This post was contributed by Jonas van den Bogaard of LF Energy member Alliander.
Céad mile fáilte! – One hundred thousand welcomes in old Irish. With that sentence, Hilary Carter from the Linux Foundation Research started her keynote where she presented the outcomes of the World of Open Source: Europe Spotlight 2022 research report.
An LF Energy delegation attended the recent Open Source Summit Europe in Dublin, Ireland! The delegation consisted of open source community leaders from RTE, PIONIX, and Alliander. Open Source Summit Europe brings together open source developers, technologists, and community leaders from around the world to collaborate, share information, solve problems and gain knowledge, furthering open source innovation and ensuring a sustainable open source ecosystem.
At most Open Source Summits important announcements are made. This time there were two: The transfer of PyTorch from Meta to Linux Foundation and the announcement of Linux Foundation Europe.
PyTorch is an open source machine learning framework that was developed by Meta. The Open Source community of PyTorch has more than 2,000 contributors. By bringing PyTorch to the Linux Foundation, Meta wants to give the open source community a boost and place the project under a neutral ecosystem.
The second announcement concerns Linux Foundation Europe. The goal of Linux Foundation Europe is to create a neutral governance entity in Europe. Currently, it is difficult for some organizations in Europe to join the Linux Foundation because Linux Foundation is an American governance entity. The hope is Linux Foundation Europe will remove this barrier and accelerate open source adoption within Europe. For European organizations that are already a member of the Linux Foundation, participation in Linux Foundation Europe is free. The first project that will be hosted at the Linux Foundation Europe is OpenWallet, which is an open source alternative to your Apple Wallet and Android Wallet, among others, and can provide a general basis for building new digital wallets.
Besides important announcements, the summit is also famous for its many presentations. The topics of these presentations range from security to OPSOs to emerging open source technologies and more.
Also, there were no less than three presentations related to open source for power system sector, which were made possible by the LF Energy delegation. The topics of these presentations were:
How Open Source Helps a Grid Operator with the Challenges of the Energy Transition – Jonas van den Bogaard & Nico Rikken, Alliander
The energy transition poses new challenges to all parties in the energy sector. For grid operators, the rise in renewable energy and the electrification of energy consumption drives the grid to its limits. By using open source, participating in open source projects, open sourcing internal projects like OpenSTEF and Power Grid Model, and being a member of LF Energy, the Dutch grid operator Alliander aims to unleash the power of open source collaboration to further the energy transition. OpenSTEF provides a complete software stack that forecasts the load on the electricity grid for the next hours to days. Given a time series of measured load or generation, a fully automated machine learning pipeline is executed which delivers a probabilistic forecast of future load. Power Grid Model is a Python library for steady-state distribution power system analysis. Currently, it supports the following calculations: 1) symmetric and asymmetric power flow calculation with Newton-Raphson method and linear method, and 2) symmetric and asymmetric state estimation with an iterative linear method. This talk explored the OpenSTEF project and Power Grid Model project, and how these projects support the adoption of renewable energy in the Netherlands.
Open Source Enables Power Grid Management Architecture by Lucian Balea & Benoit Jeanson, RTE
Since the launch of the Linux Foundation Energy, an ecosystem of industrial projects has been growing. From isolated projects held by isolated companies, a set of connected solutions is now emerging for some fields. In particular, for grid management, it is now possible to draw a fully connected net of open source tools from the inner workings of the power grid substation to the control room, from the configuration of real-time devices to operational decision-making support. This talk showed a journey through this architecture of real industrial-grade projects that is currently being implemented at RTE, the power transmission system operator in France, to enable the adaptation of core-business operational processes to the energy transition. It also presented how open source communities in other domains (edge, cloud-native, virtualization, embedded and real-time Linux) allowed the stunning rise of this wide range of solutions in only a few years. This journey is also evidence of how open source could be leveraged within a specific industry vertical to boost innovation.
Technical Introduction to Everest: Open Source Firmware for EV Charging Stations – Kai-Uwe Hermann & Piet Gömpel, PIONIX
This presentation introduced EVerest, an open source software stack for electric vehicle charging infrastructure, with specific examples of usage and integration into large-scale solutions. EVerest was designed with modularity and customizability in mind. It consists of a framework for configuring multiple interchangeable modules that are coupled via MQTT. By abstracting standards and use cases, EVerest runs on any Linux device without major customization efforts, from AC home chargers to DC public charging stations. In addition to communicating with vehicles using ISO15118 and EN61851, EVerest plans to integrate further communication such as ChaDeMo as well as supporting cloud-based management solutions, energy management including openADR and USEF, PV integration, and grid friendliness. A feature-complete OCPP cloud connectivity stack is already included. EVerest is an Apache2.0 licensed project within LF Energy. It was initiated by PIONIX GmbH to support the electrification of the mobility sector.
Video recordings of all Open Source Summit Europe sessions will be available in the coming weeks on YouTube.
To summarize, the summit was a great opportunity for the LF Energy delegation to meet each other in person, gain knowledge from the open source community and create awareness around LF Energy and the LF Energy projects.
