SEAPATH Becomes LF Energy’s First Graduated Project
SEAPATH has become the first project in LF Energy’s history to reach the Graduated stage. Grid2Op and OpenGridFM have been approved to move to Incubation, while CoMPAS moves to Early Adoption.
LF Energy’s project lifecycle sets milestones and requirements for projects as they develop. With its move to Graduation, SEAPATH enters the stage for projects that have reached their growth goals and are on a sustaining cycle of development, maintenance, and long-term support.
The LF Energy project lifecycle defines five stages for contributed projects: Sandbox, Incubation, Early Adoption, Graduated, and Emeritus, each marking a different level of maturity, governance rigor, and community adoption. A project typically enters at Sandbox, the entry point for early-stage projects that just need a maintainer, a completed contribution proposal, and basic infrastructure access. From there it moves into Incubation, for projects the LF Energy Technical Advisory Council (TAC) believes are or have the potential to be important to the ecosystem, which requires more formal governance artifacts, an OpenSSF “Passing” badge, and a documented roadmap.
Projects that show real traction advance to Early Adoption. This level is for projects operating as an open source community with a growing and diverse number of contributors and users and that are being considered for production deployment, requiring a larger, elected Technical Steering Committee, an OpenSSF “Silver” badge, and a concrete 18-month growth plan. The most mature projects reach Graduated status, for projects that have reached their growth goals and are now on a sustaining cycle of development, maintenance, and long-term support, commonly used in enterprise production, requiring an OpenSSF “Gold” badge and diversified organizational contribution.
Finally, Emeritus is for projects that maintainers or the TAC feel have reached or are nearing end-of-life; still hosted by the foundation for IP and trademark purposes but no longer actively developed or promoted. Each transition upward requires a TAC vote (and, from Early Adoption onward, an additional Governing Board vote), and the differences between stages track increasing requirements around governance formality, security, contributor diversity, and real-world adoption, paired with increasing benefits like marketing support, event promotion, and TAC voting rights.
SEAPATH: from pilot to production standard
SEAPATH is a real-time virtualization platform that lets multiple vendors’ protection, automation, and control applications run as virtual machines on shared servers in a digital substation, decoupling substation software from any single vendor’s hardware. RTE has deployed SEAPATH in production across its R#SPACE program, and EcoPhi is using the project to virtualize key substation monitoring and analytics functions. GE Vernova and National Grid have validated the platform for virtualized protection functions, and in 2025 RTE, ABB, and Schneider Electric launched the VIP’R project to extend SEAPATH further into virtualized protection. Elia, Amprion, Avangrid, Enedis, and Alliander are among the utilities now evaluating the platform.
SEAPATH also underwent an independent security audit by Ada Logics and OSTIF between April and June 2024, one of the practices the TAC weighs when assessing a project’s readiness for Graduation.
Grid2Op and OpenGridFM move to Incubation
Grid2Op and OpenGridFM move to Incubation, which signals that the TAC believes the project is, or has the potential to be, important to the ecosystem of Projects or the ecosystem as a whole.
Grid2Op, developed by RTE, is a simulation environment for developing and benchmarking automated control strategies for power grid operations. It underpins the Learning to Run a Power Network (L2RPN) competition series, including a NeurIPS edition that drew more than 300 international participants, and gives researchers a shared testbed for reinforcement learning approaches to grid control.
OpenGridFM provides tools and infrastructure for building foundation models for power system analysis, using graph neural networks pre-trained on synthetic power flow scenarios and then fine-tuned for tasks like contingency assessment and optimal power flow. The project was founded by Hydro-Québec and IBM Research, who recently released a neural solver for the project.
CoMPAS moves to Early Adoption
CoMPAS moves to Early Adoption, the stage for projects operating as open source communities with a growing and diverse number of contributors and users and a focus on industry adoption.
CoMPAS is a vendor-neutral, web-based environment for engineering IEC 61850 substation automation systems. Built on the OpenSCD project, it provides an SCL editor along with backend services for file storage, validation, CIM-to-SCL conversion, and automated SCD generation, giving utilities a way to own their substation configuration process rather than depending on proprietary vendor tooling. CoMPAS is developed by Alliander, BearingPoint, RTE, and TransnetBW, and it pairs naturally with SEAPATH: together the two projects cover both the virtualization layer and the configuration layer of a full digital substation stack.
SC Decarbonisation Hub and GXF move to Emeritus
SC Decarbonisation Hub and GXF move to Emeritus status. Reaching the end of active development is a natural part of the project lifecycle. Emeritus projects have reached or are nearing end-of-life and are not in active development, while LF Energy provides a long-term home for their project assets and code, keeping that work available for anyone who may want to build on it again in the future.
Why lifecycle advancement matters
LF Energy’s project lifecycle exists to give the community a consistent, honest signal of how mature and dependable a project is, from early research code through to infrastructure organizations can build on for the long term. Moving between stages is not a formality: the TAC evaluates factors like the diversity of contributing organizations, the presence of independent security review, documented governance, and evidence of real-world use before advancing a project.
That makes SEAPATH’s move to Graduation the strongest maturity signal LF Energy can give. It tells utilities, vendors, and integrators evaluating the project that SEAPATH is ready for deployment: it has a security audit behind it, multiple pilots running at a major transmission system operator, commercial support available, and multiple vendors validating their own applications against it. For an organization deciding whether to build its next digital substation on SEAPATH, that is the difference between an interesting project and a dependable one.
The same logic runs through the other moves in this update. Incubation tells the community that the TAC sees real potential in Grid2Op and OpenGridFM and wants to give them a neutral, well-governed home to grow into that potential. Early Adoption tells the community that CoMPAS has moved past its early research phase and is now building the kind of broad, multi-organization contributor and user base that signals durable industry relevance. And Emeritus status protects the value already created by SC Decarbonization Hub and GXF, keeping their code and assets available even after active development winds down.
Learn more about the LF Energy project lifecycle.
About the Projects
About SEAPATH: SEAPATH is an open source real-time virtualization platform for hosting protection, automation, and control applications in digital substations, hosted at LF Energy. It enables multiple vendors’ applications to run as virtual machines on shared servers, decoupling substation software from proprietary hardware. RTE uses SEAPATH in production across its R#SPACE program; National Grid and GE Vernova have validated it for virtualized protection; Elia, Amprion, Avangrid, Enedis, and Alliander are evaluating it. Major vendors including ABB, Schneider Electric, Siemens Energy, and GE Vernova have validated applications on the platform.
About Grid2Op: Grid2Op is an open source simulation environment for developing and benchmarking automated control strategies for power grid operations, developed by RTE and hosted at LF Energy. It is a research platform, not a production operations tool, used for reinforcement learning research and as the platform for the Learning to Run a Power Network (L2RPN) competition series, including a NeurIPS edition that attracted over 300 international participants.
About OpenGridFM: OpenGridFM is an open source project at LF Energy providing tools and infrastructure for developing foundation models for power system analysis. It uses graph neural networks pre-trained on synthetic power flow scenarios, then fine-tuned for downstream tasks such as approximating power flow solutions, contingency assessment, and optimal power flow, enabling fast approximate solutions for grid analysis tasks that traditional numerical solvers cannot evaluate at scale. Founded by Hydro-Québec and IBM Research. Note: the project was renamed from GridFM to OpenGridFM in 2026; historical materials (the TAC proposal, the Joule paper, prior presentations) use the original name.
About CoMPAS: CoMPAS (Configuration Modules for Power industry Automation Systems) is an open source web-based environment for engineering IEC 61850 substation automation systems, hosted at LF Energy. It provides a vendor-neutral SCL editor, built on the OpenSCD project, with backend services for file storage, validation, CIM-to-SCL conversion, and automated SCD generation. Developed by Alliander, BearingPoint, RTE, and TransnetBW.
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.
