Performance analysis and grid computing on wide area

Nowadays, the energy production system is no longer suitable to our livelihood and several issues need to be solved. Primary sources will not last forever and the environmental impact that we have on the planet grows more each year. Even renewable energies, always considered as part of the solution, are not stable enough to substitute or significantly integrate our traditional system. The research on smart grid is now seen as the best opportunity to overcome these problems. These new field proposes the realization of an intelligent grid equipped with sensors and devices able to constantly monitor demand and supply of the electrical grid. This architecture will be able to direct energy only where and when it is needed, avoiding waste and improving power quality at the same time. We give a short recap about grid proprieties and challenges, and then propose an approach based on complex network to study the real case model of a regional power. We comment all the design choices adopted during the model construction, pointing out the importance of using appropriate weights to define connections between substations, in order to represent the behavior of the grid properly. We show, through an example, how the betweenness can change employing different cost settings and finally lay the foundation for a future work.