 Today we have with us once again, Shuli Goodman, founder and executive director of LF Energy. It's an organization, it's a part of Linux Foundation that focuses on open source innovation in the energy and electric sector. Shuli, first of all, welcome to the show once again. Thank you so much. It's great to be back talking with you. When we look at power lines or when we look at grids, we still have the image of that ancient system. All it does, it moves, electrons, protons, whatever they are from one place to other place. What innovation is going on? Because if you look at the energy consumption today, it's massive, and it's going to keep growing more and more as we move more towards work from home kind of environment when we have VR and AR. So are we still talking about the old, dumb power lines and old, dumb grid? Or we are also talking about modern infrastructure. And if we do, what does it look like? Well, we're definitely talking about modern infrastructure. You know, one of the things that, one of the defining features of the grid that we're moving from is you have centralized energy generation that is being pushed out over high voltage to distribution systems. We lose nearly 60% of the packets, 60% of the electrons. That's 60% of our electrons are lost from generation to distribution. So there's a tremendous opportunity for optimization and being able to reduce the amount of electron loss. When you consider what the opportunities are, there's tremendous opportunities for optimization and the digitalization of energy in terms of the metadata and the data about energy that enables system operators to be able to work much more effectively is going to be critical in ensuring that we actually are able to balance supply and demand in a different way than we've been balancing supply and demand for the last 150 years. You guys are great at bringing all those players who have those innovative ideas together so they can collaborate on them. So talk a bit about the work that is going on to address some of these problems that you mentioned. Well, you know, I say to people a lot that I ask them to actually think ahead 30 years to the year 2050 and even imagine how old you are in 30 years from now because you're gonna be looking back at this time in a very different sort of way. We're at the beginning of a period of accelerated innovation and that all of these things, we are going to have to address them. What the digital substation project is really beginning to address is the ability to have torrents of data being managed from the edge and to be able to provide grid intelligence out at the edge and have a mechanism for being able to bring that in and then to be able to orchestrate, choreograph and to even have kind of control or share control mechanisms that enable us to manage the grid. So the kinds of innovations, you know, what I feel like that what we're working on now is blocking and tackling at a very fundamental level, both building capacity amongst the network carriers. It could, you know, you have utilities who have always thought of themselves as kind of like hardware guys, lines, you know, it's been a very manual, highly intensive, you know, industry and what we're going to be actually moving more towards is network operators, you know, almost carriers, you know, kind of an amalgam of electricity, telecommunications, you know, and internet. And so you are going to have this whole new process of being able to orchestrate energy and digitalization is essential in that paradigm. It could even be up to 50% of that. And then there's other stuff that's happening both at the chip level and at the hardware level that is going to enable that kind of intelligence at the edge and the ability to choreograph that through market signals. You know, what we're doing is shifting to a price based grid coordination model. In other words, the price signals that will shift and change based on the amount of sun or the amount of wind or the availability of energy will actually begin, you know, getting pushed out to the edge and enable coordination between assets at the edge. Can you also tell us just a bit about how exactly does DSAS or Substitution Automation works? Well, I think so for those of you who are listening who've been along the journey with LF Networking or have kind of seen what's happened with 5G, the revolution of 5G was the virtualization and the disaggregation. The shift from, you know, purely hardware centric to really moving to 75% virtualization. So the digital substation or the DSAS project is an umbrella of four different projects that are addressing the digitalization at the substation. And the substation are the critical infrastructure that separates high, medium and low voltage between, you know, the generation and then moving it and then stepping it down before it then goes out into your house. And so substations become really important. I refer to them as edge node routers and, you know, which may or may not be exactly the right term, but, you know, we're moving into a territory where we're inventing things. So I think of the edge node and the DSAS project is really about virtualizing hardware, abstracting the complexity of hardware and software so that we begin to have really software defined environments. And, you know, perhaps in the future we'll have increasingly software defined substations, transformers, all kinds of things that we consider to be de facto the standard today may in fact move more and more towards software defined. And the DSAS project is really the start of that. What kind of collaboration is there around DSAS? It's a great project. We have, it was really started with RTE and RTE, last summer we made a series of meetings where we invited people to come and talk with us. And we opened it up to all of the OEMs, vendors, suppliers, such as, you know, GE, ABB, Schneider Electric, and to all the network operators, utilities, all over the world that wanted to participate. And what we have is a core group from RTE France and then we have Allender and Tenet, which are the distribution and the transmission system operators in the Netherlands. Tenet also operates in Germany, national grid. And then we have General Electric is really driving it from a kind of vendor OEM perspective. And then Schneider Electric is also participating and we hope that others will join us. Now, you also have something called Compass or configuration modules for powered industry automation system. What is that? So Compass is the first of the four projects. It's three or four projects that's in the DSAS kind of umbrella. And so Compass is the first one and it's really a configuration model. One of the problems that end users have, that the utilities have when they think about kind of their portfolio of hardware and software is that right now there are tremendous interoperability challenges. Now, 61850, which is an IEC standard was created precisely in order to facilitate interoperability. So how we look at this is that the Compass project is leveraging 61850 to enable interoperability between various different vendors so that we can have a more heterogeneous environment and that the environment of a substation of which there are millions on the planet. And so any single actor could be managing at the transmission level, could be managing thousands and then at the distribution level, could be managing many thousands of thousands. So there are many of them in the world. And what happens is that if you don't have that interoperability, then you have vendor lock-in and if you have vendor lock-in, it's not just that it's bad for the utility, it's also really bad for the OEM because it slows innovation. It keeps the vendor and the supplier sort of focused on portfolio as opposed to really looking ahead. And I describe it somewhat as driving while looking in the rear view mirror. And what we need is to free ourselves from the rear view mirror and really begin looking ahead and thinking about what we need to do. And right now solving this interoperability problem is kind of ground zero and that's where Compass comes in. One more last question before we wrap this up is that there are two things, one you can bring industries together. We have seen with the standard organization they bring industries together and they collaborate. And the second thing is open source, which kind of bypasses that whole model where companies based on the usage, they come together, work together and then standards come out of that collaboration. So how has open source made your life easier to not only convince these stakeholders, these players but also to innovate at a much faster rate than it would take traditional companies to do in a proprietary manner? So if just for a moment you just imagined in your mind a pie and it was, you know and each of the wedges in the pie represented parts of the stack that you need to build and support in order to go to market. What open source does is it allows us to identify what are the commodity parts of that pie and can we agree on working on those together? That then frees up engineers, money, facilitates interoperability. It does really great things to accelerate innovation because instead of let's say, you know a Siemens or a GE or an ABB or a Schneider Electric putting in, you know, 30% of their resources to supporting the 61,850 integration or something like that that they actually can maybe put in, you know a quarter of those engineers and then reallocate those resources somewhere else. And the same thing is true with the utilities because for the most part utilities have given responsibility for their network operations at a digital level to vendors. I would propose in the future that that's gonna be one of the big transformation points within utilities is that they are going to need to become digitally native and cloud native because to get to where we need to go it is going to be so digitally intensive perhaps 50% of the problem is going to be digital. So we need to really build that capacity.