The Linux Foundation Energy has issued six significant software releases, and updated 25 projects with eight million new lines of code added from nearly 8,000 commits in a single year. This has been accompanied by the addition of six new organisations joining, to support the Foundation’s work, as well as growing deployments across the energy sector.

LF Energy is the open source foundation focused on harnessing collaborative software and hardware technologies to decarbonise global economies.

“Open source is experiencing tremendous momentum in the energy sector after years of innovation,” said Arpit Joshipura, Interim Executive Director, LF Energy, “Software, community, projects, and deployments are all experiencing growth. In the past 12 months alone, LF Energy has seen a 1.25x increase in hosted projects, a 23% increase in unique contributors, a 15% increase in commits, and an 8% increase in lines of code added across unique commits, bringing total lines of code to 114 million. This progress cannot happen fast enough if we are going to meet the ambitious decarbonisation goals set by national and international bodies.”

LF Energy has recently released three new research reports to provide energy stakeholders with a better understanding of the state of the energy transition and open source’s role in the transition.

The 2023 Energy Transformation Readiness Study provides survey-based insights into energy sector digitalisation through open source. Headline findings include 76% of energy stakeholders surveyed reporting their organisation has a clear strategic plan for digitalisation, and that they have already begun implementing it. Additionally, 64% of energy stakeholders use more open source software than closed source, however a plurality (43%) believe energy industry consensus is still key to increasing OSS adoption.

The Open Source Opportunity for Microgrids: Five Ways to Drive Innovation and Overcome Market Barriers for Energy Resilience informs readers about microgrids – groups of distributed energy resources designed to improve energy resiliency, with the ability to operate as part of a larger electrical grid, or separately as an island. The report highlights the current state of the microgrid market and explores the potential for open source technology to accelerate the adoption of microgrids worldwide.

The Open Source Sustainability Ecosystem provides qualitative and quantitative insights into the landscape of open source sustainability projects, identifies those having the biggest impact, as well as gaps that stakeholders across the energy industry should look to fill. Following the analysis of the open source sustainability ecosystem, the report goes on to make more than 20 recommendations for supporting and building capacity for open source in sustainability.

The six LF Energy projects that have issued major software releases in the past several months are:

• Arras, a tool for development and deployment of smart-grid and renewable energy resource integration technology, has been officially transferred to LF Energy with the release of HiPAS GridLAB-D Version 4.3.1 (chiba-1). The release includes support for new use-cases; a new fire danger tool; voltage, current, and power flow violation detection capabilities; and new support for historical, current, and forecast weather.
• FlexMeasures, an intelligent and developer-friendly energy management system to support real-time energy flexibility apps, rapidly and scalable, released version 0.1 of the new FlexMeasures client. The FlexMeasures client wraps the most important interactions needed to use FlexMeasures effectively in one place.
• OperatorFabric is a modular, extensible, industrial-strength, and field-tested platform for systems operators. Versions 3.15.0 and 3.15.1 have been recently released, adding new features including the ability to better detect loss of connection, as well as bug fixes.
• Power Grid Model, a high-performance library for steady-state distribution power system analysis, released version 1.5.0 adding new features, which includes Short Circuit calculations according to the IEC60909 standard.
• PowSyBl, an open source library dedicated to electrical grid modeling and simulation, concluded its latest release train, adding new features such as load and line asymmetrical extensions, basic implementation of asymmetric AC load flow, and more.
• RTDIP, which provides easy access to high-volume, historical and real-time process data for analytics applications, engineers, and data scientists wherever they are, has been conducting experiments to see how Generative AI could help query structured data, which is now available in RTDIP SDK v0.5.0.

LF Energy CoMPAS has also cleaned up the IEC 61850 Data Model. The CoMPAS software tool developed by LF Energy has been deployed for the Real Time Interface (RTI) project initiated by grid operators and market parties in the Netherlands. The RTI aims to enable grid operators to limit power generation by customers in order to address capacity constraints on the electricity grid. RTI encountered a significant challenge in the form of an IEC 61850 data model that contained a substantial amount of unnecessary data objects and information. CoMPAS was employed to address the challenges associated with the IEC 61850 data model. The tool’s intuitive interface and built-in validation functions allowed for efficient data model cleanup, expediting the overall development process. The accessibility of CoMPAS, even to users with limited expertise in the IEC 61850 protocol, simplified the validation and optimisation tasks, resulting in faster progress.