Cloud computing: an innovative IT paradigm to facilitate power system operations

Power system is facing great challenges resulted from various smart grid initiatives, high penetration of renewable resources, and increasing complexity of networks. To address these challenges, cloud computing offers an attractive IT alternative that can facilitate power system operations in various aspects. This paper discusses the potential implementation of cloud computing technique for power system data acquisition, storage, retrieval, and analytics. As part of this effort at ISO New England (ISO-NE), two use cases are presented, showing that adoption of cloud computing can benefit system operators (e.g., ISOs) by providing an efficient and resilient complement to existing IT infrastructure and prompting the collaboration across different system operators with the assurance of privacy and security.