Centrii’s GRIDLOCK risk assessment quantifies the probability, timing and financial cost of a coordinated attack
HOUSTON, TX / ACCESS Newswire / September 2, 2026 / Centrii, which helps energy operators, infrastructure owners and asset managers translate technical risk into financial and operational impact, today published GRIDLOCK, a risk assessment of cyber-physical exposure in battery energy storage (BESS).
Using a Monte Carlo risk analysis methodology of 10,000 simulations across three industry security postures – baseline, moderate and aggressive – the GRIDLOCK: What a Coordinated Battery Attack Would Cost the Grid report quantifies the probability and financial cost of a coordinated attack on BESS between now and 2031.
According to the findings, under industry-average security practices, the model produces a 92 percent probability of a major attack on battery storage infrastructure by 2031. This falls as security investment and protections increase. With voluntary improvements adopted gradually and unevenly across the sector, the probability falls to 78 percent. Under the most rigorous scenario, which assumes mandatory IEC 62443 certification and regular attack-readiness drills, it falls to 61 percent.
The earliest likely attack window also changes as a result, from 2027-28 under the baseline posture to 2029-31 under the most rigorous one. Based on these figures, security investment not only reduces risk, it buys time.
The cost of an attack on the Texas grid
The research models a coordinated cyberattack on the battery fleet supporting the Texas grid and finds that a major attack could result in an estimated $12 billion to $65 billion in economic damage.
Compromising just 5.4 percent of the ERCOT battery fleet, approximately 1,500 units, could be sufficient to destabilize the Texas grid, potentially affecting 30 million people.
By comparison, bringing the ERCOT battery fleet to IEC 62443 Security Level 2, the standard the modeling shows meaningfully reduces attack probability, is estimated to cost between $800 million and $2.8 billion.
Risks to grid-balancing infrastructure
The findings come as battery storage capacity is expanding rapidly across U.S. power markets. Developers plan to add 24 GW of utility-scale battery storage in the United States in 2026, following a record 15 GW added in 2025, according to the U.S. Energy Information Administration. Texas alone accounts for 12.9 GW, or 53 percent, of the battery capacity planned to come online this year.
Battery storage plays an increasingly important role in balancing the grid, integrating growing volumes of wind and solar generation and supplying electricity when demand rises. Modern battery fleets are also increasingly operated through connected control infrastructure, including cloud-based platforms capable of managing large numbers of assets remotely. While that connectivity enables portfolios to operate efficiently at scale, it also creates the potential for disruption to extend across multiple assets simultaneously.
“A coordinated attack does not need to stop generation to cause a blackout. It only needs to desynchronize the balancing layer, forcing batteries to charge or discharge together or delaying how they respond to grid signals,” said Narezzi. “The effect is closer to a distributed denial-of-service attack than a conventional outage: instead of overwhelming a website with traffic, it overwhelms the grid’s ability to stay in balance, using energy itself as the disruptive force. In the scenario modeled by GRIDLOCK, that disruption cascades into a grid-wide blackout in under two minutes.”
Recent events have demonstrated how disruption within increasingly distributed and interconnected energy systems can have wider consequences. In December 2025, a coordinated destructive cyberattack targeted more than 30 wind and solar farms in Poland, disrupting communications between affected facilities and distribution system operators, although electricity generation continued. In April 2025, a cascading grid failure caused a widespread blackout across Spain and Portugal. The subsequent investigation attributed the outage to multiple interacting technical and operational factors, rather than a cyberattack.
“Every board I speak to already accepts that cyber risk exists. What they have not had is a definitive assessment that helps them put a financial figure against that exposure,” said Narezzi. “Security spending in operational technology is rarely treated as return-generating because its value shows up in an event that does not happen. This modeling makes that value visible and measurable. Based on these figures, protecting battery storage is one of the highest-return decisions available anywhere in the business, but it is also one of the least discussed at board level.”
Notes to editors
The full GRIDLOCK: What a Coordinated Battery Attack Would Cost the Grid report and underlying peer-reviewed research paper are available here: https://centrii.com/en/gridlock-research-paper/
Rafael Narezzi is available for interviews. A demonstration, data, charts and images are also available on request from the PR team: centrii@origincomms.com.
What is GRIDLOCK?
GRIDLOCK is a public-facing summary of a peer-reviewed Monte Carlo risk assessment run 10,000 times for each of three security postures, drawing each variable from a plausible range rather than a single assumption. It accounts for projected attacker capability growth, battery deployment growth, and realistic compromise rates across cloud, remote-access and supply chain attack paths. All figures are modeled, not observed.
The underlying attack mechanism is independently validated in From Balance to Breach: Cyber Threats to Battery Energy Storage Systems, published in Energy Informatics, March 2025 (arXiv:2501.05923).
About Centrii
Centrii (formerly Cyber Energia) helps energy operators and infrastructure owners assess, quantify and act on cyber and operational risk across critical energy environments. Founded in 2022, the company delivers purpose-built solutions for energy assets, including wind, solar, storage, gas turbines and hybrid systems.
Its SaaS platform, Centrii Portal, provides real-time visibility into OT environments, continuous monitoring, risk assessment and compliance management. The platform aggregates cyber, operational and generation data to help organizations understand where financial exposure exists across their portfolios, translating technical alerts, vulnerabilities and operational anomalies into business-relevant insight.
Centrii also supports organizations navigating evolving regulatory and resiliency requirements tied to frameworks such as NERC CIP and NIS2, while helping them better understand operational resilience, portfolio maturity and cyber-related financial exposure.
Centrii is headquartered in Houston, TX and London, UK. Learn more at centrii.com.
SOURCE: Centrii
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