Towards Smart Green Energy Metering Design for OpenStack/Amazon Elastic Cloud Integration

Energy demand in most African countries is insufficient thereby hindering economic development. By leveraging renewable technologies, the control and management of renewable micro-grids requires a robust/reliable design that supports smart integration via Cloud for dynamic service delivery. Motivated by this concern, this paper developed smart green energy management system (SGEMS) for optimizing demand side management (DSM) in renewable micro-grids. The architecture employs solar photovoltaic (PV) to generate energy and meters user consumption pattern. SGEMS global model for solar PV metering platform is introduced including structured OpenStack Cloud application with active load-balancers, Trove/Hadoop Bigdata application program interface (API), OpenFlow firewall, and dynamic network scaling. These features manage user access with little computational overhead. An experimental demonstration of OpenStack/Amazon EC2 instance scenarios for transactional workload is briefly highlighted. The work discussed the usefulness of OpenStack engine as a distributed API middleware for SGEMS-energy application running on AWS EC2.