THE PROBLEM: To meet increasing demands for electrical power, modern power grid systems are increasingly adopting new decentralized energy technologies. These technologies rely on smaller energy substations located closer to the point of use — a shift that has blurred the traditional boundaries between information technology (IT) and operational technology (OT) infrastructures, increasing cybersecurity risks. Legacy security systems often fail to identify such threats because they either focus exclusively on IT systems or can’t manage OT-specific threats in real time.

THE SOLUTION: IViz-OT, developed at the National Laboratory of the Rockies (NLR), provides grid operators with real-time intrusion detection, visualization, and analysis of cyber and physical events, helping them mitigate threats and maintain system reliability. IViz-OT is hardware-agnostic, plug-and-play compatible, and interoperable across a wide range of devices and OT settings to protect substation network boundaries. Built on a cost-effective open-source Python platform, IViz-OT is the only system on the market that fully integrates and correlates cyber and physical events in real time at the substation level.

THE TECH TRANSFER MECHANISM: In 2023, NLR partnered with Eaton Corp. on a project funded by the Department of Energy Technology Commercialization Fund to develop and refine IViz-OT. The following year, Eaton signed a technical services agreement to provide detailed documentation related to the implementation, configuration, and software development work that it performed on IViz-OT. NLR’s T2 team formally licensed IViz-OT to Eaton in 2025 for commercialization at scale. NLR and Eaton then successfully integrated IViz-OT with Eaton’s SMP substation automation platform, and NLR subsequently shared its final reporting and installation guidelines for real-time testing with Eaton.

THE IMPACT: Several utilities have tested and piloted IViz-OT, and the software has shortened response time by 30–50% and minimized operation downtime by 20%. Furthermore, the software is 25–30% better at detecting network anomalies, significantly improving the accuracy of network threat identification. In the long term, IViz-OT is expected to save millions of dollars per site by preventing cyberattack-related outages, drastically reducing downtime (by an estimated 50%), and reducing energy usage through faster fault isolation and more efficient dispatch. Evidence suggests that the internal rate of return over five years from using IViz-OT will be approximately 500%. The public — particularly in rural and underserved areas where robust grid security is crucial — will see fewer power outages as IViz-OT is rolled out over the next five years. As more utilities adopt IViz-OT, the societal benefits are expected to grow exponentially.