Six new organizations have joined to support the foundation’s 25 projects, which have seen eight million new lines of code added from nearly 8,000 commits in a single year
Bilbao, Spain – Open Source Summit Europe – September 19, 2023 – LF Energy, the open source foundation focused on harnessing the power of collaborative software and hardware technologies to decarbonize our global economies, is announcing recent momentum including five new members, six significant software releases, three research reports, and participation in multiple industry events. These announcements demonstrate the growing community commitment to LF Energy and its mission of creating a technology ecosystem to support rapid decarbonization.
“Open source is experiencing tremendous momentum in the energy sector after years of innovation,” said Arpit Joshipura, Interim Executive Director, LF Energy, “Software, community, projects, and deployments are all experiencing growth. In the past 12 months alone, LF Energy has seen a 1.25x increase in hosted projects, a 23% increase in unique contributors, a 15% increase in commits, and an 8% increase in lines of code added across unique commits, bringing total lines of code to 114 million. This progress cannot happen fast enough if we are going to meet the ambitious decarbonization goals set by national and international bodies.”
Educating the Energy Sector
LF Energy has recently released three new research reports to provide energy stakeholders with a better understanding of the state of the energy transition and open source’s role to play:
- The 2023 Energy Transformation Readiness Study provides survey-based insights into energy sector digitalization through open source. Headline findings include 76% of energy stakeholders surveyed reporting their organization has a clear strategic plan for digitalization, and that they have already begun implementing it. Additionally, 64% of energy stakeholders use more open source software than closed source, however a plurality (43%) believe energy industry consensus is still key to increasing OSS adoption.
- The Open Source Opportunity for Microgrids: Five Ways to Drive Innovation and Overcome Market Barriers for Energy Resilience informs readers about microgrids – groups of distributed energy resources designed to improve energy resiliency, with the ability to operate as part of a larger electrical grid, or separately as an island. The report highlights the current state of the microgrid market and explores the potential for open source technology to accelerate the adoption of microgrids worldwide.
- The Open Source Sustainability Ecosystem provides qualitative and quantitative insights into the landscape of open source sustainability projects, identifies those having the biggest impact, as well as gaps that stakeholders across the energy industry should look to fill. Following the analysis of the open source sustainability ecosystem, the report goes on to make more than 20 recommendations for effectively supporting and building capacity for open source in sustainability.
Communicating to New Audiences
LF Energy hosted two events in June to provide opportunities for the community to share knowledge and best practices, and collaborate on how to speed innovation in the energy sector:
- LF Energy Summit took place June 1-2 in Paris, hosted at the headquarters of RTE with sponsorship support from Google and Savoir-faire Linux. Over 250 individuals representing over 150 organizations from 34 countries attended to learn how LF Energy and its projects are working collaboratively to develop new technologies to ensure the rapid onboarding of clean energy resources, deployment of electrification infrastructure, load balancing, and interoperability. Videos of all sessions are available to access for free.
- LF Energy Embedded Summit took place June 30 in Prague as part of the broader Embedded Open Source Summit. Hundreds of embedded developers and other stakeholders joined for a discussion of how IoT and other hardware can accelerate the energy transition and drive decarbonization. Videos of sessions from this event are also available to access for free.
Additionally, LF Energy members presented several sessions at SustainabilityCon at Open Source Summit North America in May in Vancouver, and will present an additional five sessions this week at Open Source Summit Europe. LF Energy members and projects have also presented in the past few months at events including CIRED, MOVE, and OpenUK’s Open Technology for Sustainability Day.
LF Energy’s EVerest project, which is developing and maintaining an open source software stack for EV charging infrastructure, will host a summit on October 5 at the PIONIX offices in Bad Schönborn, Germany.
Individual Projects Continue to Innovate
Six LF Energy projects have issued major software releases in the past several months:
- Arras, a tool for development and deployment of smart-grid and renewable energy resource integration technology, has been officially transferred to LF Energy with the release of HiPAS GridLAB-D Version 4.3.1 (chiba-1). The release includes support for new use-cases; a new fire danger tool; voltage, current, and power flow violation detection capabilities; and new support for historical, current, and forecast weather.
- FlexMeasures, an intelligent and developer-friendly energy management system to support real-time energy flexibility apps, rapidly and scalable, released version 0.1 of the new FlexMeasures client. The FlexMeasures client wraps the most important interactions needed to use FlexMeasures effectively in one place.
- OperatorFabric is a modular, extensible, industrial-strength, and field-tested platform for systems operators. Versions 3.15.0 and 3.15.1 have been recently released, adding new features including the ability to better detect loss of connection, as well as bug fixes.
- Power Grid Model, a high-performance library for steady-state distribution power system analysis, released version 1.5.0 adding new features, which includes Short Circuit calculations according to the IEC60909 standard.
- PowSyBl, an open source library dedicated to electrical grid modeling and simulation, concluded its latest release train, adding new features such as load and line asymmetrical extensions, basic implementation of asymmetric AC load flow, and more.
- RTDIP, which provides easy access to high-volume, historical and real-time process data for analytics applications, engineers, and data scientists wherever they are, has been conducting experiments to see how Generative AI could help query structured data, which is now available in RTDIP SDK v0.5.0.
LF Energy CoMPAS Cleans Up IEC 61850 Data Model
The CoMPAS software tool developed by LF Energy has been deployed for the Real Time Interface (RTI) project initiated by grid operators and market parties in the Netherlands. The RTI aims to enable grid operators to limit power generation by customers in order to address capacity constraints on the electricity grid. RTI encountered a significant challenge in the form of an IEC 61850 data model that contained a substantial amount of unnecessary data objects and information. CoMPAS was employed to address the challenges associated with the IEC 61850 data model. The tool’s intuitive interface and built-in validation functions allowed for efficient data model cleanup, expediting the overall development process. The accessibility of CoMPAS, even to users with limited expertise in the IEC 61850 protocol, simplified the validation and optimization tasks, resulting in faster progress.
LF Energy Approaches 75 Members with Six New Additions
In a significant sign of growth of LF Energy, five new members have joined the foundation. d-fine has joined LF Energy as a General Member. CRESYM, EDSN, Open Climate Fix, Trusted Computing Group, and WattTime have joined as Associate Members. LF Energy members provide funding and resources to support the foundation’s mission of building a unified approach to developing non-differentiating code that can enable utilities, grid operators, electric vehicle makers, energy saving companies and others to develop and implement technologies to transform the power sector.
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About LF Energy
A first-of-its-kind initiative, LF Energy provides a 21st century plan of action to solve climate change through open frameworks, reference architectures and a support ecosystem of complementary projects. Strategic Members include Alliander, Google, Microsoft, RTE and Shell, in addition to over 60 General and Associate Members from across the energy industry, technology, academia, and government. Find further information here: https://www.lfenergy.org
