LF Energy, the open source foundation focused on harnessing the power of collaborative software and hardware technologies to accelerate the energy transition, has announced that four new open source technical projects and three new working groups have been accepted into the foundation. These initiatives will provide the energy sector with new resources around digital substations, preparing for extreme weather events, taking advantage of advances in data and AI technologies, and more.

This comes ahead of the Open Sustainability Policy Summit and Open EV Charging Summit, both of which LF Energy is hosting with partners in May.

Four New Open Source Projects

The LF Energy Technical Advisory Council has voted to accept four new projects into the foundation. Two of these projects are focused on making better use of open data to address challenges in the energy transition, while the other two will help with modeling for extreme weather events, and digital substations. The addition of these projects further strengthens LF Energy’s overall tech stack, and provides additional open source resources for energy stakeholders looking to transition to renewables. The new projects are:

covXtreme is a model and software for hazard risk analysis of extreme events. covXtreme estimates penalized piecewise constant covariate marginal and conditional extreme value models, and allows environmental contour estimation. covXtreme was contributed to LF Energy by Shell.

NODE (National Open Data for Electrification) Collective is dedicated to sourcing, structuring, and maintaining comprehensive data on every residential incentive program in the U.S. The community has already amassed the most complete, well-structured, accurate set of incentive data in the U.S., as well as developed the tools to enlist a broad coalition in this effort moving forward. NODE Collective was contributed to LF Energy by Eli Technologies, the Building Decarbonization Coalition, Rewiring America, RMI (founded as Rocky Mountain Institute), and the North Carolina Clean Energy Technology Center.

OpenSCD is a comprehensive configuration platform for fully digital substations. From communication design, configuration, and commissioning; through to modeling, monitoring, maintenance and replacement, OpenSCD offers a universal tool built on industry standards. OpenSCD was contributed to LF Energy by Alliander, Omicron, RTE, Sprinteins, Transnet, and Transpower.

OpenSynth is a new, global open community designed to democratize synthetic data, to accelerate the decarbonization of global energy systems. The project will enable holders of raw smart meter (i.e. demand) data to generate and share synthetic data and models that can be used by researchers, industry innovators and policymakers. OpenSynth was contributed to LF Energy by the Centre for Net Zero, powered by Octopus Energy.

Three New Working Groups

LF Energy hosts working groups, which bring together communities of disparate stakeholders to identify challenges and develop open source solutions for the energy transition. Working groups may result in the creation of new technical projects, standards, documentation, best practices, or other deliverables to benefit the industry. The three new working groups are:

Digital Substation Automation Systems (DSAS) Initiative seeks to optimize digital substations through open source technology and provides a collaboration platform for projects working on digital substations. LF Energy hosts four technical projects (CoMPAS, FledgePOWER, OpenSCD, and SEAPATH) focused on digital substations, and the mission of this working group is to improve collaboration and interoperability between these projects.

LF Energy AI is a Special Interest Group created to drive AI for energy priorities forward. The potential of AI relies heavily on access to data, and much of the granular data in energy involves some degree of privacy, confidentiality, cybersecurity, and critical infrastructure protection issues. Open innovation and collaboration in this area will bring new solutions such as synthetic data generation based on real datasets, privacy-preserving techniques, and more.

Open Renewable Energy Systems (ORES) aims to revolutionize the residential renewable energy sector by developing an open standard architecture, APIs, and protocols, fostering innovation, accessibility, and sustainability.