Digital Substation Pt.3 – Deployment
This piece was contributed by Guillaume Tucker and is reprinted with permission. View the original post here.
SEAPATH deployment, RTE campus tour and where I stand
The time has come to wrap up this blog series about Digital Substations. More than a conclusion, it totally feels like a new beginning. The past few months have been a rich adventure, meeting and learning from many people via many projects and at many events as I was still going through my paces. I can definitely confirm that there is a huge potential for open-source developers from all horizons who wish to join the Energy sector and entire communities are being formed under our very eyes. I’m very much looking forward to the next steps in my journey. But first, let’s see where this has taken me so far.
OSPOlogyLive at RTE
The last event I attended was OSPologyLive at the RTE Campus in Lyon. I must begin with some very special thanks to all the organisers and to Maxime and Boris in particular for your warm welcome, the guided tour and for being such inspirational figures.
It was a double-headed event: OSPO in general and LF Energy in particular. As I’ve always been a staunch open source activist, I felt at home in OSPO land and it also helped me position myself as an independent contributor. The presentations and discussions were all of very high quality with many interactive sessions. While I can only recommend and praise this yearly meetup, let’s now return to the hot topic of Energy.
No electrical hazard
This is fine.
Electricity being transported at 400kV is not to be taken lightly, but what can possibly go wrong with running virtual machines on a plain development laptop? The tour around the RTE Transfo Campus included the miniature laser-cut electrical grid shown at the top of this article and the training ground for electrical line engineering work among many other things. It has helped me put things in perspective with my software hat on.
A key takeaway is that this isn’t just about electrical grid equipment manufacturers dealing with voltages that require a wide safety perimeter. The open-source software deployed in electrical substations can be run by anyone and virtually anywhere. Hobbyists can take part and uncover new professional avenues. Researchers and students can advance cutting-edge technology with small-scale labs. The long history and lessons learnt that have shaped the FOSS culture also apply here: while not everyone in the Energy sector is running Linux on their laptop yet, people know about licenses, best practices and the value of building a shared platform in the open.
SEAPATH
Pursuing our RTE tour, we then stopped by this rack of servers running SEAPATH for evaluation purposes. It’s designed to continuously monitor the electrical lines connected to a substation and “pull the plug” if a fault condition is met. I’m over-simplifying, this is much more complex than just a peak detector with a fixed threshold. Every millisecond counts in the event of something going wrong: waveform distortion, voltage surges etc. can damage large amounts of infrastructure, cause fires and explosions. But software-wise, it’s just regular streams of data flowing in and out – under tight real-time constraints. And of course, this can be emulated with artificial sensor data and circuit breaker models. Some substations already feature early deployments of SEAPATH while the most critical safety functions are still handled in dedicated hardware for now. Other TSOs in various countries are doing the same, largely with their own and often proprietary solutions. With a lifetime of at least 25 years, the pace and magnitude of this kind of entreprise is titanic. In comparison, writing code is fast.
The community around this project still needs to take off although it is continuously gathering momentum. More and more contributors are coming together, chiefly under the wing of RTE via LF Energy: Savoir-Faire Linux has been involved for many years and Red Hat just joined the party. This is the second key takeaway from the event: while each player is being assigned a particular role, where should I stand?
Personal roadmap
As an independent developer and long-time advocate of open source and free software best practices, I can see many ways to foster a wider engagement and extend the project beyond the corporate boundaries drawn by the big actors. This naturally boils down to the various business models involved. I don’t provide complete enterprise solutions or manage data centres and Cloud services. There’s only so much a single individual can do. However, I have extensive freedom of action and benefit from a privileged, neutral position to be an active catalyst in the community.
My previous experience in Linux kernel development and automated testing also brings a valuable element to the picture. Maintaining production deployments for 25 years is hard. We live in a connected world and security fixes in particular need to be constantly back-ported to keep a system safe. I witnessed this first-hand when ChromeOS extended its kernel support lifetime via KernelCI. Upstream long-term stable kernel releases last at most 5 years and CIP maintains specific use-cases for up to 10 years so production kernels always require a significant amount of effort.
Putting all this together, this is what my current personal Energy roadmap looks like:
Open Stack
My area of interest has now narrowed down to the Digital Substation software stack. As such, I would like to provide a development setup with ideally all components available as open-source. This would start with a SEAPATH setup that can be run on a development laptop rather than dedicated servers – I have a nested KVM PoC coming soon for this 🚀
Then as mentioned in my previous post, the IEC 61850 standard is lacking in open-source library implementation. So I’m looking forward to contributing to the Open Energy Tools project and include this in the development stack via a base image with some demo application containers and VMs.
Community Catalyst
By not being tied to the particular interests and decision process of any established organisation, I am literally walking in the community developer’s shoes. As such, I have the agency to connect the dots in the bigger picture. In practice, this can mean writing more blog posts like this one and speaking at events but also help managing communication channels (Discord, IRC, mailing list etc.) in a neutral way. I also don’t have the burden of proprietary license and confidential information that could taint software development. Put another way, my only bias is towards FOSS indeed.
Kernel Support
Going a bit further on the technical side, I can also put my deep expertise to good use with long-term Linux kernel testing and support for production deployments. As I’m currently working on VIXI, an R&D project for automated kernel testing in virtual environments, a particular use case would be to run the SEAPATH development stack mentioned earlier with rt-stable and any other relevant upstream branches. This could catch a large amount of issues before doing full-blown testing on real hardware targets. Keeping the same kernel base version for more than a few years isn’t really practical, the real answer is to be able to upgrade in the field. Doing this requires a high standard of quality to avoid regressions and minimise the hours of engineering time spent porting downstream patches.
See you at FOSDEM
The journey continues while I’m going back to where it all started. The Energy devroom has been announced for the forth time at FOSDEM 2026 (schedule to be finalised mid-December) so it’ll be good to see you there if you can attend. And as usual, please feel free to send any queries you may have via email. In the meantime, keep energised ⚡
Pictures © 2025 Guillaume Tucker with permission from RTE, licensed under CC-BY-SA-4.0
Last modified on 2025-12-08
