Clean Energy Home Devices Pose Grid Cyber Threats, DOE Warns

Energy Department officials on Monday warned of growing threats of grid cyberattacks through renewables and customer-owned devices like rooftop solar, electric vehicles, batteries, and smart thermostats.

The issue has caught the department’s attention in recent years as attacks on energy systems become more sophisticated and the distributed energy resources, known as DERs, open up new potential vulnerabilities.

The portion of distributed energy is still very small, and one attack on a few resources may not register as a serious problem on the power grid, the DOE found. Each resource ...