LF Energy has now published Building Europe’s Digital Grid Together, a position paper on why building software together is the delivery model for Europe’s energy digitalization, and what it takes to make it the norm.
What the paper argues
Europe’s system operators have the ambition, funding, standards, and engineering skill. The paper makes the case that the next step is a shared delivery model for software: build the common, non-differentiating layer together, in the open, under neutral governance, and compete above it.
Telecommunications, cloud computing, and the internet all got there this way. Energy is the stronger case. System operators do not compete with one another for customers, so the main objection to building together does not apply.
Interoperability is produced by shared proven software, not by shared documents.
Open source complements standards such as the IEC Common Information Model and IEC 61850 by giving every vendor and operator the same working implementation. It also lets operators solve today’s problems quickly while building the capability and digital sovereignty they will need tomorrow.
Already running in production
- PowSyBl underpins the CorNet program of Coreso and TSCNET, which took the European Merging Function live in December 2024, and TenneT used it to reach a tenfold calculation performance improvement in five months.
- Power Grid Model runs at Alliander, Enexis, and Stedin and has passed 10 million downloads.
- OpenSTEF is used by Alliander to forecast grid congestion, and Sigholm uses it to plan district heating production.
- SEAPATH has been deployed by RTE as the virtualization environment for its new generation of Protection, Automation, and Control (PAC) systems.
The paper was written in partnership with RTE, Alliander, TenneT Netherlands, Coreso, 50hertz, Elia Group, and Savoir-faire Linux.
Three calls to action
- System operators and their suppliers: commit engineering capacity, check what already exists before procuring, and apply an open source first principle.
- The European Commission: give energy an entry in the EU Open Source Strategy, which names energy as a leading sector but lists no action or institution for it.
- ACER, CEER, and national regulatory authorities: confirm that contributing to shared open source tooling is an efficient, recoverable cost.
Read the full paper
The full paper covers how other industries made this work, why neutral governance matters, the security question, and the complete set of recommendations.
Download Building Europe’s Digital Grid Together