Running Smart Grid Control Software on Cloud Computing Architectures

There are pressing economic as well as environmental arguments for the overhaul of the current outdated power grid, and its replacement with a Smart Grid that integrates new kinds of green power generating systems, monitors power use, and adapts consumption to match power costs and system load. This paper identifies some of the computing needs for building this smart grid, and examines the current computing infrastructure to see whether it can address these needs. Under the assumption that the power community is not in a position to develop its own Internet or create its own computing platforms from scratch, and hence must work with generally accepted standards and commercially successful hardware and software platforms, we then ask to what extent these existing options can be used to address the requirements of the smart grid. Our conclusions should come as a wakeup call: many promising power management ideas demand scalability of a kind that only cloud computing can offer, but also have additional requirements (real-time, consistency, privacy, security, etc.) that cloud computing would not currently support. Some of these gaps will not soon be filled by the cloud industry, for reasons stemming from underlying economic drivers that have shaped the industry and will continue to do so. On the other hand, we don’t see this as a looming catastrophe: a focused federal research program could create the needed scalability solutions and then work with the cloud computing industry to transition the needed technologies into standard cloud settings. We’ll argue that once these steps are taken, the solutions should be sufficiently monetized to endure as long-term options because they are also of high likely value in other settings such as cloud-based health-care, financial systems, and for other critical computing infrastructure purposes.