Cloud Computing for the Power Grid: From Service Composition to Assured Clouds

The electric power industry is one of the few industries where cloud computing has not yet found much adoption, even though electric power utilities rely heavily on communications and computation to plan, operate and analyze power systems. In this paper we explore the reasons for this phenomenon. We identify a variety of power system applications that could benefit from cloud computing. We then discuss the security requirements of these applications, and explore the design space for providing the security properties through application layer composition and via assured cloud computing. We argue that a combination of these two approaches will be needed to meet diverse application requirements at a cost that can justify the use of cloud computing.