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

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

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May 15, 2019, 03:00 ET

BRUSSELS, May 15, 2019 /PRNewswire/ -- INNOGRID-- 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
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