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Announcement

Jul 16
0

Linux Foundation Energy member TenneT “open sources” their open source strategy

By | Announcement, Blog

This post was written by Loek Bakker, Corporate Information Management Office Head at TenneT

TenneT is the first European cross-border electricity transmission system operator (TSO), with activities in the Netherlands and in Germany, providing uninterrupted electricity to over 41 million people. The security of our supply is among the best in Europe, with 99.99% grid availability. With the energy transition, TenneT is contributing to a future in which wind and solar energy are the most important primary sources to produce electricity.

As an LF Energy member, we recognize that open source is the commodity foundation upon which the entire IT industry rests. A recent Synopsis study indicated that 100% of the proprietary software our vendors are using in the energy and utility space have open source inside [1].  Yet, as an industry, we do not manage our software as a community, and we have relative ignorance about what exists within our “black boxes”. The open source model refers to the software development practice that encourages transparent governance and open collaboration to create software for which the original source code (design, code, ingredients) is made freely available and may be redistributed and modified. For TenneT, like many other utilities, open source is essential to our strategic success.

TenneT chose to adopt the open source model in 2017 by developing the TenneT Data Platform (TDP). We now want to accelerate the development and adoption of open source for the following reasons:

  • TenneT wants to drive the energy transition. 
    • Open source is the dominant software model for open innovation efforts in the new digital economy.
  • TenneT increasingly uses open source for mission-critical workloads, and this will increase in the future.
    • Open source software is used within mission-critical workloads by over 90% of IT operations across industries. It is the global standard.
  • TenneT has a public task and is focused on lowering cost for society. 
    • Open source provides opportunities for faster innovation, and lowering overall development and maintenance costs for software.

These reasons closely relate to the renewed strategic goals for TenneT as a TSO, meaning that our open source strategy fully supports TenneT’s strategic direction.

Since we truly believe that open source is one of the great leverage points to accelerate technological paradigm changes which are necessary for the energy transition, we have decided to publish our open source strategy under a Creative Commons license, making it available for everyone to see, share, and use. This will not only improve the quality of our own strategy document, but it can also support other parties in moving forward with open source and creating solutions for the energy transition. And what better way to do this than through the LF Energy initiative, to underline our commitment to LF Energy as a neutral place for collaboration and cooperation.

Click to read TenneT’s full strategy [PDF].

Europe’s Two Largest TSOs Discuss the Call to Open Source and Joining Linux Foundation Energy

Join a webinar with Loek Bakker from TenneT and Lucian Balea from RTE
August 8th at 8:00am PT, 16:00 GMT, 17:00 CET

CLICK HERE TO REGISTER


[1] 2019 OPEN SOURCE SECURITY AND RISK ANALYSIS: Synopsys Cybersecurity Research Center https://www.synopsys.com/blogs/software-security/open-source-trends-ossra/

May 14
0

LF Energy Ecosystem Gains Momentum for Open Source Innovation With New Members and Projects

By | Announcement, Latest

Energy Industry Comes Together To Collaborate On the Grid of the Future and Secure Distributed Power Systems  

INNOGRID, BRUSSELS, May 15, 2019 –  LF Energy, a Linux Foundation initiative developing and sustaining open source technology innovation in the energy and electricity sectors, is rapidly growing its community with additional founding Premier member, Faraday Grid, joining RTE. New General members include IBM, OSISoft, and Recurve; while Elering AS, Energinet, Energy Foundation, École Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne, Fraunhofer IEE, FIWARE Foundation, Iowa State University, Monash University, National Renewable Energy Laboratory (NREL), North Carolina State University FREEDM Center, Project Haystack, Stanford University, TenneT, The Energy Coalition, University of Kassel, and Washington State University join European Network of Transmission System Operators (ENTSO-E) and Vanderbilt University as new Associate members.

In addition, three new projects, Energy Market Methods Consortium (EM2), OpenEEmeter, and Open Energy Data Initiative are now hosted by LF Energy.

    • OpenEEmeter is an open-source engine focused on quantifying changes in energy consumption and providing standards for enabling behind-the-meter flexibility in building as a grid resource. The project is contributed by Recurve, formerly Open Energy Efficiency.
    • The Energy Market Methods Consortium (EM2) is designing standards to quantify energy flexibility at both the meter and the grid, and for ensuring customer privacy when using smart meter data. This is also contributed by Recurve, formerly Open Energy Efficiency.   
  • The Open Energy Data Initiative, which focuses on building open data connections to high-value federal datasets to better enable analysis and computation, contributed by the U.S. Department of Energy’s National Renewable Energy Laboratory (NREL).

LF Energy is a growing community supported by the world’s leading utilities, system operators, system integrators, technology vendors, academic institutions, and end-user organizations to accelerate the global energy industry transition to achieve efficient, sustainable, and distributed power systems.

“LF Energy is working with global energy providers to build and run scalable applications in modern, dynamic environments to transform centralized grids into distributed systems by leveraging open source and open standards,” said Shuli Goodman, Executive Director of LF Energy. “It’s incredibly exciting to see momentum and support for LF Energy grow so quickly. A robust ecosystem of projects, developers and members joining and contributing to LF Energy will be instrumental in achieving a secure, flexible, and sustainable grid.”

Several LF Energy founding members, including Elering, Energinet, ENTSO-E, Faraday Grid, TenneT and RTE, came together in Brussels at InnoGrid2020+ May 13-14 to exhibit and introduce new projects that expand the initiative beyond operators and the control room. Goodman also presented closing remarks on day one, and Faraday Grid participated in the “Time to Market” panel on May 14.

Background on New LF Energy Projects

LF Energy provides open frameworks and reference architectures that bring complementary projects to one central home to create collaborative solutions that are compatible and support the entire power systems ecosystem from generation and aggregation to transmission, distribution, and demand response and flexibility services.

    • Energy Market Methods Consortium (EM2): Energy Market Methods Consortium is developing standardized methods, linked to open source code, to enable demand flexibility as a resource, supporting energy programs and distributed energy resources (DER) ​markets. EM2 includes three working groups: CalTRACK to standardize measurements of meter-based changes in consumption; GRID to provide methods for  relative impacts to load shape for claimable savings and forecasting net grid impacts; and SEAT, which leverages differential privacy to enable a range of data-driven policy and market-based use cases using AMI data. This project was contributed by a diverse group of stakeholders that includes utilities, regulators, evaluators, software companies, and load shape aggregators, through a multi-year process that was led by Recurve, formerly Open Energy Efficiency.
    • OpenEEmeter: The OpenEEmeter project is an open source engine that quantifies monthly, daily, and hourly changes in energy consumption, from behind-the-meter building interventions, to define consistent transactional units for distributed energy resources, ensure transparency, and provide a quantifiable standard for an ecosystem that enables markets for behind-the-meter flexibility as a resource. OpenEEmeter implements the methods created by the CalTRACK working group in EM2. This project was contributed by Recurve, formerly Open Energy Efficiency.
  • Open Energy Data Initiative (OEDI): The mission of OEDI is to improve and automate access to high-value energy (and related) datasets to make data actionable and discoverable by researchers and industry to accelerate analysis and advance innovation. OEDI will provide governance oversight of technical contributions, curate multiple datasets and data lakes, and develop and support machine learning and artificial intelligence based on datasets. The initial contribution comes from the U.S. Department of Energy’s National Renewable Energy Laboratory (NREL).

Existing LF Energy projects include OperatorFabric, PowSyBl, and RIAPS.

    • OperatorFabric is a modular, extensible, industrial-strength and field-tested platform for use in electricity, water, and other utility operations. It features Let’s Coordinate, a multi-system technical and organizational module based on OperatorFabric, that streamlines organizational and technical communications between operators in power systems.
    • PowSyBl provides the code building blocks for the simulations and analyses of power systems, for horizons from real-time operation to investment planning)
  • RIAPS: The Resilient Information Architecture Platform for Smart Grid (RIAPS) provides core infrastructure and services for building effective, secure and powerful distributed Smart Grid applications, such as monitoring and control, data collection and analytics, energy management, microgrid control, and protection applications.

Because of the breadth of the energy sector, LF Energy will also add more projects in the future from across the entire electricity and power systems lifecycle to enable and facilitate the acceleration of the energy transition.

With members across 10 countries, LF Energy anticipates new initiatives to include a digital substation project that will disaggregate and virtualize the substation bus utilizing open source and commodity x86 hardware to drive costs down and capacity for data consumption. A second predictive maintenance project will utilize IoT and drone technology to build AI and machine learning algorithms using sensors, geospatial images, and harmonic listening. Additionally, Powernet and Visdom, two Stanford open source projects, are already engaging with LF Energy.

Supporting Quotes from Founding LF Energy Members

“With accelerating change in the energy sector, keeping costs under control is a real challenge,” said Georg Rute, Digitalisation Manager at Elering. “We welcome the initiative to open source our basic IT infrastructure, thus helping reduce costs for all grid operators and bring down barriers in integrating our energy systems.”

“Decarbonization and digitalization of the energy system calls for radical changes to our IT ecosystem,” said Henrik Lang Petersen, CIO at Energinet. “Increased collaboration across borders and sectors is needed. For these reasons, Energinet has joined LF Energy in an ambition to foster new partnerships and further advance the socio-economic value of our IT investments.”

“It is no surprise that LF Energy has been developing so fast,” said Nicolas Richet, Chief Information Officer and Secretary of the Digital committee at ENTSO-E. “It allows for the collaborative development of building blocks that will support the cutting-edge innovations needed for customers worldwide to enjoy a reliable and sustainable power supply. ENTSO-E Members are already applying this collaborative approach in their shared IT developments. This is why ENTSO-E is supporting LF Energy and looks forward to stakeholders across the power system to join.”

“To realise reliable, affordable, and decarbonised energy systems and drive continued prosperity, we must look beyond the historical technology approaches,” said Matthew Williams, Faraday Grid Founder, Director and CTO. “We need speed of innovation, which requires that we adopt new processes and practices, with open collaboration at the heart of this. Faraday Grid is proud to be a founding member of LF Energy to enable prosperous and sustainable energy systems globally.”

“LF Energy brings the collaborative benefits of open source software and data to the energy industry. We are thrilled to be a founding member and are committed to building a healthy and extensive global ecosystem,” said Neil Gerber, Director, IBM’s Energy, Environment & Utilities Industry. “This will dramatically improve system interoperability and enable advanced technologies like Artificial Intelligence. This is necessary to address the world’s need to rapidly evolve the electrical grid infrastructure, while enhancing transparency and innovation.”

“Monash University is developing a digital platform, Smart Energy City, to provide crucial infrastructure supporting our $135 million commitment to reach net zero emissions by 2030,” said Ken Sloan, Monash Deputy Vice-Chancellor and Vice-President Enterprise. “The platform will enable research and deployment to create a transactive energy market as a living laboratory for academics, students and industry. The LF Energy partnership vastly accelerates our access and connectivity to global technology leaders and developers.”

“NREL aims to build a network of data users and contributors for our platform, while at the same time making open energy data more useful, usable, and accessible for researchers and analysts,” said Debbie Brodt-Giles, Data, Analytics, Tools, and Applications (DATA) Group Manager at NREL.

“By its very nature, power spans many boundaries – political, enterprise, economic, social and cultural. As we face rising concerns around global warming and grid disturbances from more frequent severe weather events, we need to leverage technology – from renewable energy to advanced grid control – not to thrive, but just to survive. OSIsoft is thrilled to support LF Energy as a vehicle to drive collaboration and cooperative software and systems that are desperately needed to meet these challenges,” said Richard Beeson, CTO of OSIsoft. “OSIsoft is fortunate to serve 75% of the world’s top energy companies. Our technology helps them manage their operations data for better situational awareness and renewable integration. We are committed to working with the broader ecosystem in helping our collective customers, their stakeholders and the communities and people they serve in adapting and continuing on this journey.”

“We finally found our people,” said Matt Golden, CEO of Recurve (formerly OpenEE), who recently contributed their open source project, the OpenEEmeter, and the CalTRACK method process to LF Energy. “LF Energy is the perfect home for this important consensus building effort. Clearly LFE understands open source and how to help make projects succeed. However, what sets LFE apart is their vision for how open source can drive innovation and the software ecosystem needed to achieve a distributed clean energy grid.”

“In the smart grid, all players take part,” said Loek Bakker, Head of Information Management Office, TenneT. “TenneT believes that this open market demands open software, which is why we have joined the LF Energy initiative.”

LF Energy provides the leadership, infrastructure, training, legal support, and community outreach needed to nurture an open source ecosystem to pave the way for alternative paths to energy efficiency and savings, the integration of renewables, and electric mobility, powered by open source. Energy sector engineers and developers across hybrid clouds, containers, and microservices, are encouraged to learn more and to join the LF Energy community in deploying, testing, and improving open source software to rapidly digitize the grid.

About the Linux Foundation

Founded in 2000, the Linux Foundation is supported by more than 1,000 members and is the world’s leading home for collaboration on open source software, open standards, open data, and open hardware. Linux Foundation’s projects are critical to the world’s infrastructure, including Linux, Kubernetes, Node.js and more. The Linux Foundation’s methodology focuses on leveraging best practices and addressing the needs of contributors, users, and solution providers to create sustainable models for open collaboration. For more information, please visit us at linuxfoundation.org.

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The Linux Foundation has registered trademarks and uses trademarks. For a list of trademarks of the Linux Foundation, please visit our trademark usage page at https://www.linuxfoundaton.org/trademark-usage. Linux is a registered trademark of Linus Torvalds.

Jul 12
0

The Linux Foundation Launches LF ENERGY, New Open Source Coalition

By | Announcement

LF ENERGY Launches with Europe’s Biggest Transmission System Provider, RTE; Initiative Fuels Energy Transition and Momentum for Open Source Innovation

SAN FRANCISCO, July 12, 2018 – Just as open source software has transformed automobiles, telecommunications, financial services, and healthcare, The Linux Foundation today announces the formation of LF Energy with support from RTE, Europe’s biggest transmission power systems provider, and other organizations, to speed technological innovation and transform the energy mix across the world.

LF Energy also welcomes four new projects to be hosted at The Linux Foundation as part of the initiative, which will advance everything from smart assistants for system operators to smart grid controls software.

LF Energy is an umbrella organization that will support and sustain multi-vendor collaboration and open source progress in the energy and electricity sectors to accelerate information and communication technologies (ICT) critical to balanced energy use and economic value.

“Our complex, multifaceted global energy market is evolving quickly, and it demands that we not only keep pace, but act more rapidly than ever before,” said Shuli Goodman, LF Energy Executive Director. “A collaborative open source approach to development of these technologies across companies, countries, and end users, will provide the innovation needed to meet our respective goals in renewable energy, power electronics, electric mobility, and rapid digitalization for the energy sector overall.”

LF Energy members aim to inform and expedite the energy transition, including the move to electric mobility and connected sensors and devices—all while modernizing and protecting the grid.

“We are thrilled to launch LF Energy and honored to work with RTE, European Network of Transmission System Operators, Vanderbilt University and The Electric Power Research Institute to harness open source technologies and advance the energy transition. We invite developers and organizations around the world to join us in advancing this exciting new endeavor,” said Jim Zemlin, Executive Director of The Linux Foundation. “With the technical and operational guidance of the Linux Foundation, LF Energy will create a sustainable ecosystem to quickly and efficiently deliver robust, secure and innovative solutions. Our goal with LF Energy is to deliver value as quickly as possible to help our stakeholders advance their business goals, strengthen local and global economies, and improve renewable energy and grid modernization.”

LF Energy will focus on curating reusable components, open APIs and interfaces through project communities that the energy ecosystem can adopt into platforms and solutions. Building the plumbing upon a common infrastructure enables energy companies and solution providers to differentiate at higher value layers and services, while reducing cost and integration complexity at non-differentiating layers. As a result, power system providers will be empowered to achieve time to market, scale and efficiency much faster than ever before.

Key Facts, Background and Supporting Partners

RTE is a French transmission system operator and Europe’s biggest transmission system provider.

“RTE is thrilled to be a founding member of LF Energy because we believe it is essential for creating forward-thinking grid solutions,” said Olivier Grabette, Executive Vice
President and Member of the Executive board. “Shared open development is fundamental to enabling smart power for the benefit the global economy and the energy landscape of the future. RTE is proud to contribute three significant projects to the LF Energy ecosystem, and we look forward to working closely with The Linux Foundation and the open source community to make our systems smarter and more secure.”

Vanderbilt University is a private research university in Nashville that conducts research in the area of cyber-physical systems through its Institute for Software-Integrated Systems.

“Vanderbilt’s Institute for Software-Integrated Systems has a long track record in building various open source software tools and this is an exciting cross-sector collaboration,” said Gabor Karsai, Associate Director of the Institute. “This initiative will allow us to share our research results with the open source community and facilitate technology transition to industry.”

ENTSO-E, the European Network of Transmission System Operators, represents 43 electricity transmission system operators (TSOs) from 36 countries across Europe.

“ENTSO-E sees the potential for community and collaborative action that the LF Energy initiative offers to pool skills and knowledge in new strategic digital areas,” said Laurent Schmitt, Secretary General, ENTSO-E. “ENTSO-E recognizes the benefits of open source and shared development to develop agility in future digital developments, which is key for ENTSO-E and our TSO community. We have established a first liaison with LF Energy as a strategic option for meeting ENTSO-E’s and the European TSOs’ commitment to a cost effective and secure energy transition. We are pleased to be part of this global announcement.”

The Electric Power Research Institute (EPRI) conducts research, development, and demonstration projects for the benefit of the public in the United States and internationally. Its membership has grown to represent approximately 90% of the electric utility revenue generated in the United States and extends to participation in more than 35 countries.

“The Electric Power Research Institute believes a collaborative, innovative, and objective approach is necessary to tackle many of the opportunities ahead for maintaining a safe, reliable, affordable, environmentally responsible, and integrated electric power system,” said EPRI Vice President of Integrated Grid Mark McGranaghan. “This effort will continue to foster that spirit of collaboration, bringing multi-national perspectives to the table to inform globally-impactful work toward our respective and complimentary missions.”

RTE contributed three projects to The Linux Foundation to form LF Energy, and Vanderbilt University will transition its Resilient Information Architecture Platform for Smart Grid (RIAPS) applications technology. These projects will help seed an open source ecosystem for TSOs, distribution system operators, aggregators, utilities, vendors, and other energy sector stakeholders.

More about new LF Energy projects:

  • OperatorFabric: is a smart assistant for system operators for use in electricity, water, and other utility operations. The industrial strength, extensible and flexible grid operations platform provides strategic management of information with a modular approach to applications, easy-to-add new functionality, and open APIs.
  • Let’s Coordinate: an extensible solution of OperatorFabric, enables organizational power system coordination, visibility, communication, and workflow between distributed users across national and regional boundaries.
  • The PowSyBl Framework: of reusable modular components is a high-performance computing platform that enables grid modeling (e.g., CGMES) and simulation in a highly distributed energy resource environment from system expansion studies to planning and operation.
  • RIAPS: The Resilient Information Architecture Platform for Smart Grid (RIAPS) provides core services for building effective, secure and powerful distributed applications. Created at the Institute for Software-Integrated Systems at Vanderbilt University, with support from North Carolina State University, Washington State University, and funding from the U.S. Department of Energy’s Advanced Research Projects Agency for Energy (ARPA-E), RIAPS enables smart grid control software to run reliably, just as smartphone apps run on platforms like Android and Apple iOS that have become industry standards.

Hardware, software, UI, services, and applications suppliers will work together on these independent technical projects as part of LF Energy to accelerate the energy transition. To learn more about LF Energy or join the effort, go to https://www.lfenergy.org/.

About The Linux Foundation
The Linux Foundation is the organization of choice for the world’s top developers and companies to build ecosystems that accelerate open technology development and industry adoption. Together with the worldwide open source community, it is solving the hardest technology problems by creating the largest shared technology investment in history. Founded in 2000, The Linux Foundation today provides tools, training and events to scale any open source project, which together deliver an economic impact not achievable by any one company. More information can be found at www.linuxfoundation.org.

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The Linux Foundation has registered trademarks and uses trademarks. For a list of trademarks of The Linux Foundation, please see our trademark usage page: https://www.linuxfoundation.org/trademark-usage. Linux is a registered trademark of Linus Torvalds.