Interconnecting smart grids and clouds to save energy

Cloud computing is becoming an essential component for Internet services. However, its energy consumption has become a key environmental and economic concern. The distributed nature of Cloud infrastructures involves that their components are spread across wide areas, interconnected through different networks, and powered by diverse energy sources and providers, making overall energy monitoring and optimizations challenging. In this paper, we present the opportunity brought by the Smart Grids to exploit renewable energy availability and to optimize energy management in distributed Clouds. The presence of smart sensors which are both integrated into the electricity Grid and connected to the Internet, indeed offers for the first time the possibility of exploiting the availability of various energy sources, and of making complete energy measurements of all the Cloud resources — computing, storage and especially networking resources — problems which have previously been intractable.