Argonne National Laboratory Awarded $3.4 Million In Research Funding

LEMONT, IL — On Tuesday, the Department of Energy announced that Argonne National Laboratory in Lemont was awarded $3,484,765 to advance the cybersecurity of distributed energy resources. According to the release, the funding was made possible by the bipartisan infrastructure law.

Argonne was one of nine new National Laboratory projects that received funding.

"As a scientist and businessman who has designed and built software-controlled electric power subsystems, I'm thrilled that Argonne National Laboratory was awarded nearly $3.5 million in funding to develop cybersecurity software to help bring our energy infrastructure into the 21st century," said Congressman Bill Foster in a news release from his office. "Ensuring our energy resources are protected against malicious actors is essential to enhancing the reliability of the grid that powers our daily lives."

Argonne's project will develop an "Intrusion Diagnostic Unit" cybersecurity software tool for distributed energy resources aggregators to "securely participate in wholesale energy markets."

"The tool will be supported using a cloud services to perform real-time monitoring, threat detection and mitigation for individual distributed energy resources," a release states.

All of the funding supports the Biden-Harris Administration’s commitment to "safeguarding the nation’s critical infrastructure and advancing the energy sector’s cybersecurity capabilities nationwide," according to the release from the Department of Energy.