IEC 61850 is one of the most prominent communication standards adopted by the smart grid community due to its high scalability, multi-vendor interoperability, and support for several input/output devices. Generic Object-Oriented Substation Events (GOOSE), which is a widely used communication protocol defined in IEC 61850, provides reliable and fast transmission of events for the electrical substation system. This paper investigates the security vulnerabilities of this protocol and analyzes the potential impact on the smart grid by rigorously analyzing the security of the GOOSE protocol using an automated process and identifying vulnerabilities in the context of smart grid communication. The vulnerabilities are tested using a real-time simulation and industry standard hardware-in-the-loop emulation. An in-depth experimental analysis is performed to demonstrate and verify the security weakness of the GOOSE publish-subscribe protocol towards the substation protection within the smart grid setup. It is observed that an adversary who might have familiarity with the substation network architecture can create falsified attack scenarios that can affect the physical operation of the power system. Extensive experiments using the real-time testbed validate the theoretical analysis, and the obtained experimental results prove that the GOOSE-based IEC 61850 compliant substation system is vulnerable to attacks from malicious intruders.

In conventional method protection schemes are devised for certain operation conditions with fixed settings throughout their operation life, however, protection systems in interconnected distribution networks rely on a detailed analysis of fault current contribution and variation in operation conditions under real-world scenarios. In fact, the concept of Adaptive Protection System (APS) and possibility of the adjustment for protection settings within modern Intelligent Electronic Devices (IEDs) have introduced desired functionalities for protection systems to cope with complex operation scenarios envisioned within future power system networks. In this paper, a novel protection system based on Multi-Agent System (MAS) and heuristic decision-making is proposed to update protection settings of the protection IEDs with respect to prevailing operation conditions in an interconnected distribution network. The adopted methodology is reliant on real-time simulation of a distribution network interconnected with Doubly-fed Induction Generator (DFIG) wind farms where different fault scenarios are applied to evaluate the functionality and performance of the proposed Multi-Agent Protection System (MAPS). In addition to that, combination of knowledge sharing between different protection IEDs and logic reasoning are integrated to fulfill protection task under real-world operation scenarios. The significance of the proposed MAPS is the improvement in protection system of the interconnected distribution network.

Green hydrogen has an essential role to play in decarbonising global economies in response to climate change. Renewable power costs continue to drop while research and development into water-splitting technologies also strive to meet the challenge of driving down the Levelized cost of green hydrogen to compete with fossil fuels. The current green pilot studies with numerous renewable power sources and process technologies represent a wealth of untapped information that could be invaluable for planning full-scale production facilities. This paper outlines a mechanism for unlocking the potential wealth from several pilots by identifying stakeholders, and their interests, collecting and benchmarking key performance areas, and modelling the entire green hydrogen process into six distinct regions where scenario planning and sensitivity analysis could be undertaken. It is proposed that participants in the study may receive confidential reports for each part quantifying the range of values in the research and the performance of their areas of interest. The study is anticipated to highlight areas for ongoing research and development.