stations, et, etc. To the grip. And the number of electricity vehicles will raise by the factor of 15.

That means by 2017 we will have 14 million approximately heat pumps in the field and every fifth car will be an electric car. We as eon, we have clear priorities as an answer to this energy transformation. The first is sus sustainability because our, our mission is to connect everyone to good energy and sustain sustainability is really the core of what we are doing. We want to help our customers to get COT two neutral and we will also become co CO2 neutral Growth is of course necessary because without growth we cannot do business. And how do we do this? We need to digitize.

We need to digitize to really connect all these new assets to the network. In the past we had super manual processes and this needs to change. Now we need to become faster, faster and faster. And this is what we are doing with approximately 72,000 employees for approximately 50 million customers. And our grid is to the extent of 1.6 million kilometers all across Europe. So what does this mean for the electricity network? So the electricity network is, is really a very volatile thing.

I always compare it with a, with a box of water with a kind of aquarium where you put water in and then the waves are coming if you pull, if you throw something in on this end and then you need to do something in order to stabilize it again. And because we are now going that decentral and you will all become producers in the near future.

Yeah, so prosumers as as as we call you, then you will put, here's something into our grids there and we need to stabilize and keep this balance. And this is or was in the past quite easy because we had contracts with the big power plans.

We were, we knew exactly their plans when we wanted to change something in the grid, we called them, they did produce more or less and that helped us to stabilize the grid and this is now what we need to change. And this is super difficult because we have no clue when you turn your PV station on or off. Yeah. And now imagine this is not only a small PV station that you are operating, but it's a larger one. We don't know when you turned it on and off. So this is why the first challenge for us is we need to have observ availability in the grid. The second is we need to be able to steer our grid.

This is where smart meters come into play for instance. Yeah. So and this is why we did set ourselves the targets to really reach in the medium voltage grid by 2026, a hundred percent of observ availability. Currently there is almost 20%, maybe 10, 20%. And in low voltage we want to reach 30% of OB observability. There is currently not even 10%.

So, and this is as said where smart meters come into play, but also what we called dig digital secondary substations that you might know from the street where you are living in. And this is how this whole thing looks from an smartification picture on the top level you see the network solutions there. You see what we are building into the grid? Yeah. So we have a solution from n value and value helps us monitoring our grid. This is where we get parts of of the observa availability. Then we have the virtual multi-meter where we also can measure more.

And then we have the LV flex control and this is where we can start really steering via smart meter gateways. Our grids from that level was not existing in the past. Yeah. Just to explain where we are coming from below this, we did build a data platform. We call it ipen. And there we do our grid calculation. We have E I O T measured values where we can also forecast then what's going to happen in the, in the grid we have our grid structure with the asset data, with our geographical information systems and we have media data. This is what we call our I iPad platform.

Below this we have a communication layer and then we start with the low voltage grid. And there you see the digital substations, the digon, and also the smart meter gateways. This is then where we get the ability to really steer the grid. And you see also yourself, myself as customers with maybe a home energy system that is taking the electricity from your roof, from your PV panels and feeding them either into your charging station when you don't cons into your, your E car when you are not consuming it or it lets you consume the energy.

So let's now look at the security side of things because as I mentioned, as mentioned, what you saw in the previous picture was not there five years ago and it's currently ramping up. Yeah. And what you see here is actually not used to you. Right? So we heard already today about supply chain attacks. We heard about legacy systems that we need to get rid of and believe me, we have tons of legacy systems in the in in the utilities. Then we have IT connections, we have more and more. Now you saw this on the previous picture, connections from IT into ot.

Then we have remote access also into the different layers I have shown and many, many service technicians that are also working there. And as BATTLE had said, they are all touching the critical infrastructure that we are operating for the society. Looking now at how we mitigate those risks, I put this into three topics. The first is communication risks. Then you will see operational risks and then you will see excess risks. And actually what you see here is not rocket science. We know this everything. And also what you see on the next slides already for, for years, maybe even for decades.

But we now use this down to your home. This is what we didn't do in the past because we had no visibility there.

Yeah, we did not do any steering on this level. So encrypted communication down to your meter. This is why we have the smart meter gateways, super important secure data exchange platforms. The iPad layer that I did share, this is super important to properly protected trust relations between all these layers. Also between all the components with the digi o n s super important. And then of course incident response plan plans and regular supplier audits. The incident response plan is, is a good example again where for an area where we haven't been to in the past.

Yeah, the digi o n s is for instance, something we have in monitoring. And if something happens there at this box in your street, then we can do something and can kick off our incident response plans. The replacement of legacy systems. We saw the presentation from the colleague from ABB and he was talking about the huge amount of applications ABB has. Our environment is similar, I would say yeah, we have a little less HR systems, but overall it is the same. So we need to continuously replace our legacy systems. What is also important is firmware integrity.

So these firmware integrity tests are something that we haven't done in the past regularly down on this level. And we are doing this now. So penetration tests have been conducted for these Ds before they got deployed into the fields and so on and so on. Phishing simulations is something we do what we need to extend now also and do even more for our OT colleagues. Yeah. Who were working in the past on separate systems. And then finally we have redundancy of critical assets and the monitoring locks for suspicious activities that I mentioned already.

The excess risks is something that we also know from the past. Yeah. Usage of jump service, multifactor authentication, super important. We are currently pushing multifactor authentication out with really, really high speed time-based logins to really monitor our, our environment.

Just to give you an example, on one of the previous slides I mentioned remote access and you know from many attacks via remote accesses that this is important and we can, we can confirm this and this is why we are putting lots of effort into these locks in lock-ins and the usage of the remote accesses into our environment least privilege principle. And then finally but not implemented yet is session recording. So these are the mitigations we are using to really protect our SmartFi grid. And finally we have, and this is something that is coming really from my heart.

We have really also core demands and we need help from the government, from politicians. And this is what we realized where we were not good at when the with the smart meter rollout, we need to really work way closer with the politicians, with the government. They need to make the life for us way easier. We have way too much bureaucracy. We have a super fragmented area of contact persons in the government. We have kind of cannibalism in the government for talents. Everyone thinks that it's super sexy to build up some sort or sock functionalities.

And this is why the scarcity in the market is becoming even worse. We need even in the future, or especially in the future, way more accurate and detailed pictures of the situation so that we understand what is going on. We too often get just an information and we cannot work with it because we have no idea where to look for it. And this is something where we need support from the government. And finally then of course also the training was SEC security experts, promotions, r and d and supporting defense initiatives. That was it. I was very quick. Thank you very much. Thank you Renee.

Welcome. We do have a question from John wk and the question is smart tech, smart grid tech at the level of the home has the potential to infer personal information. And the question is, how are you addressing privacy risk in the smart grid?

Oh, that is a very, very good question. Also a very, a very broad question. Yeah. So we have lots of regulations in Germany and we are following this regulation. We are also applying GDPR and so on and so on. And what you saw, how we protect all the environment. These three pillars are how we protect not only your personal data, but to be honest, from my point of view, I would say even more important the grid overall. Because again, if we make a mistake there, the lights go out. And this most probably not only in Germany but in the whole of Europe. Okay. Thank you very much.

That was a lot of lessons learned. Very value, valuable lessons learned in different areas and well, I think other organizations may want to talk to you and learn from you Anytime. And we are also happy to learn. Of course. Thank you. Thank You. Thank you Renee.