LF Energy Summit North America 2025: A Day of Connection, Innovation, and Open Collaboration
October 3, 2025 — Varennes / Montreal, Canada (IREQ, Hydro‑Québec)
LF Energy hosted its inaugural North America Summit in Varennes, Quebec, just outside Montreal, with Hydro‑Québec serving as gracious host at their world-class research facility, IREQ. The event coincided with peak autumn colors and followed a busy week at CIGRE’s international gathering, bringing together a focused group of utility professionals, researchers, and technology developers from across North America and Europe.
With around 80 participants from around the world, the one-day summit offered a full agenda of sessions, project deep-dives, and community discussion. Attendees included representatives from Hydro‑Québec, RTE, Alliander, GE Vernova, Savoir-faire Linux, and Artelys—alongside contributors from across the LF Energy project ecosystem. The event provided a valuable opportunity for cross-regional collaboration, direct engagement with project maintainers, and meaningful dialogue on the future of digital infrastructure for power systems.
Welcome and Opening Sessions
The day began with opening remarks from Alex Thornton, Executive Director of LF Energy, who welcomed participants and emphasized the growing importance of shared, open digital foundations to meet the demands of a decarbonizing grid.
The full schedule featured 11 sessions across the day, including technical deep-dives, strategy discussions, and implementation case studies. Speakers represented utilities, project teams, and ecosystem contributors, offering insights into both the challenges and opportunities facing energy system operators.
Session topics included:
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Open Source Program Offices (OSPOs) in grid operations – Hydro‑Québec, RTE, and Alliander shared lessons from launching internal OSPOs, highlighting governance, legal alignment, community participation, and organizational change.
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Open source and digital procurement strategy – RTE and Alliander explored how collaborative technology development can complement or even replace traditional build-or-buy approaches, while improving resilience and sustainability.
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Project updates – Attendees heard from contributors to PowSyBl, SEAPATH, GEISA, and TROLIE, each addressing different layers of the power system stack—from grid modeling and substation virtualization to edge deployment and conformance frameworks.
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AI and simulation – Hydro‑Québec introduced GridFM, a new project exploring the role of pretrained foundation models in grid analytics. The session examined potential applications such as power flow reconstruction, anomaly detection, and reliability analysis.
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Congestion management – Alliander demonstrated how open source tools like OpenSTEF and Power Grid Model can be combined to detect and resolve grid congestion in both real-time and day-ahead contexts.
Community Reflections and Shared Priorities
Throughout the day, participants returned to a few recurring themes: the importance of open governance, the challenge of integrating open tools into legacy environments, and the value of sustained community-building across geographies. The presence of both European and North American stakeholders sparked ideas for future collaboration, particularly around harmonizing models and co-developing shared infrastructure components.
Looking Ahead
The 2025 Summit in North America reaffirmed that open source is no longer a peripheral interest, it is becoming a central strategy for many utilities and system operators. As new tools mature and organizational support structures like OSPOs become more common, the path toward interoperable, resilient, and ad
aptable energy systems becomes clearer.
LF Energy extends its thanks to Hydro‑Québec for hosting, to all speakers and participants for their engagement, and to the broader community for continuing to push this work forward. We look ahead to future regional summits and continued progress across the ecosystem.
To learn more about the projects featured in this summit or to get involved, visit lfenergy.org.
