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Smarter smart grids
Smart grids--power grids that adapt to changes in demand and reconfigure as needed to avoid overloads and other problems--can reduce energy costs, help avoid blackouts and deter cyber attacks. They also pose new challenges.
A team led by researchers at North Carolina State University, with partners from the Renaissance Computing Institute (RENCI) at UNC Chapel Hill and the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, are using NSF-funded cloud computing resources to analyze smart grid data from thousands of sensors, called phasor measurement units, or PMUs. The PMUs are distributed across the transmission grid and connect a wide range of energy generating plants, including wind turbines and solar panels.
This process - which is currently only available using the GENI infrastructure - could someday evolve into the standard method for monitoring and troubleshooting smart grids.
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Through ExoGENI, the researchers linked real-time sensor data to on-demand virtual computing resources at ExoGENI nodes across the U.S. Sensors collected as many as 120 data points per second; high-speed networks with guaranteed bandwidth connected the data to computing resources at many sites; each site provisioned a slice of virtual machines, or VMs; and the VMs ran algorithms to analyze and visualize the data in real time.
Credit: iStock
Data flow diagram of smart grid monitoring system using ExoGENI. The research is funded by the National Science Foundation's Cyber-Physical Systems program, and leverages resources developed through another NSF project called ExoGENI, part of the Global Environment for Network Innovations, or GENI.
Credit: Aranya Chakrabortty, North Carolina State University
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