LF
Energy announced the launch of three new open source projects
to speed the energy transition, as well as the expansion of the existing LF
Energy OpenEEMeter project into a broader suite to model energy usage based on
meter data. In addition, new partnerships have been announced with the
International Energy Agency (IEA) and the non-profit Open Energy Transition.
New
Hosted Projects for Power Grid Edge Applications, Grid AI Modeling, and Scope 3
Emissions Visibility
The
LF Energy Technical Advisory Council (TAC)
has accepted three new projects into LF Energy. Hosted projects benefit from a
neutral home that encourages greater collaboration, contribution, and
innovation for the project, with lower R&D costs for stakeholders. Open
governance means no one company or individual is in control of a project,
enabling and protecting joint investment. Projects additionally benefit from LF
Energy staff support for legal and trademark issues, technical infrastructure,
events, marketing, governance, and more.
The
latest projects to join LF Energy are:
- GEISA (Grid Edge
Interoperability & Security Alliance) - GEISA creates a
production-grade, secure technical foundation for a robust and open grid
edge "app" ecosystem in constrained edge devices. GEISA specifies a
uniform runtime environment for running applications, and creates a
testing program to develop an industry-wide, consistent and interoperable
approach to securely deploying grid edge applications, significantly
reducing the audit burden on IT teams and accelerating the deployment of
innovative solutions. The project was founded within LF Energy with support
from Southern California Edison (SCE).
- GridFM - GridFM is an
open source framework to enable the development of foundation models for
power grids. Foundation models (FMs) are large artificial intelligence
(AI) models pre-trained on massive data sets and adapted to a broad set of
applications. FM technology can be applied for the electric power grid
(GridFMs) have been conceptualized to be trained on grid data. GridFM was
originated and contributed to LF Energy by Hydro-Quebec and IBM.
- SC
Decarbonisation Hub - SC Decarbonisation Hub (SCDH) creates
visibility, measurability, and to allow for conversations around scope 3
emissions data, which is central to reducing greenhouse gas emissions.
This visibility and measurability is then translated into decisions and
actions that can deliver the change an organization is focused on. SCDH
was originated by Shell before being contributed to LF Energy.
OpenEEMeter
Ecosystem Expands to Become OpenDSM
OpenEEMeter
has been an LF Energy project since it was contributed by Recurve in 2019. The
project consists of an open source toolkit for implementing and developing
standard methods for calculating normalized metered energy consumption (NMEC)
and avoided energy use. The community that developed and maintains OpenEEMeter
has expanded its scope, and now offers a larger suite of open source solutions
in addition to OpenEEMeter. This suite has been branded LF Energy OpenDSM.
The
OpenDSM suite of tools is used to ingest electric or gas data (AMI data) and
model said usage in order to predict future usage given covariate information
such as actual temperature. In practice this is used to measure energy savings
of energy efficiency and demand response programs. This suite of tools is
currently comprised of:
- EEweather pulls weather station
data critical for building models.
- EEmeter creates long-term,
building-level energy consumption models using billing, daily, or hourly
resolution data.
- EEmeter is often used to
measure the load impact of energy efficiency, load shifting and other
programs or factors that cause an ongoing change to energy consumption.
- DRmeter (Demand Response)
creates short-term, building-level models with hourly resolution data.
- DRmeter is commonly used to
measure demand response programs
- GRIDmeter uses data from
non-participating customers to remove model errors in energy efficiency
and demand response measurements. Errors can be due to improperly applying
a linear function to a non-linear response or complex and dynamic external
factors such as natural disasters, economic shifts, and public health
events that would otherwise skew results.
LF
Energy Summit Comes to Aachen, Germany in 2025
The
dates and location for LF Energy Summit 2025 have been announced: September
10-11, 2025 in Aachen, Germany. LF Energy Summit gathers the LF Energy
community including electric utilities, technology vendors, global energy
companies, researchers, and other industry stakeholders to learn about LF
Energy and its projects, collaborate, and share best practices. The event
focuses on collaborating to accelerate the energy transition by building
communities to develop open technologies and standards to optimize physical
infrastructure, orchestrate supply and demand, and rapidly onboard clean energy
resources.
LF
Energy Summit 2024 in Brussels gathered 249 attendees from 127 organizations in
29 countries around the globe, and 2025 is expected to be even larger. Videos
of all LF Energy Summit 2024 sessions are available on demand. A call for
proposals for next year's event will be launched in early 2025, and
sponsorships are now
available.
Open
Energy Transition Joins LF Energy as an Associate Member
LF
Energy welcomed Open Energy Transition as an Associate Member. Open Energy
Transition is a non-profit organization dedicated to accelerating the global
energy transition towards 100% renewable energy. LF Energy members provide
resources to support the foundation's mission of building a unified approach to
developing non-differentiating code that can enable utilities, grid operators,
electric vehicle makers, sophisticated energy buyers and others to develop and
implement technologies to transform the power sector.
EVerest
Joins IEA's Task 53
Bidirectional
EV charging, or Vehicle-to-Grid (V2G), plays an essential role in the
decarbonization of the electricity sector. But there are still hurdles to
overcome, e.g. lack of standardization and insufficient interoperability. To
improve interoperability of bidirectional charging, the Hybrid and Electric
Vehicle Technology Collaboration Programme (HEV TCP) by the International
Energy Agency (IEA) launched Task 53. In line with this goal, the LF Energy
EVerest Project has partnered
with Task 53.
Both
the EVerest project and Task 53 are working to remove hurdles and increase
interoperability to encourage the expansion of EV charging: EVerest by
implementing a universal open source charger firmware covering all relevant
standards and their variations, and Task 53 by organizing cross-system
interoperability testing. These approaches strongly complement each other, and
further collaboration will provide tremendous interoperability benefits.
TROLIE
Publishes Version 1.0.0 Specification
LF
Energy TROLIE is a community project developing an open source specification to
address FERC Order 881, which requires North American transmission owners,
operators, providers, and reliability coordinators to establish a means to
exchange ratings information based on current and forecasted ambient
conditions. The initiative was launched due to the absence of a dedicated
standards body or vendor consortium actively working towards a technical
specification for this critical exchange.
The
TROLIE community recently
announced that version 1.0.0 of the TROLIE specification has been published.
At a high level, the specification facilitates the frequent exchange of power
system ratings information, data needed to reliably operate the bulk power
transmission while maximizing the utilization of existing transmission asset
capacity. By creating a standard way for utilities to exchange this data,
TROLIE promotes interoperability, supporting robust and reliable coordination
between grid operators.
"This
year, LF Energy has seen tremendous growth in support for open source software,
hardware, and standards growing to drive the energy transition forward," said
LF Energy Executive Director Alex Thornton. "The benefits are clear; open
source offers a pathway for digital grid modernization that is faster, less
expensive, more secure, and more maintainable. The challenges presented by the
energy transition and decarbonization goals are becoming even more pressing,
and an open, innovative, collaborative approach is the best way forward to
address them."