URBANA, Ill. (AP) - The University of Illinois says it has received an $18.7 million federal grant to develop a way to test the United States' response to and recovery from any attack on the country's electric grid.
The university said Tuesday that the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency awarded the grant.
Tim Yardley is associate director for technology at the Information Trust Institute at Illinois. He says the aim of the project is to take a "generational step forward" in proving that the tools being built to deal with such an attack are reliable.
The project will build models of the grid that are first run under normal conditions and then with disturbances that mimic both attacks and natural problems.
