The Linux Foundation Energy has added five open-source projects, expanding its energy infrastructure tech stack for battery storage, grid resilience and EV charging.

LF Energy, the open-source foundation focused on harnessing the power of collaborative software and hardware technologies to decarbonise energy systems, has announced that five open-source technical projects have been accepted.

These will provide the industry with resources around battery storage, grid resilience, EV charging, transmission facility rating, and open-source sustainability research. Additionally, LF Energy and the Open Source Security Foundation (OSSF) have released a free whitepaper providing best practices for cyber security in energy infrastructure.

This research and new technologies should help drive LF Energy and its mission of creating a technology ecosystem to support rapid decarbonisation.

LF Energy’s technical advisory council has voted to accept the five projects into the foundation, bringing the total to 30. These projects address various technical requirements across power systems, including battery storage, grid resilience, EV charging, transmission facility rating, and open-source sustainability research. The addition of these projects strengthens LF Energy’s overall tech stack, and provides additional open-source resources for energy stakeholders looking to transition to renewables.

The five projects are:

• Battery Data Alliance: The Battery Data Alliance was created to bring battery companies together to work jointly to unify how batteries are handled in terms of software. Battery data are core to creating a decarbonised economy and power systems, yet companies waste tremendous amounts of time implementing battery data schemas, integrations, conversions, typical calculations and so on. The Battery Data Alliance project was contributed by AmpLabs.
• CitrineOS: CitrineOS offers community-tested and reliable open-source software for charger management, which drives forward adoption of the OCPP 2.0.1 protocol resulting in more reliable charging networks worldwide. When implemented, it will broaden access to and use of EV charging networks while making it more secure, intelligent and manageable. CitrineOS was contributed by S44.
• Grip: The Grid Resilience & Intelligence Platform (Grip) is designed to help electric grid operators anticipate, mitigate against and recover from the effects of extreme weather events. With Grip, operators can reduce costs by optimising grid hardening costs and lowering liability costs and shareholder exposure. These grid operator benefits should ultimately lead to lower electricity rates for users. Grip was contributed by the SLAC National Accelerator Laboratory, which is operated by Stanford University for the US Department of Energy Office of Science.
• Open Sustainable Tech: Open Sustainable Technology is an informative platform and open science community that explores the impact, potential and strategies of the open-source movement for sustainable technology development, business and transition. Earlier this year, LF Energy partnered with the project’s maintainers to release the 2023 Open Source Sustainability Ecosystem Report.
• Trolie: The Transmission Ratings & Operating Limits Information Exchange (Trolie) aims to establish an open conformance standard and cultivate a software ecosystem to accelerate the implementation of reliable, secure and interoperable systems for the exchange of transmission facility ratings and related information. Most organisations involved in the operation of the transmission system in North America now need to exchange ratings and related information in an automated, frequent manner. Trolie should help accelerate their implementation and simplify interoperability. Trolie was contributed by Miso Energy and GE Vernova.

As energy represents infrastructure critical to the operation of modern society, it is essential that stakeholders take all available steps to ensure its security. This is why LF Energy and OSSF have released a free whitepaper (lfenergy.org/cybersecurity-in-energy-infrastructure) on how critical open-source software is to the innovation and transformation of energy infrastructure, and how to use it in a way that shields against cyber threats.

The whitepaper covers best practices for open-source development within the energy sector with a focus on four areas: evolution of energy systems; role of open source in energy; current state of cyber security in energy; and best practices in open source for cyber security.

Concrete best practices are outlined in the paper to help stakeholders understand how to improve their cyber security and protect energy assets. Cyber security is strongest when it is built in from the start rather than added as an afterthought, and this paper can serve as a resource to help utilities, vendors and other stakeholders do just that.

LF Energy has seen tremendous growth in 2023, including nine members joining the foundation and nine more projects being accepted. This brings total membership close to 75, and projects to 30.

Unique aggregate contributors across all hosted projects increased 30% to 1720. Commits made across monitored repositories increased 26% to 58,740. And lines of code added across all unique commits increased 22% to 67.4 million.

“LF Energy’s momentum is truly astounding, however we cannot move fast enough to build the technologies necessary to accelerate the energy transition,” said LF Energy interim executive director Arpit Joshipura. “I call on all energy stakeholders to get involved by open sourcing their internal tools, contributing to open-source communities both at LF Energy and elsewhere, and to generally collaborate with one another to ensure we make every effort to decarbonise power systems to reduce the worst outcomes of climate change.”

LF Energy (www.lfenergy.org) provides a plan of action to solve climate change through open frameworks, reference architectures and a support ecosystem of projects. Members include Alliander, Google, Microsoft, RTE and Shell, in addition to over 60 general and associate members from across the energy industry, technology, academia and government.