IT Security Aspects of Integrating the German Balancing Reserve into the Smart Metering Infrastructure

Abstract:
This work evaluates how the German Smart Metering Infrastructure (SMI) could be used in the context of the balancing reserve (BR) in Germany. Due to § 34 of the Act on Metering Point Operation and Data Communication in Smart Energy Networks (MsbG) Metering Point Operators must provide the possibility to use the SMI for the communication necessary for the provisioning of BR by January 1st 2028 [2]. The four German Transmission System Operators (TSO) have defined a set of requirements (“detailed requirements”) which must be met by balancing reserve providers (BRP) in order to provide BR [3,7,9]. We analyse these detailed requirements regarding communication and information system linkage [3] and derive four abstract requirements which summarize the underlying IT-security concept without specifying tech-nical implementation details. Twelve SMI-compliant candidates for system architectures are defined and evaluated on their ability to meet both the detailed and abstract requirements. We show that while six of these candidates are able to satisfy the abstract requirements, this number is reduced to two when trying to fulfil the detailed requirements. Based on these results the paper concludes that the requirements stated by the four TSO should be updated to make use of the full potential of the SMI while maintaining the same security level.