  Due to growing environmental concerns, the world's governments have been
encouraging the shift of the transportation sector towards the adoption of
Electric Vehicles (EVs). As a result, EV numbers have been growing
exponentially and are expected to continue growing further which will add a
large EV charging load to the power grid. To this end, this paper presents an
EV-based defense mechanism against Load-Altering (LA) attacks targeting the
grid. The developed mechanism utilizes H-infinity controllers and Linear Matrix
Inequalities (LMIs) to mitigate LA attacks. After the controller synthesis and
presentation of the attack scenarios, we demonstrate the effectiveness and
success of our defense mechanism against the three known types of LA attacks.
The scenarios include three 800 MW LA attacks against the New England 39-bus
grid. The results demonstrate how our EV-based mitigation scheme eliminates the
attack impacts and maintains the grid's stability in face of an unknown
persisting attack.
