Abstract: As cloud computing becomes as vital as power, transportation, gas, and fresh water supply, people start benefiting from this state-of-the-art technology directly or indirectly in various aspects of their life, especially during these difficult times. On the other hand, more and more companies are moving their business services to the cloud to seek operating cost optimization, work efficiency improvement, solution scalability, and fault tolerance. While people in the electric energy sector are still worried about the security of cloud, power industry cannot resist this technology trend because the power grid today is facing more challenges than it was a decade ago and we have to find out new ways to cope with them.

Firstly, how we operate, plan, monitor, and control the system is being, and will continue to be, greatly affected by fundamental changes happening in the grid, such as shifting from fossil-fuel domination to high penetration of renewable generation and increased proliferation of distributed energy resources (DER) and demand response resources (DRR). Modeling, analysis, and simulation of such complex integrated cyber-physical systems calls for new computing approaches.

Secondly, explosive growth of operational data during grid modernization requires scalable, low cost solutions for storage, management, and utilization. Moreover, risk assessment of natural and human-induced disaster events on bulk power system necessitates new data-driven methods through machine learning and other AI techniques.

Last but not the least, utilities and grid operators need a resilient, fault-tolerant IT infrastructure that offers abundant redundancy to support operational continuity. Cloud technology, with no doubt, opens up new opportunities for the power industry to address all these needs.

This talk will cover a few topics that might interest the group, including why do we need cloud computing for power systems? What are the attitudes of power industry towards cloud adoption? How should we do the security control on different workloads based on their criticality? What real use cases of cloud computing are there? What are the key takeaways from these use cases?