Practical Design and Implementation of Cloud Computing for Power System Planning Studies

The increased penetration of renewable resources and retirement of traditional generation units are posing new challenges to power system operations and planning to meet the ever-growing demand for more computing resources to run large-scale, computationally intensive simulations. As the traditional on-premises infrastructure loses pace to the constantly increasing computing needs, cloud computing has become an attractive addition for increasing average computing capacity, and alternative for meeting peak demands. ISO New England (ISO-NE) pioneered the use of cloud computing technology for large-scale power system simulations, believing it to be the only viable solution that is capable of keeping pace with the growing challenge in the foreseeable future. This paper shares the practical design and implementation of an elastic, on-demand, application-independent cloud platform that ISO-NE deployed in production at the end of 2017. As a secure, cost-effective and scalable platform for addressing the intensive computing demand in planning studies, this platform made using Amazon Web service as easy as using on-premises computers by completely automating the access to cloud based resources. This frees ISO engineers to focus on power system analysis, and thus significantly increased their productivity. To accommodate simulation jobs with varying urgency requirements, this platform allows the users to make the tradeoff between cost and completion time. The platform also further strengthened its support for cyber security and data privacy.