ABSTRACT
This chapter presents a roadmap of how cloud computing can be used to support the computational needs of the advanced power grid. Commercial cloud computing infrastructure lacks the essential properties required by power grid applications. The notions of real-time responsiveness, guaranteed consistency, data security, and fault tolerance are significantly more forgiving in these applications than in infrastructure control, supplying little incentive for commercial clouds to embrace the type of changes necessary to support critical infrastructure systems. Cloud computing provides three service models: software as a service, platform as a service, and infrastructure as a service. The chapter outlines many of the cloud adoption challenges which are essentially about supporting highly scalable, highly assured behaviors and stringent communication guarantees. GridStat provides a mechanism by which communication patterns can be rapidly changed among multiple pre-configured modes in response to anticipated power system contingencies.
