An Intelligent Grid Network Based on Cloud Computing Infrastructures

An Intelligent Grid Network Based on Cloud Computing Infrastructures

Suresh Annamalai, Udendhran R., Vimal S.
Copyright: © 2019 |Pages: 15
DOI: 10.4018/978-1-5225-9023-1.ch005
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Abstract

This chapter covers important topics in development of efficient energy girds. Inefficient power generation, unbalanced consumption patterns that lead to underutilization of expensive infrastructure on the one hand, and severe overload on the other, as well as urgent issues of national and global concern such as power system security and climate change are all driving this evolution. As the smart grid concept matures, we'll see dramatic growth in green power production: small production devices such as wind turbines and solar panels or solar farms, which have fluctuating capacity outside of the control of grid operators. Small companies that specialize in producing power under just certain conditions will boom in forthcoming years. Energy is stored in the storage during low-cost periods, and the stored energy is used during high-cost periods to avoid the expensive draw from the grid. The authors evaluate the impact of large-scale energy storage adoption on grid electricity demand.
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Smart Grid On Cloud Computing Infrastructures

Cloud computing is of interest to the power community for several business reasons. Some parallel the green energy considerations that have stimulated such dramatic change in the power industry: cloud computing is a remarkably efficient and green way to achieve its capabilities (Ali and K. A. Smith, 2016). Others reflect pricing: cloud computing turns out to be quite inexpensive in dollar terms, relative to older models of computing. And still others are stories of robustness: by geographically replicating services, companies like Google and Microsoft are achieving fraction of a second responsiveness for clients worldwide, even when failures or regional power outages occur. Cloud systems can be managed cheaply and in highly automated ways, and protected against attack more easily than traditional systems. Finally, cloud computing offers astonishing capacity and elasticity: a modern cloud computing system is often hosted on a few data centers any one of which might have more computing and storage and networking capacity than all of the world’s supercomputing centers added together, and can often turn on a dime, redeploying services to accommodate instantaneous load shifts. We shall enumerate some of the issues in the debate about using the cloud for building the smart grid.

The Cloud Computing Scalability Advantage

The cloud and its transformation of the computing industry have resulted in the displacement of previous key industry players like Intel, IBM, and Microsoft by new players like Google, Facebook, and Amazon. Technology these new-age companies created is becoming irreversibly dominant for any form of computing involving scalability: a term that can mean direct contact with large numbers of sensors, actuators or customers, but can also refer to the ability of a technical solution to run on large numbers of lightweight, inexpensive servers within a data center. Earlier generations of approaches were often abandoned precisely because they scaled poorly. And this has critical implications for the smart grid community, because it implies that to the extent that we launch a smart grid development effort in the near term, and to the extent that the grid includes components that will be operated at large scale, those elements will be built on the same platforms that are supporting the Facebooks and Amazons of today’s computing world (Davidson. 2015).

Cloud Cost Advantage

The Smart Grid needs a national-scale, pervasive network that connects every electricity producer in the market, from coal and nuclear plants to hydroelectric, solar, and wind farms, and small independent producers, with every electricity consumer, from industrial manufacturing plants to residences, and to every device plugged into the wall. This network should enable the interconnected devices to exchange status information and control power generation and consumption. The scale of such an undertaking is mind boggling(P. Budde, 2015). Yet, the key enabler, in the form of the network itself, already exists. Indeed, the Internet already allows household refrigerators to communicate with supermarkets and transact purchases. It won’t be difficult to build applications (“apps”) that inform the washing machine of the right time to run its load, based on power pricing information from the appropriate generators. Whatever their weaknesses, the public Internet and cloud offer such a strong cost advantage that the power community cannot realistically ignore them in favor of building a private, dedicated network for the smart grid(European Technology Platform, 2015).

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