Defense Mechanism of PV-Powered Energy Islands Against Cyber-Attacks Utilizing Supervised Machine Learning

During this period, as distributed energy resources (DERs) are crucial for meeting energy needs and renewable technology advances rapidly, photovoltaic (PV)-powered energy islands (EIs) requiring a constant energy supply have emerged. EIs represent a significant milestone in the global energy transformation towards clean and sustainable energy production. They play a vital role in the future energy infrastructure, offering both environmental and economic benefits. In this context, reliance on information and communication technologies for system management raises concerns regarding the cybersecurity vulnerabilities of PV-supported EIs. In other words, since EIs transmit power through power converters—integral cyber-physical components of these systems—they are uniquely susceptible to cyber-attacks. To tackle this vulnerability, a cyber-attack detection scheme using a supervised machine learning (SML) model is proposed. The initial goal is to ensure the transfer and maintenance of energy demands without power loss for critical loads by detecting cyber-attacks to establish a defense mechanism. Two distinct artificial neural network (ANN) structures are implemented to identify cyber threats and support subsequent power demand, resulting in a complementary approach. The findings reveal the model’s effectiveness, demonstrating high accuracy (e.g., a cross-entropy loss of 12.842 × 10−4 for ANN-I with a 99.98% F1 score and an MSE of 1.0934 × 10−7 for ANN-II). Therefore, this work aims to open the fundamental way for addressing this issue, particularly concerning hijacking attacks and false data injection (FDI) cyber-attacks on PV-powered EIs. The success of this model and its outcomes confirm the effectiveness of the proposed approach method.