The Appliance of Cloud Computing in a Swiss Smart Grid

The purpose of this paper was to investigate the usage of Cloud Computing technology in a Swiss Smart Grid environment. Smart Grid is still a very young topic, mostly promoted as the key to solve the future energy problems. The goal was to apply the promising information technology Cloud Computing in this early stadium to the Smart Grid to discover benefits for stakeholders of the Swiss energy market. The target of this application was to bring out an architectural model and specific solution scenarios.Qualitative research was utilized in this master thesis. Secondary data was analyzed in a literature review and primary data was collected in the form of four unstructured interviews with stakeholders of the Swiss energy market. The creation of solution scenarios was done by following the design science process. The analysis of the state-of-the-art concepts showed that the main benefits of Cloud Computing are avoidance of bound capital and high scalability. In Switzerland the energy market stands before a major change with the liberalization of the market for private households. Utilities wait with their investments in Smart Grid technologies until the regulations and technical standards are defined. The Smart Grid requires huge investments in new, mainly IT-based technology for data processing, analysis and fast response. This is a major challenge, especially for small players. With Cloud Computing a service based approach was shown up to avoid these investments by obtaining Smart Grid functions from a service provider over the cloud. Out of this approach, four specific use cases were created for creating benefits of Cloud Computing in a Swiss Smart Grid environment.The consideration of Cloud Computing in a Swiss Smart Grid is recommended by the author. As a next step, deeper research in this area is suggested to refine the created model and the use cases together with Swiss utilities.