As part of my work in energy and sustainability management, I keep touch with my colleagues in the HP Utilities group to grow my understanding of the supply side of the equation. Terry White and I have been blogging about applications that connect to the Smart Grid and how they will change things. Christian Verstraete, who is HP’s Chief Technologist for Cloud Strategy, highlighted a Cornell University Computer Science Department paper Running Smart Grid Control Software on a Cloud Computing Architecture that looks at the current state of cloud computing, the needs of the Smart Grid, and identifies gaps in the technology and business models.
On the surface, cloud appears to address the needs of Smart Grid:
- Massive scalability
- Redundancy
- Cost
- Multiusers/multitenancy
As you dig deeper, you need to understand that most of the control systems that run the grid are supervisory control and data access (SCADA) based, and were not likely designed with the Internet in mind. The authors lay out the following requirement areas for high assurance cloud computing for the smart grid:
- Support for scalable real-time services
- Support for scalable, consistency guaranteed, fault tolerant services
- Protection of private data
- Highly assured Internet routing
The conclusion is that the cloud is not ready at this time to run the Smart Grid, but could be in the future if sufficient research is done to make it more robust, secure and performant. Definitely worth a read.
