ORNL's Cyber Grid Guard licensed to GridForge for grid cybersecurity

The Department of Energy’s Oak Ridge National Laboratory has licensed its Cyber Grid Guard cybersecurity framework to GridForge Energy Solutions.

• Main announcement: ORNL has licensed the patented Cyber Grid Guard framework to GridForge Energy Solutions, which plans to explore commercial deployments to boost real-time visibility of grid behavior for energy projects, grid management companies, and utilities; the technology was tested in ORNL’s GRID-C substation test bed and proven on commercial hardware against simulated denial-of-service and multi-step data-manipulation attacks.
• Background/details: The platform uses tamper-resistant blockchain to validate device configuration and operating data, can automatically notify operators of unusual behavior, and was developed with support from the DOE Office of Electricity and ORNL researchers (Raymond Borges Hink, Gary Hahn, Aaron Werth, Emilio Piesciorovsky); GridForge (California-based) was incubated through LabStart. The article cites a concrete capacity point: “over 100 gigawatts of flexible grid capacity underutilized” as context for the technology’s potential.