Cloud native software for mass electrification
The electrification objective
The successful transition to 100% renewables, electrification of transport and retreat from gas will require a sophisticated ICT infrastructure to control, monitor 10+ million solar systems, EVs, and smart devices - or what we refer to a distributed energy resources (DER).
Such a digital infrastructure must exist across various Cloud platforms, traverse the internet, and maintain characteristics of critical infrastructure, such as strict change control, monitoring and auditability - this is the central idea behind a new digital infrastructure for electrification.
The OpenElectric initiative is a Reference Architecture and a Security Model for a Cloud Native Digital Infrastructure that describes a multi-tier security between Cloud workloads, DER resources, their users, and how that can be extensible to new applications and services.
Security Model
Identity and Access for IoT and Cloud workloads
Conventional ICT for managing electric systems needs a rethink on how to communicate and secure information across Cloud environments and physical assets. Cloud managed capabilities combined with internet enabled IoT moves beyond perimeter based security, to embrace new zero trust paradigms, Cloud native security models and common data formats.
Cloud service and firmware change control
The systems we deploy in homes and businesses – solar panels, hot water systems and electric vehicles – will be updated continuously to provide consumers with new features and security updates. This requires foundations that build in redunadancy, resilience and robust change management that will be the bedrock of a robust yet evolving electric ecosystem.
Cybersecurity
threat detection and response
As the digital grids become larger, more interconnected and interactive, they also become much more complex, which in turn makes them much more vulnerable to failures. Shared frameworks for collective defence will minimise the impacts of cyber threats and unintended mishaps through resilience at every level in our systems.
Reference Architecture
OpenElectric is defining a reference architecture, supported with Cloud infrastructure containerised components, and open source libraries for use by technology vendors and utility operators in the electrification services domain.
The reference architecture defines ways in which services within a supply chain can authenticate with access controls, route traffic securely between multi-Cloud and IoT environments, and establish high resilience through a common change management processes.
Valuing security and reliability for DER systems
Lifecycle Cost
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Costly to establish “infrastructure plumbing” for communications with OEMs, utilities and market systems.
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Ongoing overhead of testing and compliance with regular releases and security patches.
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Increasing operational and compliance costs to meet standards, increased risk from privacy breaches.
Infrastructure Complexity
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Many moving parts – brittle, tooling, no reuse
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Highly complex infrastructure that requires specialists to configure and harden.
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Requirements for currency across jurisdictions and markets, requiring continous updates and release cycles.
Cybersecurity
and reliability
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Cybersecurity and attacks on critical infrastructure rising sharply
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Supply chain risks from substandard integrations, uncontrolled versioning
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Proprietary lifecycles result in software 5+ years behind state-of-the-art