Cloud Computing and Smart Grids

Increasing concern about energy consumption is leading to infrastructure that supports real-time, two-way communication between utilities and consumers, and allows software systems at both ends to control and manage power use. To manage communications to millions of endpoints in a secure, scalable and highly-available environment and to achieve these twin goals of ‘energy conservation’ and ‘demand response’, utilities must extend the same communication network management processes and tools used in the data center to the field. This paper proposes that cloud computing technology, because of its low cost, flexible and redundant architecture and fast response time, has the functionality needed to provide the security, interoperability and performance required for large-scale smart grid applications.