pCloud: A Cloud-Based Power Market Simulation Environment

In the electric power industry, power market simulators are widely used by market participants, power system planners, project developers, investors and consulting companies. These simulators are complex, highly CPU intensive, expensive to use and are limited to companies that can afford to pay high licensing fees, support hardware infrastructure and maintain dedicated professional staff. Use of cloud computing will drastically reduce the cost and increase computational performance of these simulators which will benefit the power industry and general public. We propose to develop pCloud, a power market simulation environment organized around the Software as a Service (SaaS) concept. pCloud will provide clients with standardized access to power market solvers offered by third parties and support data structures and post processing tools organized in one of the commercially available cloud environments. Taking advantage of the computational power available on the cloud, users will enjoy computational performance of up to three orders of magnitude above what is presently available with existing simulators. Commercial Applications and Other Benefits: Development of pCloud will create significant technical, economic and social benefits to the power industry, to all industry stakeholders and to the general public as everyone consumes electricity. pCloud users will be able to improve system design, investment, trading and policy decisions over time horizons ranging from hours to years. They will be able to thoroughly model uncertainty and operational characteristics of variable generating resources (represented by wind and solar), real-time price responsive behavior of consumers, fuel-price volatility, planned and forced outages of generation and transmission facilities, addition and retirement of new generation units, and implications of future environmental policies. The service will be charged on a per processor hour basis making it affordable to a wide range of users while development and maintenance costs will be recovered through increased utilization. Use of pCloud will lead to a more transparent power industry and more precise decision supporting tools will lead to more liquid and efficient electricity markets.