Identifying Security Vulnerabilities in Electricity Market Operations Induced by Weakly Detectable Network Parameter Errors

In this article, a new security vulnerability in electricity market operations is identified. It involves certain parameters in the network model database whose errors, by nature, are difficult to detect and identify. These errors can either occur due to unintentional reasons or be maliciously introduced by cyber-adversaries. It is shown that by impacting the injection shift factors and transmission line congestion patterns, these errors may exert biases on locational marginal prices (LMPs), and thus impact the revenues received by the holders of financial transmission rights (FTRs). A method is then developed for identifying the network parameters whose errors are difficult to detect and may have severe impacts on the LMPs and FTR revenues. Simulation results in the IEEE 57-bus system are presented to illustrate and verify the analysis and the proposed method. The proposed framework can be used to conduct cyber-vulnerability assessment for power system model databases.