LF Energy Overview

July 2023

Antitrust Policy Notice

Linux Foundation meetings involve participation by industry competitors, and it is the intention of the Linux Foundation to conduct all of its activities in accordance with applicable antitrust and competition laws. It is therefore extremely important that attendees adhere to meeting agendas, and be aware of, and not participate in, any activities that are prohibited under applicable US state, federal or foreign antitrust and competition laws.

Examples of types of actions that are prohibited at Linux Foundation meetings and in connection with Linux Foundation activities are described in the Linux Foundation Antitrust Policy available at linuxfoundation.org/antitrust-policy. If you have questions about these matters, please contact your company counsel, or if you are a member of the Linux Foundation, feel free to contact Andrew Updegrove of the firm of Gesmer Updegrove LLP, which provides legal counsel to the Linux Foundation.

Antitrust Policy Notice

Linux Foundation meetings involve participation by industry competitors, and it is the intention of the Linux Foundation to conduct all of its activities in accordance with applicable antitrust and competition laws. It is therefore extremely important that attendees adhere to meeting agendas, and be aware of, and not participate in, any activities that are prohibited under applicable US state, federal or foreign antitrust and competition laws.

Examples of types of actions that are prohibited at Linux Foundation meetings and in connection with Linux Foundation activities are described in the Linux Foundation Antitrust Policy available at http://www.linuxfoundation.org/antitrust-policy. If you have questions about these matters, please contact your company counsel, or if you are a member of the Linux Foundation, feel free to contact Andrew Updegrove of the firm of Gesmer Updegrove LLP, which provides legal counsel to the Linux Foundation.

The Linux Foundation is a pre-competitive platform that enables cooperation and leveraged development.

Topics

• Linux Foundation Overview
• LF Energy Overview
• State of Energy Transition
• Why Software
• Why Open Source
• Why LF Energy
• High Level Summary
• Membership and Governance
• Project Details

Linux Foundation Overview

The Linux Foundation’s goal is to create the greatest shared technology investment in history by enabling open collaboration across companies, developers and users.

We are the nonprofit organization of choice to build ecosystems that accelerate open source technology development and commercial adoption on a global scale.

LF beyond Linux

The Linux Foundation provides unparalleled ecosystem support

• CI/CD technical architecture design
• CI environment delivery
• Release engineering services
• Project planning, build & system go-live
• Delivery of project collaboration solutions, domain registrations & websites

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Value

Neutral Management

Developer Recruitment and Relations

Training

Content

IT Beyond Version Control

Marketing Programs

Support and Resources

• Define problem project/code solving
• Recruit widely deployed projects/communities
• Curate projects with natural adjacency to existing project
• Demonstrate where project fits in to broader tech innovation

• Provide home for IP assets
• Define a governance structure for decisions
• Separate business decisions from technical
• Curate sense of identity superseding individuals or firms
• Maintain IT infrastructure

In person

• Meetups
• Events
• Hackathons
• 3^rd Party Events
• Evangelism

Online

• Email lists and calls/meetings
• IRC/Slack
• Github, Gitlab, etc.
• Stackoverflow
• 3rd party repos

Technical

• Code samples
• Getting started guides
• How to’s/FAQ
• API/SDK

Research

• Use cases/Case Study
• Whitepapers
• Blogs
• Webinars
• Articles

Engage

• Massive Open Online Course (EdX)
• Webinars
• Snackable learning

Train

• eLearning
• Classroom learning
• Subscription learning

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Certify

• Skills based testing
• Ongoing engagement

• Advocate/Influence Programs
• Rewards/Recognition
• Startup/Incubator Engagement
• Student programs
• PR/AR

Self Service

• FAQ
• Forum
• Knowledgebase
• Onboarding

Community/Responsive

• Slack/IRC
• Email
• Stackoverflow
• IT operations/Release Mgmt

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LF Energy Overview

Mission/Vision

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The Linux Foundation’s mission is to support the world’s most important shared technology collaborations.

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LF Energy’s mission is to create a technology ecosystem to support rapid decarbonization that benefits the environment, enables economic prosperity, and leads to social well-being for future generations.

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Reference: Climate Tech Review overview of LF Energy for the Climate Tech 100

Linux Foundation Energy is a vendor-neutral, non-profit organization that brings together energy producers, utilities, end users, academia, government and the technology industry to collaboratively develop technology solutions – including software solutions, standards, and specifications – for the energy sector to speed decarbonization and the energy transition generally.

Sustainability - the big picture impact

Impact of Digitalization on Competitiveness

https://www.mckinsey.com/industries/oil-and-gas/our-insights/digital-transformation-in-energy-achieving-escape-velocity

Energy savings, payback and investment in digitally enabled optimisation of process controls in the United States

https://iea.blob.core.windows.net/assets/b1e6600c-4e40-4d9c-809d-1d1724c763d5/DigitalizationandEnergy3.pdf

Digitalization’s potential impact in oil and gas, coal, and power

https://iea.blob.core.windows.net/assets/b1e6600c-4e40-4d9c-809d-1d1724c763d5/DigitalizationandEnergy3.pdf

Potential worldwide cost savings from enhanced digitalization in power plants and electricity networks (2016-2040)

https://iea.blob.core.windows.net/assets/b1e6600c-4e40-4d9c-809d-1d1724c763d5/DigitalizationandEnergy3.pdf

“Bringing digital technologies to scale could reduce emissions by up to 20% by 2050 in 3 highest-emitting sectors: energy, materials, mobility.”

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-World Economic Forum

https://www.weforum.org/agenda/2023/01/davos23-data-is-helping-to-drive-the-energy-transition/

Why LF Energy?

LF Energy Key Stats:

• Hosting 24 open source projects covering the energy systems tech stack from generation to distribution to end use
• 70+ members, including utilities, research organizations, traditional energy system vendors, and technology vendors
• Annual increases of:
• Contributors - 29%
• Lines of code - 60 million
• Members - 19%

Where We Add Value:

• Neutral governance providing a home for collaboration across all stakeholders from utilities to researchers, vendors, government, and more
• Project management and hosting infrastructure
• Legal support including licensing, trademarks, etc.
• Communications support including events, thought leadership, etc.
• Community management, to encourage growth, innovation, and determining priorities and direction

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Energy Ecosystem is now a software challenge & speed of innovation is key!

• The energy transition requires collaborative, open, and neutral solutions to achieve decarbonization.
• Open collaboration accelerates innovation to scale, modernize, and digitally transform the energy sector through software orchestration.
• LF Energy builds communities to develop open technologies, frameworks, reference architectures, and research to alleviate pain points and identify the most urgent priorities to digitally transform the energy sector. This includes cybersecurity, interoperability, control, automation, virtualization, flexibility, and digital orchestration for balancing of supply and demand, which cannot be solved by legacy, proprietary solutions.

Business Intelligence

Edge & Distributed Intelligence

Central Supporting Services

Source: https://landscape.lfenergy.org/softwarestack

LF Energy Landscape

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l.lfenergy.org

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1,343 projects, market cap of $7.5T and funding of $17B.

Governance & Membership

Governance at a Glance

Technical Advisory Council (TAC)

Governing Board

Budget Committee

Marketing Advisory Committee (MAC)

Technical Projects

Working Groups/SIGs

LF Energy Standards and Specifications (LFESS)

Steering Committee

Standards

Working Groups

Fiduciary Governance - Membership driven

Technical Governance - Open to all

Governing Board

voting representatives

Technical Advisory Council (TAC)

voting representatives

Membership and Participation Levels

* FTE = Full Time Equivalent (e.g. 2 employees each spend 50% of their time on a project). This suggestion is meant to provide a minimum resource investment to ensure members are contributing technically. Most projects see much higher investment of resources than the minimum requirement.

LF Energy project lifecycle

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• Projects can become part of LF Energy through the submission of a mature code base.
• Projects can also be formed through working groups or special interests groups that submit a proposal and then form as a project.
• Learn more at lfenergy.org/host-your-project

Membership Benefits

LF Energy Members

Projects in Detail

LF Energy Projects

Early Adoption Stage

The Early Adoption stage is for projects that are operating as an open-source community and are seeing a growing and diverse number of contributors and users of the project.

Projects at the Early Adoption phase are focused on industry adoption and have completed the necessary steps for end-users to be able to consider these projects for future production deployments.

Open source modular framework for EV charging

Edge & Distributed Intelligence

Learn more at everest-project.energy

Acquisition and Control

Infrastructure Management

Top Use Cases

Manage communication around energy between different players:

• Car (EN IEC 61851, ISO 15118)
• Local energy generation & batteries (Modbus, Sunspec)
• Adjacent chargers (WIP)
• Grid (including specific grid constraints)
• Cloud backend / payment (OCPP 1.6)
• User (interface)

Technical Summary

• Consists of multiple modules which can be enabled/disabled depending on the deployment, all connected via a MQTT server.
• Contributed by PIONIX GmbH

Software platform that enables hardware monitoring and control in the public space at scale

Central Supporting Services

Learn more at gxf.energy

Acquisition and Control

Infrastructure Management

Top Use Cases

• Smart Metering: At DSO Alliander GxF is the Back-end platform for the Smart Meter Head End. There we use different Dutch protocols to communicate with the smart meters. We do that for 3.4 million devices.
• Distribution Automation: At this moment we support via MQTT Low voltage measurements. In the future we want to implement also a gateway device so that more digitalization is possible in the DA Space. In the end 26.000 devices are connected.
• Flex OVL. In 33% in the Netherlands we switch the public lighting via 16.000 RTU’s. GxF makes it possible to work with a lux signal and give also the municipalities the possibility to switch via their own schema

Technical Summary

• Designed as a middleware component for a DSO/TSO to standardize on, or can be used in as the framework in a vendor application stack.
• Project contributed by Alliander

Modular, extensible platform for alert management for systems operators.

Business Intelligence

Learn more at operatorfabric.energy

Shared

Unified Operator's UX Components and Framework

Top Use Cases

• Electricity, water, and other utility operational dashboard for managing field devices and alert response
• Organizational power system coordination, visibility, communication, and workflow between distributed users across national and regional boundaries.

Technical Summary

• Written in Java and based on the Spring framework
• Contributed by RTE

Open source library dedicated to electrical grid modeling and simulation

Business Intelligence

Learn more at powsybl.energy

System Management

Power System Calculation

Top Use Cases

• Dynamic power flow simulations and security analyses across a power grid
• Data exchanges using a variety of formats including ENTSO-E CIM/CGMES, UCTE-DEF, and more.

Technical Summary

• Written in Java
• Can be used for one-off scripting and scale up to production application usage.
• Contributed by RTE

Enables building a real-time virtualization industrial-grade platform based on Yocto or Debian

Edge & Distributed Intelligence

Learn more at seapath.energy

Acquisition and Control

Substation Node

Top Use Cases

• By vendors to build a fully virtualized digital substation and ensured to its client that it is based on open source
• By integrators that wants to propose and support a real-time virtualization industrial-grade platform for their clients
• By utilities, universities and start up that want to evaluate their concepts and take benefit of this collaboration framework.

Technical Summary

• The technology behind SEAPATH includes the use of Ceph storage, Linux RT, Pacemaker for high availability, Open vSwitch (OVS) for network virtualization, SR-IOV for hardware acceleration, KVM for virtualization, and PTP synchronization for accurate timekeeping
• Contributed by Alliander and RTE

Microservice based architecture for distribution grid automation

Learn more at songo.energy

Business Intelligence

System Management

System Control

Top Use Cases

• State Estimation
• Load Prediction
• Voltage Control

Technical Summary

• Microservices architecture; designed to be deployed using Kubernetes, either in the cloud or at the edge
• Seamless integration of development, testing, and deployment enables new automation functionalities to be developed and thoroughly tested against a virtual real-time representation of the power system before deployment.
• Developed under European Union’s Horizon 2020 research and innovation programme under grant agreement No 774613, and open sourced by RWTH.

Incubation Stage

Incubation projects are projects which the TAC believes are, or have the potential to be, important to the ecosystem of Projects or ecosystem as a whole. They may be early-stage projects just getting started, or they may be long-established projects with minimal resource needs. The Incubation stage provides a beneficial, neutral home for these projects in order to foster collaborative development and provide a path to deeper alignment with other LF Energy projects.

Common software blocks for IEC 61850 profile configuration

Central Supporting Services

Learn more at compas.energy

Acquisition and Control

Substation Node

Top Use Cases

• SCL data management / SCL data storage service: store and load SCL files / SCL Files versioning​
• CIM to IEC61850 conversion​
• Display/edit SCL files e.g.
• GOOSE/Sample value subscription

Technical Summary

• Reference implementation of the IEC 61850 standard
• Uses cross-platform Docker-based microservices along with a browser client, scriptable controls, and the ability to integrate third-party tools.
• Project contributed by Alliander

Flexible, lightweight, industrial-grade, open source gateway that embeds Fledge (LF EDGE)

Edge & Distributed Intelligence

Learn more at fledgepower.energy

Acquisition and Control

Communication Infrastructure

Top Use Cases

• Improving the availability of an IEC 104 substation by deploying FledgePower with multi-centre IEC 104 redundancy.
• Securing an old generation substation in HNZ protocol, by deploying FledgePower with IEC 104 over TLS.
• Power grid simulation, using FledgePower to integrate with the substation in IEC 104 on the one hand and the simulation system in OPCUA on the other.

Technical Summary

FledgePOWER solves the problem of multiple protocols by providing the industry with a flexible, lightweight, industrial-grade, open source gateway that embeds Fledge (LF EDGE). Additionally, FledgePOWER provides a toolbox for simulation, data configuration, and checking focused uniquely on power systems’ protocols translation and power systems’ use cases.

FledgePOWER is a cross foundation collaboration between LF Edge and LF Energy that ensures strong cooperative governance and technical alignment between the two communities.

Project contributed by RTE

Intelligent & developer-friendly EMS to support real-time energy flexibility apps, rapidly and scalably

Business Intelligence

Learn more at flexmeasures.energy

Asset Management

Data Management

Top Use Cases

The problem it helps to solve is “What are the best times to run flexible assets, like batteries, heat pumps or industry processes?”

• Industry: Shift process running times to minimize balancing costs as well as CO2 & support network congestion
• Built Environment: Optimize heating to satisfy comfort and energy costs (use rooftop solar & dynamic tariffs)
• E-Mobility (optimal charging time to lower bills, including vehicle-to-grid)

Technical Summary

FlexMeasures is designed to be developer-friendly, which helps you to go to market quickly, while keeping the costs of software development at bay. FlexMeasures supports:

• Real-time data integration & intelligence
• Model data well ― units, time resolution & uncertainty (of forecasts)
• Faster app-building (API/UI/CLI, plugin & multi-tenancy support)

Contributed by Seita BV

Enable grid operators - and the customers they serve - to more easily see when and where connections will be most optimal

Business Intelligence

Learn more at gridcapacitymap.energy

System Management

Power System Calculation

Top Use Cases

• Ensure customer and stakeholders expectations on grid connections are realistic to give a better connection experience with fewer surprises for both grid owner (DSO/TSO), grid customers and other stakeholders.
• Giving a utility ability to advise a company to move locations to get connection sooner.

Technical Summary

• Built in Python; using the pandapower grid model and power flow calculation
• Contributed by Vattenfall Eldistribution AB

Open-source control for AC, DC, AC/DC microgrids

Edge & Distributed Intelligence

Learn more at hyphae.energy

Acquisition and Control

Edge Node Control

Top Use Cases

• Autonomous Power Interchange System: P2P control of batteries charging/discharging in DC microgrid
• Converter controller with plug-and-play capability

Technical Summary

Hyphae aims at building open-source control for AC, DC, AC/DC microgrids. This refers to component-level control and system-level control. The former includes plug-and-play control for power electronics converters that interface the distributed energy resources of the microgrid. The latter includes coordination control of all components in the microgrid and control for the islanding and grid-connection of the microgrid to the main distribution grid. The project aims also at power flow control between several microgrids, enabling ancillary services provided to the distribution grids. This is distributed, modular and scalable control, to enable flexible expansion of microgrids.

Project contributed by Sony Computer Science Laboratories.

Computing consistent and replicable estimates of changes in time series of energy consumption, primarily as measured for populations of commercial and residential buildings.

Business Intelligence

Learn more at openeemeter.energy

Customer and Market

Customer Relationship and Communication

Top Use Cases

OpenEEmeter, as implemented in the eemeter package and its companion eeweather package, contains the most complete open source implementation of the CalTRACK methods, which specify a family of ways to calculate and aggregate estimates avoided energy use at a single meter particularly suitable for use in pay-for-performance (P4P) programs

Technical Summary

OpenEEmeter emphasizes consistency and replicability to facilitate payments and market transactions that may be take the energy savings outputs of the software as inputs.

Project contributed by Recurve

Software stack that predicts future load on the electricity grid using machine learning

Edge & Distributed Intelligence

Learn more at openleadr.energy

Acquisition and Control

Edge Node Control

Top Use Cases

• Computes revenue-grade impacts of residential and commercial demand flexibility, such as energy efficiency projects, behavioral interventions, and demand-response events.
• Documents standard approaches and reasoning behind methodological approaches to data modeling.
• Supports methods development and model testing.

Technical Summary

• The stack is based on open source technology, organized in a microservice architecture, and optimized for cloud-deployment.
• Contributed by ElaadNL and OpenADR Alliance

Architecture Diagram

Predict future load on the electricity grid using machine learning

Business Intelligence

Learn more at openstef.energy

System Management

Power System Calculation

Top Use Cases

• Forecasting load at the DSO/TSO interface
• Forecasting load for the DSO to perform congestion management
• Forecasting load on secondary substations or individual customers to facilitate smart-grid applications

Technical Overview

• OpenSTEF validates input data, uses external predictors such as weather and market prices, trains machine learning models, and provides a forecast via API and graphical user interface.
• The stack is based on open source technology, organized in a microservice architecture, and optimized for cloud-deployment.
• Project contributed by Alliander

Implements the Universal Smart Energy Framework for flexibility forecasting, offering, ordering, and settlement processes.

Business Intelligence

Learn more at shapeshifter.energy

Customer and Market

Market Platform Gateway

Top Use Cases

• Exchange of flexibility between aggregators (AGRs) and distribution system operators (DSOs) or between aggregators and transmission system operations (TSOs).
• Enables DSO and TSO to resolve grid constraints by applying congestion management or grid capacity management

Technical Summary

• Based on the market-based coordination mechanism (MCM) described by USEF
• Contributed by GOPACS

Architecture Diagram

Sandbox Projects

Projects being submitted to the LF Energy at the sandbox level are intended to be the entry point for early-stage projects. Characteristics for projects at the Sandbox Stage maybe one or more of:

• Early-stage projects that the LF Energy TAC believes warrant experimentation.
• New projects that are designed to extend one or more TAC projects with functionality or interoperability libraries.
• Independent projects that fit the LF Energy mission/vision and provide the potential for a novel approach to existing functional areas (or are an attempt to meet an unfulfilled need).
• Projects commissioned or sanctioned by LF Energy, including initial code for LF Energy Working Group collaborations, and "experimental" projects.
• Any project that realistically intends to join LF Energy Incubation in the future and wishes to lay the foundations for that.

Simulation and analysis tool that models emerging smart grid energy technologies

Learn more at arras.energy

Central Supporting Services

System Management

Power System Calculation

Top Use Cases

• Distributed energy resource hosting capacity, tariff design, and end-use load electrification
• Extreme weather resilience and wildfire safety and protection,
• Peer-to-peer energy and advanced load modeling and forecasting.

Technical Summary

• Originally called HiPAS GridLAB-D.
• Primarily built in C++ and Python.

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Project contributed by California Energy Commission and US Department of Energy Cybersecurity Energy Security and Emergency Response Office

Hybrid C++/Modelica open source suite of simulation tools for power systems

Business Intelligence

Learn more at dynawo.org

System Management

Power System Calculation

Top Use Cases

• Power system simulations
• Decision making on operational grid needs

Technical Summary

• Hybrid C++/Modelica codebase
• Project contributed by RTE

High performance distribution grid calculation model

Learn more at powergridmodel.energy

Business Intelligence

System Management

Power System Calculation

Top Use Cases

• Short term real-time state estimation and forecasting
• Long term grid planning
• Congestion management

Technical Summary

Power Grid Model has a C++ calculation core with a mature C-API and Python API. Currently, it supports the following calculations:

• Symmetric and asymmetric power flow calculation with Newton-Raphson method, iterative current method and linear method
• Symmetric and asymmetric state estimation with iterative linear method

Project contributed by Alliander

Enables fast, flexible settlement and hourly measurements of production and consumption of electricity

Business Intelligence

Learn more at opengeh.energy

Shared

Data Management

Use Cases

• Help utilities to onboard increased levels of renewables by reducing the administrative barriers of market-based coordination

Technical Summary

Contributed by Energinet and Microsoft.

Easy access to high volume, historical and real time process data for analytics applications, engineers, and data scientists wherever they are.

Edge & Distributed Intelligence

Learn more at rtdip.io

System Management

Data Management

Use Cases

• Process time series data for preventive maintenance management

Technical Summary

Key components are:

• The Delta Ingestion engine used to process streaming data from streaming sources and files stored in cloud storage into Delta format.The data ingested is typically sourced from Pi Historians, OPC UA Servers, IoT Devices 2.
• Python SDK that enables data consumers to read and queryraw, sampled, interpolated or time weighted averages of the data stored in Delta3.
• REST APIs that are wrappers forthe Python SDK that enable developers in non-python languages to consume the data

Contributed by Shell

Specifications for the underlying measured/raw data used to calculate energy and carbon-related metrics.

Learn more at carbondataspec.org

Central Supporting Services

Asset Management

Data Management

Use Cases

• Customer data. This may include, but is not limited to:
• Metering consumption and production data
• Account and bill data needed for project analysis
• Authorization and consent processes
• Power systems data. This may include, but is not limited to:
• Power generation emissions
• Delivery capacities and/or constraints
• Generation mix
• Power imports and exports
• Power market data
• Contractual data

Technical Summary

Data dictionary for raw data and a standard for data requirements that enable energy data access for measuring, quantifying, and tracking carbon emissions from energy production and consumption.

Worldwide applicable meter and respective data gateway specification

Learn more at superadvancedmeter.energy

Central Supporting Services

Customer and Market

Customer Relationship and Communication

Use Cases

• Basic metering functionality
• Country-specific functionality
• Third party functionality and integration capability for system operation applications

Technical Summary

Standards collaboration

Contributed by Utilidata and Alliander

Contribute to our projects - anyone can!

More information at https://wiki.lfenergy.org/display/HOME/Technical+Projects

Contribute to an existing project:

• Submit a PR with a bugfix or new feature
• Pick existing GitHub issue as a sample project
• Integrate with a new app / contribute plugin
• Help improve project documentation
• Submit additional test cases
• Join the TSC discussion: dev mailing list, conf calls

Get involved with the TAC or Working Group:

• DevOps / CI expertise always useful
• Interest / expertise in security especially welcome
• Join the TAC discussions: mailing list, conf calls

Contact Us

LF Energy Foundation

1 Letterman Drive�Building D, Suite D4700�San Francisco CA 94129�Phone/Fax: +1 415 7239709�www.lfenergy.org

General Inquiries

info@lfenergy.org

Membership

membership@lfenergy.org

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