Minimizing Energy Consumption of Smart Grid Data Centers using Cloud Computing

Cloud computing provides its services via high speed networks as a service to users. In private clouds, the consumers access resources through a broker. This prevents wasting resources by owning idle systems and thus, lowering the cost. In this paper, a method is proposed to minimize the energy consumption of smart grid computation systems. To achieve this, different properties of private clouds, such as distributed computing among an array of data centers, were utilized. The proposed method was simulated on the Cloud Analyst test bed. Simulation results demonstrate that the proposed method achieves lower energy consumption as compared to predominant methods, which results in a significant cost reduction.