Guest: Dan Brown (LinkedIn)
Organization: LF Energy (Twitter)
Show: State of Energy

“Without energy, you don’t have any technology. You need to power all of the devices, computers, servers, etc.”

LF Energy is the open-source foundation that is building open-source systems, software, hardware standards, and specifications to advance the power sector and help us decarbonize faster. In this episode of State of Energy recorded at the Open Source Summit in Bilbao, Spain, LF Energy Director of Communications Dan Brown talks about the foundation’s presence at the summit, its activities as well as updates on its projects.

On the importance of energy and open source:    

• Without energy, you don’t have any technology. You need to power all of the devices, computers, servers, etc.
• Open source is the way to drive the power sector forward.
• If we don’t digitalize these grids and all of the operations within utilities, substations, and control centers, we won’t be able to onboard the renewables that are needed.
• LF Energy is expanding quickly and is seeing deployment and adoption, but the development and the implementation needs to speed up more, because the effects of climate change are very evident. If we can’t prevent them, at least, we can mitigate the worst impacts.

Recent LF Energy activities:

• At the Open Source Summit, LF Energy hosted 5 different sessions, including a presentation on why open source for energy, overviews of specific projects, and how they are impacting utilities.
• It welcomed 6 new members.
• It released 3 research reports this year. The latest is the 2023 Open Source Sustainability Ecosystem Report, which analyzed more than 1,300 different open source projects and public repositories that are impacting sustainability, from energy systems and modeling to hydrosphere, forestry, agriculture, and others.
• At the LF Energy Summit in Paris earlier this year, there were 150+ people on site from 37 countries, plus 100+ more joined virtually. There were 30 different sessions covering not just LF Energy projects, but the entire open-source ecosystem for energy systems. Videos of all sessions are available for free at lfenergy.org.

Project updates:

• Of the 25 projects, 6 of them had major software releases this year, adding new features, including the ability to better account for the impact of wildfires.
• Its most recent project is the Power Grid Model, which was started by Alliander, the distribution system operator in the Netherlands. It helps power utilities better model what’s happening on their power grids.
• The EVerest project is a reference framework and architecture for EV chargers to ensure that they all work together. This avoids the experience where the plug fits, but it won’t charge or the app won’t take your payment because there are so many different systems on the back-end. EVerest is being piloted all over the world.
• The Real-Time Data Ingestion Platform (RTDIP) project started at Shell and was open-source through LF Energy. It applies to any use case where you have lots of sensors or devices that are creating massive amounts of data that need to be ingested and analyzed and processed. Since it was open sourced, it averages 20,000 downloads per month.

What’s ahead:

• The EVerest project will hold their first summit on October 5 in Germany.
• An open-source tool is going to be deployed across an entire national energy grid. Announcement to follow.

This summary was written by Camille Gregory.