Economic Viability of Smart Grid Cloud in India

While the innovation and technology is modernizing the industry at rapid pace, the electrical power system is lagging behind the race and is being maintained in the same way for decades. Although the smart grid has ensured demand-response, reduction in transmission and distribution losses, and minimized theft, the inherent characteristic of enormous data generation has become a biggest concern. The absence of IT infrastructure in existing set up for handling unstructured data and huge capital investments are the major obstacles in complete success of smart grid in developing countries like India. However cloud computing has emerged as a solution to this problem. In this work, we have simulated cloud for smart grid on CloudSim and derived the cost for storing the smart grid data on cloud. The total cost of ownership (TCO) and return on investment (ROI) on building the datacenter with same configuration is also calculated using net present value (NPV), and compared with previous calculated cost. The results indicate that the initial cost of building a datacentre is $6673185 and ROI is 22.74 % in 7 years, which is low keeping in view the fact that during average design life of 10 years, a datacenter undergoes major equipment changes 3 to 4 times. On the contrary, outsourcing the same data on to cloud costs $2430720 annually, which is considered as an effective alternative. This analysis would be beneficial to developing countries like India in framing policies for storing the smart grid data on to the cloud which will further help in reaping the benefits of smart grid.