In the years ahead, rapid innovations will transform how we create, distribute, and use energy. It has become widely recognized that software-defined infrastructure is essential for decarbonization.
Why Open Source & Energy
Open source leads the way.
Open
Open is more than a buzzword. We have found at the Linux Foundation that in the early days of a new market, custom, proprietary solutions can meet acute short-term needs. Utilizing these sorts of solutions is often sensible to jump start evolution, but as industries mature in their digitization efforts, proprietary stacks perpetuate vendor lock-in, one-off solutions, and ultimately stifle innovation.
Open source interfaces and reference implementations enable interoperability between solutions so that utilities and end users can leverage best of breed options in the ecosystem.
The shared technology investment at the heart of open source provides a core set of capabilities built-on by the entire ecosystem. That is the value proposition of LF Energy. Shared technology investments provide significant acceleration and act as a multiplier for investments that directly impact the transformational goals’ energy transition. We will get farther together, sooner.
Open source interfaces and reference implementations enable interoperability between solutions so utilities and end users can leverage best of breed options in the ecosystem.
The future grid will be built on infrastructure platforms that will mostly consist of bare metal hardware, VMs and containers, and cloud orchestration systems
Composable
LF Energy’s focus on the decarbonization of power systems through digitalization and open source represents an unprecedented change for electrification, electric mobility, and the grid. Mitigating climate collapse, while ensuring economic prosperity, requires that we network supply and demand through secure distributed hardware, data, and software. The future grid will be built on infrastructure platforms that will mostly consist of bare metal hardware, VMs and containers, and cloud orchestration systems that can manage and choreograph those resources, plus Software-Defined Networking (SDN) controllers that enable high data processing.
While similar software exists in the telecommunications sector, networking electrons has the challenge of physics. Much of this software does not exist. Over the coming years it must be built and/or composed of open source blocks from other domains. Ensuring that the necessary inputs and pieces from diverse stakeholder groups working together, under pressure, is not a trivial exercise. That is the value proposition of LF Energy.
Agile
The promise of LF Energy is that moving to software-defined energy systems will enable utilities to take a far more agile approach. LF Energy enables system and network operators, along with their vendors and suppliers, to “fail fast, fail often” while bringing new software functions and services to market quickly and efficiently. Transitioning from fossil-fuel requires that decarbonization make economic sense. We will win by being cheaper, faster, and more secure — the classic open source playbook.
DevOps, Continuous Integration and Continuous Deployment methodologies are key to this transition. We provide training, communities, and resources to help all stakeholders come up to speed. At The Linux Foundation we take your learning seriously. Whether through our sister projects, LF Training, the TODO Group, or webinars with open source leaders, we have you covered.
The promise of LF Energy is that moving to software-defined energy systems will enable utilities to take a far more agile approach.
We envision a more rapid and iterative approach that leverages a cloud-based architecture that promotes scaling of various pieces of the software stack independently of others.
Robust
The microservices, functional view of power systems needs to take into account a more network centric view of robustness: self-healing, scalable, dynamic, redundant, upgradeable, and secure.
Rather than traditional, monolithic software, we envision a more rapid and iterative approach that leverages a cloud-based architecture that promotes scaling of various pieces of the software stack independently of others. By dynamically scaling up and scaling down resources based on application demand or consumer usage patterns, and leveraging as much as possible easily available open source ready hardware to simplify supply chains, we will drive costs down while rapidly expanding.
The LF Energy approach to technical and project alignment works to ensure that all components developed in the ecosystem meet the highest standards for safety and security, while enabling speed, flexibility, and minimum toil for the women and men responsible for managing power systems.
