Investigating a Raspberry Pi cluster for detecting anomalies in the smart grid

Smart Grid Technology is an integral part of ensuring the security of the power grid. To provide situational awareness to grid operators, a smart grid system must be able to detect alarm events (such as sudden voltage fluctuations or drops in current) in close to real-time. In this paper, we propose the use of a low energy Raspberry Pi cluster to detect anomalies in the Smart Grid. We build a prototype cluster and test our approach on a real data set of approximately 1 million measurements derived from 8 PMUS from a 1000:1 scale emulation of a working power grid. Our results show that a cluster of 12 Raspberry Pis is capable of achieving better performance than a more power-hungry multicore server at lower cost and a significant reduction in power consumption.