Introduction:
In the summer of 2003, a major power outage struck the greater part of the North-East United States. The problem only perpetuated itself as the decreasing supply of power due to power plant shutdowns coincided with a steady rise in demand. What was missing was a central controller – a provider of grid-wide statistics that could help moderate consumption to meet current levels of production and to optimize production by generating only as much power as is necessary to avoid blackouts.
The Power Grid Management System (PGMS) does just this. A fault-tolerant high-availability Web Service with methods to manage both power consumers – entities such as cities and large organizations that require a say in their power consumption – and power producers – power plants, wind farms, and other energy generators interested in providing (and potentially selling) their excess power to a larger grid.
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