On Using Cloud Platforms in a Software Architecture for Smart Energy Grids

Increasing concern about energy consumption is leading to infrastructure that continuously monitors consumer energy usage and allow power utilities to provide dynamic feedback to curtail peak power load. Smart Grid infrastructure being deployed globally needs scalable software platforms to rapidly integrate and analyze information streaming from millions of smart meters, forecast power usage and respond to operational events. Cloud platforms are well suited to support such data and compute intensive, always-on applications. We examine opportunities and challenges of using cloud platforms for such applications in the emerging domain of energy informatics.