LF Energy welcomes Alliander, the largest electricity company in the Netherlands. Alliander consists of a group of companies, among them Liander, Qirion and Kenter, which together represent an expertise in energy networks, energy technology and technical innovations.
Alliander has joined LF Energy as a Premier Member, which also gives them a seat on the LF Energy Governing Board and Technical Advisory Committee.
LF Energy and RTE announce the LF Energy Global Summit
at La Défense, Paris, November 4-5, 2019
This first-of-its-kind event for power system operators and their vendors showcases collaborative development and shared innovation intended to accelerate the energy transition and lead us towards 100% decarbonization by 2050.
The Summit begins at 1pm on November 4 with a host of keynotes, including Mechtild Wörsdörfer from IEA, Olivier Grabette from RTE, Nithya Ruff from the Linux Foundation & Comcast, Sean Couglan from OpenChain, Dan Kohn of CNCF, and a host of other powerful speakers, followed by an evening event. The conference follows on Tuesday with an educational session on open source from leaders in the open source community – longtime open source program officers, community managers, and thought leaders in security, intellectual property, and more. We will spend the late morning and remaining day focused on LF Energy projects and building awareness of the emerging LF Energy stack.
This event has limited seating, so please register early. Registration is now open at the event website for 300€. More information is available on the LF Energy Global Summit web page.
Sponsorships for this event are still available. If you would like to help but don’t have the funds to support at a sponsorship level, you can donate any amount using our CommunityBridge link.
Note: We are also organizing a project working day on November 6th for all LF Energy projects. More details will be published as they become available.
LF Energy folks will be presenting a two conferences this week.
Shuli Goodman, Executive Director for LF Energy, is on a panel discussion Wednesday at the IEPEC conference in Denver. The panel, titled Open Source Software and the New Energy Frontier, is moderated by Puget Sound Energy’s Michael Noreika and also features participants from VEIC and Sagewell. It will cover the ways open source has transformed other industries, the benefits and risks of open source business models, and common issues that open source is uniquely able to solve.
Shuli will also present at the Open Source Summit North America in San Diego. Her talk Where Ohm’s Law Meets Moore’s Law: Scaling the Electrification of Everything will be on Thursday afternoon at 3pm, introducing LF Energy and discussing the benefits of collaborative development in the energy sector. Shuli will also give a keynote on Friday morning at 9:30am titled Networking Electrons – The Next Frontier in Energy and Open Source. In addition, Jeff Osier-Mixon, Program Manager for LF Energy, will provide a Birds-of-a-Feather (BoF) discussion on Thursday evening at 4:55pm.
Later in the year, Neil Gerber will be on a panel at Horizon19 in a few weeks, and we have many more speaking engagements and events coming up, including one we are very excited about – the LF Energy Global Summit, details of which will announced soon! Mark your calendars for Paris, November 4-5.
We hope to see you at any or all of these events!
On September 18-20, the Horizon19 conference on clean economy targets and climate goals will take place at the Boston Convention & Exhibition Center. With a community of several thousand stakeholders, Horizon19 represents an unprecedented opportunity for creating strategic partnerships that will merge customers, finance, technology, and markets into solutions for the clean economy. Horizon will gather 2000+ business leaders and key stakeholders to explore new market opportunities in the US and internationally and create new business partnerships and projects for the clean economy.
Horizon19 will consist of a conference, stakeholder engagement & matchmaking, showcasing, pitching, and side events. This combination aims to promote business-driven solutions for the clean economy, connecting innovation and implementation across the whole ecosystem for cleantech deployment. LF Energy board member Neil Gerber from IBM will participate on a panel titled Advancing Clean Energy Through Industry Leadership on Thursday at 10am in Session Hall 1.
The Horizon conference was established by NECEC, MassCEC, and World Climate Ltd, in order to create a platform that brings together key stakeholders in Boston, USA and around the world for partnerships that accelerate clean economy solutions.
LF Energy brings together industry principals throughout the global energy sector to build software that will run the grid of the future. Watch this space as well for upcoming news on the LF Energy Global Summit in Paris in November.
This is a final reminder that Loek Bakker, Corporate Information Management Office Head at TenneT, and Lucian Balea, R&D Program Director for Réseau de Transport d’Electricité (RTE) will join LF Energy’s Executive Director Shuli Goodman tomorrow for a live discussion about open source and its benefits and costs on the path to the energy transition.
Europe’s Two Largest TSOs Discuss the Call to Open Source and Joining Linux Foundation Energy
August 8th at 8:00am PT, 16:00 GMT, 17:00 CET
The Open Energy Data Initiative, OEDI, is an open energy data project hosted by LF Energy. OEDI provides access to very large scale “data lakes” for the purpose of synthesizing energy data. The Federal Data Strategy just posted an article on OEDI and the rest of the Open Energy Information (OpenEI) initiative, which is managed by Debbie Brodt-Giles.
Debbie is the Technical Steering Committee chair for the OEDI project as well as co-chair for LF Energy’s Technical Advisory Council, representing technical projects to the LF Energy board of directors. And this is just in her spare time – most often, Debbie is a director at the US Department of Energy’s National Renewable Energy Labs.
Read the article and also drill down into OEDI and OpenEI.
Carmen Best, Director of Policy & Emerging Markets at LF Energy general member Recurve, was also the head of EM&V at the California Public Utilities Commission, so she has a unique view on performance-based regulatory oversight with respect to energy efficiency, giving regulators tools to make intelligent decisions about energy.
Last week, she published an excellent article on the way open source can drive better data for energy efficiency in a regulatory environment, with a particularly interesting discussion on open source and collaborative development.
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:
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.
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
[1] 2019 OPEN SOURCE SECURITY AND RISK ANALYSIS: Synopsys Cybersecurity Research Center https://www.synopsys.com/blogs/software-security/open-source-trends-ossra/
By: Matthew Williams, Founder, Director, and Chief Technology Officer, Faraday Grid Ltd.
The electricity system is the biggest and one of the most complex machines ever built. In recent decades, this machine has begun to undergo a radical transition, with both the way we generate and use electricity evolving. In the midst of this, however, the power grid has not been able to keep up pace, which already manifests in reliability issues, such as power disturbances or even blackouts, and ever-increasing electricity costs.
The primary approach to address this so far has been to compensate for the grid’s weaknesses by adding external mitigating technologies; an approach unsustainable in the face of the fundamental energy transition we are experiencing. The electricity system needs a revolution, and it needs it now. To enable this at the pace necessary can only be a matter of collective effort. For this, the energy community needs an open source environment that facilitates collaboration and fuels innovation.
Over the last century, our society flourished thanks to the availability of reliable and affordable electricity. During this time, nearly every aspect of our life, including our entire economy became dependent on it. As our values and behaviors are shifting, our approach to electricity is evolving as well; with ever-increasing energy use on the consumption side, and variable renewables taking up rising portions in the energy mix on the generation side.
In the meantime, the delivery system underpinning all this, the electricity grid has remained fundamentally the same since its invention over one-hundred years ago. This is a problem, because the grid was not designed for power flows of modern electricity use and generation, and these changes are rapidly driving its architecture close to a breaking-point.
The only reason it is still able to fulfil its duty of supplying energy right now is due to grid operators investing substantially into various mitigating technologies. These are band aid solutions individually added on top of the system, that are able reactively address symptoms of an unsuitable grid. However, at a great cost: they heavily increase the complexity of the electricity system. Looking at the system as a whole, complexity can only mean two things: increased fragility and increased costs; two things that directly contradict our intention to ensure supply of reliable and affordable electricity.
It is clear that ultimately, a system-wide solution is the way forward. Nonetheless, there are countless players shaping the energy sphere who operate independently, each using their personalized tools and solutions. In other words, the pieces of hardware and software that enable us to have an energy system are not designed to be interoperable. This results in the different companies, who own and operate various parts of the system, not being able to share information with each other at all, simply because that is in different formats – despite being connected by physical power lines.
Currently, too much creative time is wasted among key shapers of energy just finding ways to work together, as opposed to focusing on actual innovation. This is a critical issue to be resolved, as realizing a sustainable energy system that continues to bring prosperity will no doubt require the energy community to come together in close collaboration.
As a technology, the internet has completely outpaced all other technologies over the last twenty- thirty years. What enabled it to grow and scale to add so much value so quickly? It had some fantastic minds working on it, for sure. But the key was that its global crowd of developers agreed on a shared set of tools. Using these, each participant is able to shape the world wide web with their individual value, and we know this will continue to be the case.
This is what we need in energy. We can be certain that no one technology, company, or academic institution will be able to comprehensively resolve the systemic issues the energy system is facing by themselves. We need a global collaboration – and to enable that, a shared set of tools, a common architecture, a framework that enables all players of energy to contribute to the system most efficiently.
A common platform will speed up technological innovation, by ensuring that participants are no longer limited by the lack of interoperability. Rather, they are free to focus on adding the unique value they provide; ranging from little blockchain startups to large utilities.
Importantly, there is no central authority who sets the rules in an open source system, the group selects the optimal solution from the pool of multi-disciplinary perspectives. Rather than following a subjective decision, an entire community is available to constantly define, change, edit, and improve what the framework is.
At Faraday Grid, we are building a physical platform that will enable the plethora of technologies shaping the energy transition, ones that already exist and the ones yet to come. Faraday is a Founding member of LF Energy, because we not only share a common vision – enabling a future-proof energy system – but see no alternative to achieve this, other than through open-source collaboration.
LF Energy is an open source initiative, focused on the power systems’ sector, overseen and hosted at the Linux Foundation. LF Energy provides a neutral, collaborative environment to build the digital foundations that enable the “electrification of everything to scale” to transform the world’s relationship to energy. The Linux Foundation has led initiatives to modernize industries including telecommunications, financial services, automobiles, filmmaking, consumer products and more through the use of open source, and the time is right to do the same for power systems.
I am excited to represent both LF Energy and Faraday Grid at DistribuTECH in New Orleans this year, where I will expand on why we believe an open source system is a necessary foundation for a prosperous energy future. If you’ll be at the event, I invite you to come see my talk (details below) and/or shoot an email to connect to: luca [dot] mezossy-dona [at] faradaygrid [dot] com.
The Future of Energy is Shared Technology Innovation
Room: Exhibit Floor Booth 11456
Tuesday, February 05, 2019: 3:00 PM – 3:30 PM
Track: Digitalizing the Grid
As we end 2018, I wanted to reengage with the growing Linux Foundation Energy (LF Energy) community to say thank you for being on the frontlines of transforming our global electricity systems. Our work is an epic responsibility given the pressing planetary issues we face in the next 10 years to globally reduce carbon from our electricity and transportation sectors by 40%, and then by 2050, to get to 100% to mitigate the worst of the climate crisis.
With your participation, leadership, and membership in LF Energy we can accelerate the energy transition to decarbonize the world’s economies. There is no better home for building the shared technology innovations that will speed the energy transition, than the Linux Foundation. The LF has provided the neutral home for some of the greatest industrial transformations of our time — whether the Linux OS, or in networking, automobiles, banking, blockchain, cloud, and deep learning.
It is with excitement, that I invite you to join LF Energy either as a founding Governing Board member, or as a General or Associate member. Together we will define, build, and support the shared digital foundations to speed the energy transition. This is your opportunity to have a seat at the table from the beginning and we need you there!
All our Q1 efforts are pointed towards the Linux Foundation’s Open Source Leadership Summit in Half Moon Bay, March 12-14, 2019. This is an invitation-only event for member companies and where LF Energy will have its first Governing Board meeting. We are planning to announce the LFE Founding members in early 2019 ahead of this event.
If you would like to talk about corporate or organizational membership, please feel free to reach out to me or please make a meeting here. I am happy to send additional information and also discuss your vision and needs.
In closing, I also want to thank the pioneer attendees who came to the inaugural LF Energy Summit, October 24th, in Edinburgh, UK. The event was a great success and brought together power system engineers with open source developers to start building a community. You can find all the great content from Edinburgh available for viewing here.
I want to wish you a very healthy and happy New Year. 2019 and 2020 are going to be two of the most important years of our lives. Let’s do this together. We’ve got this!
In Partnership,
Shuli Goodman
Executive Director, LF Energy
sgoodman@lfenergy.org
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