LF Energy Welcomes New Members, Launches Three Projects, and Advances Open Source Grid Technology Across the Portfolio
Summary
- New members: AZX and EcoPhi join as General Members; Empa joins as an Associate Member
- New projects: AINETUS (AI decision support for grid operations), URPX (Utility Rate Plan Exchange standard), and CUPID (IEEE 2030.5 DER interoperability toolkit) join the LF Energy portfolio
- Advancement: Power Grid Model advances to Early Adoption stage, the most recent milestone in a project that has crossed 10 million downloads and is deployed in production at all three major Dutch DSOs
- Case study: TenneT TSO B.V. achieved a 10x performance improvement in grid security analysis using PowSyBl, deploying ReFlow, an orchestration platform built on open source, in five months with no proprietary licensing required
- Releases: EVerest, OperatorFabric, Power Grid Model, FlexMeasures, and PowSyBl all released new versions in recent months
SAN FRANCISCO, June 9, 2026 – LF Energy, the Linux Foundation’s neutral home to build the digital foundation for energy together through open source software, standards, and data, today announced new membership additions, three new hosted projects, and significant progress across its portfolio of open source software, standards, and data. The announcements reflect continued growth in the community of organizations building shared digital infrastructure for modern energy systems.
New Members: AZX, EcoPhi, and Empa
LF Energy welcomes three new member organizations whose participation expands the foundation’s reach across energy technology, AI services, and research.
AZX joins as a General Member. AZX delivers AI solutions for critical industries including energy, real estate, and supply chain, working with organizations to apply AI to infrastructure operations and transformation challenges.
EcoPhi joins as a General Member. EcoPhi is a technology company working on software-defined substation monitoring and analytics. The organization has previously engaged with the LF Energy ecosystem, including work with SEAPATH on virtualizing substation monitoring and analytics functions.
Empa joins as an Associate Member. Empa, the Swiss Federal Laboratories for Materials Science and Technology, is an interdisciplinary research institute of the ETH Domain conducting applied research across energy, sustainable built environment, and advanced materials. Empa develops science-based solutions for industry and society in close partnership with industrial collaborators, with energy as a core research focus area. The organization has previously collaborated with the LF Energy Battery Data Alliance to produce a large open source dataset formatted in Battery Data Format (BDF).
“Alongside three new members, three new projects joining in a single announcement, and Power Grid Model advancing to Early Adoption, it reflects real momentum across the community. The shared foundation we are building is one that the energy industry can depend on,” said Alex Thornton, Executive Director, LF Energy. “TenneT’s case study shows what open source can deliver for utilities. They went from project start to production in five months, less time than a typical RFP process, and achieved a tenfold performance improvement over their previous tooling.”
New Projects: AINETUS, URPX, and CUPID
LF Energy has accepted AINETUS (AI for Safety-Critical Network Infrastructures), an open source project providing AI components designed to augment operator decision-making in power grid control rooms, combining reinforcement learning, explainability, and human-AI interaction to improve situational awareness and manage complex grid conditions.
Originating from the European research project AI4REALNET, funded under Horizon Europe, AINETUS delivers reinforcement learning agents for topology optimization and redispatch, explainability tools and uncertainty estimation as core components, and operator-facing hypervision interfaces designed to surface AI recommendations in forms that operators can interrogate and trust. The project integrates with Grid2Op for simulation-based agent training and validation, OperatorFabric for operator notification and coordination workflows, and grid management platforms.
Key contributors include INESC TEC, Politecnico di Milano, Fraunhofer IEE, IRT SystemX, University of Amsterdam, RTE, TenneT, and enliteAI.
LF Energy Standards and Specifications (LFESS) has accepted URPX (Utility Rate Plan Exchange), an open semantic standard built on W3C technologies – RDF, OWL, and SHACL – that defines a machine-readable format for utility rate plan data, from simple flat-rate structures to complex time-of-use and dynamic pricing models.
The project addresses a persistent gap in energy data infrastructure: while standards exist for customer usage data and grid operations, no comprehensive standard exists for the rate plan data that determines how customers are charged for energy, water, and other utilities. URPX covers rate plan structure and billing logic, eligibility rules, temporal versioning and regulatory tracking, and a Common Service API for data exchange. It provides formal alignment mappings with Green Button, LF Energy CDS, CIM, and OpenADR.
URPX was initiated by Flux Tailor, with collaboration from the National Laboratory of the Rockies.
LF Energy has also accepted CUPID, an open source interoperability toolkit hosted at LF Energy that addresses fragmentation in distributed energy resource (DER) communication. It provides two core software components, an Interoperable Client/Server Library and a Legacy Protocol Converter, that allow ADMS and DERMS platforms, DER devices, and legacy hardware to communicate using the IEEE 2030.5 standard over a high-performance, message-driven architecture.
Originating from the Horizon Europe InterSTORE project, CUPID replaces traditional synchronous REST over HTTP with NATS, a high-performance cloud-native messaging system, and adds JSON support alongside the standard XML format. The toolkit is designed to meet current EU regulatory requirements including the Data Act and the Network Code on Demand Response, and is aligned with Common European Energy Data Space architecture. The Legacy Protocol Converter is deployable via Docker containers on-premise, on edge devices, or in cloud environments including Kubernetes.
Key contributors include CyberGrid, Forschungszentrum Jülich (Jülich Research Centre), INESC TEC, RWTH Aachen, and Sunesis.
Project Advancement: Power Grid Model Advances to Early Adoption
Power Grid Model has advanced to the Early Adoption stage in the LF Energy project lifecycle, reflecting the growth of its production deployments and community. Power Grid Model is an open source library for steady-state distribution power system analysis including power flow, state estimation, and short circuit calculations, contributed by Alliander and hosted at LF Energy. The project has crossed 10 million downloads and is deployed in production at all three major Dutch DSOs – Alliander, Enexis, and Stedin – for applications spanning network planning to active congestion management.
The Early Adoption stage recognizes projects that have proven community growth across commits, committers, and organizational diversity; production use by at least two independent end users; an elected Technical Steering Committee achieving the OpenSSF Best Practices Silver badge; and a TAC-approved growth plan covering release targets, end-user strategy, and contributor development. Advancement requires an affirmative majority vote of the LF Energy Technical Advisory Council, and demonstrates significant progress by the community supporting the project.
Case Study: TenneT Achieves 10x Performance Improvement With PowSyBl in Only 5 Months, From Start to Production
A case study published by LF Energy documents how TenneT TSO B.V., the high-voltage transmission system operator for the Netherlands and a large part of Germany, built ReFlow, an orchestration platform for grid security analysis powered by the LF Energy open source project PowSyBl. The solution achieved at least a tenfold performance improvement across standard grid security processes, reducing calculation times that previously exceeded required time resolutions, and reached first production deployment in five months from project start with no proprietary licensing required.
ReFlow consumes standardized CIM/CGMES 3.0 inputs and automatically executes parallel PowSyBl security analyses, scaling calculation pods on demand and terminating them on completion. The architecture is designed for modularity to avoid vendor dependency, allowing different calculation engines to be selected per analysis type.
“We consider PowSyBl the most advanced open source power-system analysis engine available,” said Hugo Pfister, Manager Grid Security Applications, TenneT Netherlands. “We benefit directly from years of investment by RTE and the broader LF Energy community.”
TenneT joins RTE, BalticRCC, and Coreso as production users of PowSyBl. The team is considering open sourcing ReFlow’s core components and is developing Nexus, an operator-facing interface that will integrate the advanced analytical capabilities of ReFlow and PowSyBl into daily grid security workflows.
Recent Project Releases
LF Energy projects have continued active development, with several significant releases across the portfolio in recent months.
- EVerest 2026.02.0 – The first stable release under EVerest’s new long-term support strategy, marking a maturity milestone for the open source firmware stack used by multiple commercial EV charger OEMs.
- OperatorFabric 4.12.0 – The latest release of the open source control room coordination platform deployed by RTE across its eight control centers.
- Power Grid Model v1.13.x – This version delivers expanded power flow modeling capabilities and improved observability for distribution network analysis.
- FlexMeasures v0.31 – The release introduces forecasting API endpoints and restores visual annotations on time series data, alongside improvements to CSV upload validation, scheduling, and UI behavior.
- PowSyBl Dependencies 2026.0.0 – The PowSyBl community’s latest coordinated dependency release, maintaining the framework used in production by multiple European TSOs and regional coordination centers.
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About LF Energy
LF Energy is the Linux Foundation’s neutral home to build the digital foundation for energy together. We host more than three dozen open source projects used to plan, operate, and modernize energy systems. The portfolio spans from transmission system modeling to substation virtualization, smart meter integration to EV charging. We provide the trust layer: neutral governance, legal frameworks, security practices, and community of practitioners that turn open source software, standards, and data into infrastructure the industry can depend on for decades. Members include utilities, energy companies, vendors, researchers, and technology providers, aligned to deliver affordable, reliable, safe, and clean energy. For more information, please visit lfenergy.org.
Press Contact
Dan Brown
Director of Communications, LF Energy
pr@lfenergy.org
FAQ
What is LF Energy and why does it matter for the energy industry? LF Energy is the Linux Foundation’s neutral home to build the digital foundation for energy together. We are the trust layer over open source, providing the neutral governance, legal frameworks, security practices, and community of practitioners that turn open source software, standards, and data into infrastructure the energy industry can depend on for decades.
What does Power Grid Model’s Early Adoption advancement mean for potential users? The Early Adoption stage recognizes projects that have proven community growth across commits, committers, and organizational diversity; production use by at least two independent end users; an elected Technical Steering Committee achieving the OpenSSF Best Practices Silver badge; and a TAC-approved growth plan covering release targets, end-user strategy, and contributor development. For organizations evaluating Power Grid Model, this milestone signals proven stability, active maintenance, and a growing ecosystem of deploying organizations to learn from.
How do AINETUS, URPX, and CUPID differ in their focus areas? The three new projects address distinct layers of the digital energy system. AINETUS provides AI-based decision support for grid operators managing transmission networks in real time. URPX standardizes how utility rate plan data is represented and exchanged – addressing a gap that makes it difficult to build tools that compute customer energy costs accurately across territories. CUPID addresses the communication fragmentation that prevents distributed energy resources from coordinating with modern grid management systems, specifically for organizations working with IEEE 2030.5 and legacy field devices.
What does TenneT’s ReFlow case study demonstrate for other TSOs facing similar challenges? The TenneT case study is designed as a concrete example for TSOs facing scaling pressure on grid security analysis. Using PowSyBl as the calculation engine, building on a cloud-native Kubernetes environment, and embedding software engineers with direct operational knowledge, TenneT achieved at least a tenfold performance improvement and a five-month deployment timeline. The team is also considering open sourcing ReFlow’s core components.
How can organizations get involved with LF Energy projects? All LF Energy projects are open source and free to access. Organizations can join working groups, contribute code and requirements, influence roadmaps, and participate in community meetings and governance directly through individual project channels on GitHub, Slack, and mailing lists.
