Practical Design and Implementation of Cloud Computing for Power System Planning Studies The increased penetration of renewable resources and retirement of traditional generation units are posing new challenges to power system operations and planning to meet the evergrowing demand for more computing resources to run largescale, computationally intensive simulations. As the traditional onpremises infrastructure loses pace to the constantly increasing computing needs, cloud computing has become an attractive addition for increasing average computing capacity, and alternative for meeting peak demands. ISO New England (ISONE) pioneered the use of cloud computing technology for largescale power system simulations, believing it to be the only viable solution that is capable of keeping pace with the growing challenge in the foreseeable future. This paper shares the practical design and implementation of an elastic, ondemand, applicationindependent cloud platform that ISONE deployed in production at the end of 2017. As a secure, costeffective and scalable platform for addressing the intensive computing demand in planning studies, this platform made using Amazon Web Service (AWS) as easy as using onpremises computers by completely automating the access to cloud based resources. This frees ISO engineers to focus on power system analysis, and thus significantly increased their productivity. To accommodate simulation jobs with varying urgency requirements, this platform allows the users to make the tradeoff between cost and completion time. The platform also further strengthened its support for cyber security and data privacy.

Towards ServiceOriented and Intelligent Microgrids The current energy transition implies fundamental changes in energy systems, in both their structure and operation. In this context, microgrids have the potential to reshape the traditional power grid, empowering the role of smallscale renewable power generators towards more sustainable, costeffective, and reliable energy systems. Microgrids are operated by energy management systems whose development is driven mainly by the contributions of technologies for distributed energy resources and techniques for optimal planning of loads. Yet, little attention is given to the design of such systems as software tools, whose capabilities are often limited because of a monolithic structure. We postulate that such systems need to intertwine both perspectives if microgrids are going to become a realised potential. We therefore propose a novel design of an energy management system that considers both perspectives and is based on the principles of serviceorientation. We implement the proposed design into a serviceoriented energy management system prototype and we run simulations with real data to test its feasibility.