Proposal for a new layer for energy cloud management: The regulatory layer

Abstract

Summary The global energy matrix has been transforming in recent years and today it is moving toward a decentralized form of management for the generation of clean energy worldwide. With this, new ways of management for the energy environment has been emerging, being the Energy Cloud (EC), through cloud computing, one of these trends that seek to optimize the process of generation, distribution, storage and energy consumption, making the most flexible and dynamic energy market. Given these motivations, the objective of this article is to discuss the proposal of a series of technical, economic, and environmental standards for energy management in a cloud computing environment. For this, a systematic review was carried out to identify these regulatory suggestions, where through the reading and analysis of 121 articles, 72 suggestions were extracted and classified according to the layers and management support blocks of from EC management environment. Besides, these policies were grouped according to their approach into technical, economic, and environmental factors to identify what was already proposed by the academy's authors and what are the regulatory deficiencies for EC. These regulatory suggestions can be used by policy‐makers, researchers, and managers of this innovative energy management environment, which is the EC. Novelty Statement This study consists of a regulatory proposal for Energy Cloud (EC), an innovative energy management environment. As there is still no regulatory body responsible for the regulation of EC, the main contribution of this article is the proposal of a regulation layer. In this sense, 72 suggestions for standards were raised, presenting a new layer for EC.

Permeability evaluation of Industry 4.0 technologies in cloud-based energy management systems environments - Energy Cloud

“…A literature review in the Scopus and Web of Science databases with the search terms "energy cloud" and "management" was carried out, with 26 articles and congress articles being found in the Scopus database and 20 in the Web of Science. After reading these researches, it was seen that only the articles of Schaefer et al (2020b) and Carvalho et al (2021) address the EC theme with a managerial focus.…”

“…The energy production process still comes from conventional sources and this raises serious climatic concerns (Ahmad et al, 2020). The increase in the use of energy from fossil fuels together with global warming has led to the development of new technologies based on renewable and natural sources (Carvalho et al, 2021). This way, energy management is important in micro-networks, homes, buildings, communities, among others, (Al Faruque & Vatanparvar, 2016) so that the operation and control of the energy systems are carried out reliably and efficiently (Guo & Zhao, 2018).…”

“…The evolution of energy management to CC environments has given rise to a new concept, the EC. EC connects users so that they can manage their energy through digital platforms using public, private, or hybrid cloud models (Carvalho et al, 2021). Figure 1 presents the functioning scheme of the EC.…”

“…Schaefer et al (2020b) proposed a basic layout for managing the EC, consisting of seven main layers (Physical, Fog, Network, Cloud, Service, Session, and Application) and four management support blocks (Broker, Security and Privacy, Third-Party Services, and Cloud Auditor). In a later proposal, Carvalho et al (2021) the Regulation layer was added to this layout, where all activities within the scope of regulation and the establishment of legislation are carried out. Figure 2 shows this layout.…”

“…Many factors have contributed to the evolution of the EC, such as the new regulations on electricity generation that are driving the shift to the massive use of distributed energy resources, and the cost of these technologies, which are rapidly decreasing (Giordano et al, 2019). In this sense, this transition from the traditional network to an EC environment would be capable of providing great energy-saving potential, where governments will be able to carry out scientific analyzes of the energy-saving potential and predict the energy use profile (Carvalho et al, 2021).…”