Practical Adoption of Cloud Computing in Power Systems - Drivers, Challenges, Guidance, and Real-world Use Cases

Motivated by The Federal Energy Regulatory Commission’s (FERC) recent direction and ever-growing interest in cloud adoption by power utilities, a Task Force was established to assist power system practitioners with secure, reliable and costeffective adoption of cloud technology to meet various business needs. This paper summarizes the business drivers, challenges, guidance, and best practices for cloud adoption in power systems from the Task Force’s perspective, after extensive review and deliberation by its members, including grid operators, utility companies, software vendors, and cloud providers. The paper begins by enumerating various business drivers for cloud adoption in the power industry. It follows with the discussion of the challenges and risks of migrating power grid utility workloads to the cloud. Next, for each corresponding challenge or risk, the paper provides appropriate guidance. Notably, the guidance is directed toward power industry professionals who are considering cloud solutions and are yet hesitant about the practical execution. Finally, to tie all the sections together, the paper documents various real-world use cases of cloud technology in the power system domain, which both the power industry practitioners and software vendors can look toward to design and select their own future cloud solutions. We hope that the information in this paper will serve as helpful guidance for the development of NERC guidelines and standards relevant to cloud adoption in the industry.

[1]  Nada Golmie,et al.  A Survey on Industrial Internet of Things: A Cyber-Physical Systems Perspective , 2018, IEEE Access.

[2]  Laura Taylor.  FedRAMP: History and Future Direction , 2014, IEEE Cloud Computing.

[3]  Song Zhang,et al.  Practical Design and Implementation of Cloud Computing for Power System Planning Studies , 2019, IEEE Transactions on Smart Grid.

[4]  Cristina L. Abad,et al.  Serverless Computing , 2021 .

[5]  R. H. Goudar,et al.  Cloud computing review: concepts, technology, challenges and security , 2017, Int. J. Cloud Comput..

[6]  C. Feinstein,et al.  Defining Distributed Resource Planning , 1997 .

[7]  Di Shi,et al.  Rethink AI-based Power Grid Control: Diving Into Algorithm Design , 2020, ArXiv.

[8]  Hyun Ah Song,et al.  GridWatch: Sensor Placement and Anomaly Detection in the Electrical Grid , 2018, ECML/PKDD.

[9]  Milos Manic,et al.  Big data analytics in smart grids: state-of-the-art, challenges, opportunities, and future directions , 2019 .

[10]  Mohd Ezanee Rusli,et al.  A Review of Cyber Security Assessment (CSA) for Industrial Control Systems (ICS) and Their Impact on The Availability of the ICS Operation , 2021 .

[11]  Canbing Li,et al.  The contributions of cloud technologies to smart grid , 2016 .

[12]  Song Zhang,et al.  Serverless computing for cloud-based power grid emergency generation dispatch , 2020, International Journal of Electrical Power & Energy Systems.

[13]  L. Johnson.  Cybersecurity framework , 2020, Security Controls Evaluation, Testing, and Assessment Handbook.

[14]  Prashant J. Shenoy,et al.  Predicting solar generation from weather forecasts using machine learning , 2011, 2011 IEEE International Conference on Smart Grid Communications (SmartGridComm).

[15]  K. Birman,et al.  Cloud-based Data Exchange Infrastructure for Wide Area Monitoring of Bulk Electric Power Grids , 2018 .

[16]  P. Mell,et al.  The NIST Definition of Cloud Computing , 2011 .

[17]  Sanjay P. Ahuja,et al.  A Survey of the State of Cloud Computing in Healthcare , 2012, Netw. Commun. Technol..

[18]  Sedat Akleylek,et al.  Security requirements for cryptographic modules , 2013 .

[19]  Robert J. Marks,et al.  Electric load forecasting using an artificial neural network , 1991 .

[20]  Yang-Hoon Kim,et al.  Benefits of cloud computing adoption for smart grid security from security perspective , 2015, The Journal of Supercomputing.

[21]  Darko Galinec,et al.  Cybersecurity and cyber defence: national level strategic approach , 2017 .

[22]  David Choffnes,et al.  SoK: Attacks on Industrial Control Logic and Formal Verification-Based Defenses , 2020, European Symposium on Security and Privacy.

[23]  Ing-Ray Chen,et al.  A survey of intrusion detection techniques for cyber-physical systems , 2014, ACM Comput. Surv..

[24]  Anjan Bose,et al.  GridCloud: Infrastructure for Cloud-Based Wide Area Monitoring of Bulk Electric Power Grids , 2019, IEEE Transactions on Smart Grid.

[25]  Qiang Zhang,et al.  Big Data Analytics Platform and its Application to Frequency Excursion Analysis , 2018, 2018 IEEE Power & Energy Society General Meeting (PESGM).