 Good morning. My name is Shuli Goodman. I am the founder and executive director of LF Energy and we are the Power of Together. So there are three things that I want to cover in my talk today. The first one is must we change. The second is can we change? And the third is, well, how LF Energy leads the change. This talk is going to be about 35-40 minutes and then I will open up the camera and we can talk together face to face. I've chosen to record the PowerPoint for the best fidelity to minimize distractions and also limit network distortions. So for me, must we change? So let us begin with home. To answer this question, I want to start with the context about where we are, not just in space, but where we are in time and how we've gotten to this moment. Framed by COVID-19 economic collapse and the reckoning of debts past due as they relate to race and in general, a historical relationship to domination, dominating people, dominating nature, dominating gender. And this notion of domination really is at the core of how we need to consider the decisions about what future we wish to create. While the future is not predefined or predestined or even faded, it is the conditions of the present around which the future emerges. Gandhi was precisely right when he said, be the change you wish to see. Because more than anything, if you want to inform the future, you have to become that future by becoming the change you wish to see. So as the executive director of LF Energy, I spend all day, every day, thinking about what are the conditions that are necessary to enable LF Energy to become as central and defining to the world and how we relate to energy and power. As, for instance, the Lennox kernel is to our present and how it has become the foundation of technology in information and communication. To become the center of gravity for the digital foundations of the future of the grid, we have to prepare ourselves to become that future. And I find myself needing to find a way to speak the truth about where we are and how each and every one of us must decide what story we will tell our children and our children's children. And even if we're lucky, our children's children's children, we must wake up. And that really is the task of every human is to wake up. And for this reason, I'm taking the time to set the context about our current situation, out of which LF Energy emerged and within which LF Energy exists. So this is the bottom line for me. We must transform energy and power at all levels, at the personal, at the political, and at the economic. They are all connected, and they all spring from the mind that created the circumstances that we find ourselves in. So I want all of us to begin with this notion of home. So do people know what this number is? It's parts per million of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere. Despite the fact that our economies were shut down for several months, eight months ago, we were at 408. So we are accelerating at an alarming rate in this number? Well, that's the number at which there will be no return for many thousands of years. Make no mistake, COVID-19 on some level can really be considered the dress rehearsal for climate collapse. As uncomfortable and as challenging as this time has been, I'm afraid to tell you that it will seem like the good old days if we do not deliberately focus all of our energies on transforming and decarbonizing our economies. It's critical. We have to learn to live in relationship to the natural laws of the universe. In the same way that no one actor can either solve for a pandemic or wish it away as fake news, climate change is the ultimate test of humanity's ability to find the power of together. And for this, we have some great examples of people learning to work together and solve problems where there were no guns, no armies, no one died. And I would refer to that as the Lennox Foundation. So this guy is not a vast and limitless expanse the way it appears to us when we stand on the ground and look up and it seems to go on forever and ever. In reality, it is just a very thin shell of atmosphere surrounding the planet. But it's this thin layer of atmosphere that provides us with the Goldilocks, the just perfect climate that has enabled life and our species to thrive. Yet we are spewing into the environment global warming pollution, as if the air we breathe and the climate we live in were an open sewer. If you had any doubt about the relationship between fossil fuels, so as a result of this pollution being trapped in the atmosphere, global temperatures have risen dramatically. 19 of the 28 hottest years ever measured with instruments have occurred since 2001. The hottest year of all was 2016. And some experts believe that 2020 is expected to surpass that. Climate change will likely lead to food and water shortages, pandemic diseases, disputes over refugees, and natural disasters in regions around the globe. So here we are. Wow. This came from the Department of Defense in 2014. This is not a surprise. Like what we have known about climate change, we have also anticipated about pandemics. The global issues around immigration and refugees are going to get worse. We are truly at the very, very beginning of decades of dislocation. And our national conversation about immigration and refugees has deteriorated completely. And food and water shortages will increase as the inhabitable earth decreases. And the more that happens, the more people will leave their homes in search of food and water and safety. The pandemic of 2019 is certainly not the last we will see. And if we continue to shrink the inhabitable places on the planet and continue to expand our human footprint into areas and wildernesses, this will only surely increase in speed. So the next question really is, can we change? Absolutely. Humans are unbelievably creative. And where we don't have solutions, we have the capacity to innovate at scales previously unimagined. We are resilient in the face of obstacles and challenges. And probably every single one of you listening to this know that, because you are innovators, you are early adopters, you are people who look to the edges and look across systems and patterns in order to be able to understand what is happening. How can you participate? What do I need to learn to be part of this? So I think that when we look at innovations, part of a really simple exercise is how do the projections, for instance about wind energy, compare with reality? So in 2000 we made projections, but in reality, we exceeded that goal by a factor of 22. And that's what the diffusion curve looks like for global wind. Or with solar, for instance. We imagined the energy market would grow by a gigawatt per year, but the reality was is we exceeded that by a factor of 17. And taking that even farther forward from 2010, by 2019, last year, we exceeded installation of PVs by a factor of 121. That's what the diffusion curve looks like on PVs. Every hour that the sun is shining, we produce enough of the world's energy for a full year. I find this incredibly hopeful because what it means is that we are nowhere near capacity in terms of being able to capture a natural resource. So my question to you and to all the people who participate in LF Energy is, can we design the future of energy in relationship to the natural laws of the universe and with the resources we have that are abundant and free? So can we change? Absolutely. How does LF Energy lead the change? Well, the place where I want to start is really talking a little bit about how has the world around energy changed? For 150 years since the grid was created, fossil fuel has provided relatively cheap energy that has enabled the evolution of consumer society. But I really find this interesting. The word consume, which etymologically, or at its root, means to waste. It was never applied to people and their power to purchase goods and services until 1890. And that was about 20 years after the advent of electricity. So is there a relationship between consumerism and to waste and the ways that we have run the grid? I would say yes, absolutely. Because there's something about how we have used energy and how we have consumed resources that has been inherently wasteful. Electricity was centralized due to the expensive infrastructure and it enabled the electrification of huge parts of the planet. And I believe that if we hadn't done that, you would have much more poverty in which people did not have energy to be able to work, to read, to go to school, to learn all of those things. But we believed we had so much of it that we were willing to lose 60% of electrons from generation in order to flip a switch. Is there any other industry that wastes so much? I mean, really, think about it. Is there any other industry that wastes so much of their precious commodity? Eventually, just kind of in a historical sense, energy was regulated as a commodity upon which our economic future was dependent. And that is how it has lived for the last 130 years. It's been a regulated utility. And the guiding principle of energy, which I find really fascinating, was inertia. Here we are at a period of time when we're trying to create change and the guiding principle is inertia because it is inertia that allows a power system to manage supply and demand. But that very same principle of inertia has been internalized into the organizational structure of utilities. And so for 150 years, very little change. And I think that with energy and power, they are both these concrete practical things, but they are also symbolic. And so in transforming energy and power, we have a great opportunity to transform society. As digitalization and communication technologies have evolved, those technologies have the ability to change the democratization of energy. Along with those digitalization and communication technologies, also came time that the debts from the externalities of fossil fuel and their impact on the environment and the atmosphere and the never-ending wars of geopolitical conflict, they also have come due. And so all these things are happening at once. That is the context within which LF energy exists. And our job, the job of all of our members, all of the people who participate, the individual contributors, the corporations, the nonprofits, the academic institutions, is to provide a 21st century plan of action for decarbonization through open source, open frameworks, reference architectures, and a support ecosystem of complementary projects. And that's what LF energy is. This is a typical technology adoption curve. When I think about innovations, take a particularly economic approach to them. In other words, an innovation has the ability to do more with less. And the pathway, whether it's a belief or a practice or a technology, is pretty much an S-curve that works through these five phases, from innovators to early adopters to early majority, late majority, and laggards. So this is the challenge for decarbonization. We have an adoption rate of 9% annual for 30 years. If we had started 10 years ago, it would have been much lower. If we wait 10 years, it will be much steeper. So we do not have a moment to lose. We have a really almost vertical adoption curve to get us to 2030, 20, 40, 20, 50. Because incremental progress has to be made along the way. We can't just go from where we are now or much worse and then decarbonize in 10 years. We have to start now. So I'd like to talk a little bit about the internet as a case history because I believe that it's really important when thinking about energy. Back in 1998, at a time when we could first make database queries, we imagined convergence. I remember us sitting around and talking about coming together of the internet, of telecommunications, of TV, movies, and commerce. We had no idea that our phones would become so powerful that they would hold cameras and that we would have unlimited music in our pockets and millions of apps for everything. But we imagined the broad brushstrokes that 20 years later we can see all around us. I bring this up because when we think about where we are with energy, we need to leverage the same design principles that we use to scale the internet. Because just like the internet, the finest and most brilliant grid architects envision the future of our energy system as a massively connected, highly distributed, and hugely redundant and self-healing system of systems. The internet has open source in its DNA, and that open source has driven technological innovations at scale. So when I look at that diffusion curve and I see how steep it is, I recognize there are very few leverage points that could possibly meet the demands of the future that we have in front of us. And if it were not for Linux and Apache and other open source foundations, the world that we're in right now, that I'm doing this presentation remotely, that I'm sending it off, that you guys are all listening in, none of that would have been possible. And I tell you that because from where I sit, this is incredibly hopeful. Sometimes looking back helps us to see how to look forward, to see the seeds of the future. So isolation and going in alone are no longer viable. We see what happens when you have countries proceed in relationship to COVID in that way. It doesn't work. Well, it's not going to work with climate change either. So maybe one time it made sense to build a fortress around our businesses, our homes, our communities, but it's not feasible anymore. We are all interconnected. This is what we need. We need speed and scale. We need mass collaboration. And like these Starling murmurs, we have to learn to be in relationship to the laws of nature. So we need the Linux Foundation and we need you. We need every single person who's listening to this. I'm setting a context because I want everyone to understand this is where we are. It is possible to change. And the Linux Foundation is perhaps the most important open source platform in the world. It may not be perfect. It may be perfect. But what it does is it enables unbelievable technology transformation. And it is a pre-competitive platform. It is neutral. And it is a very simple structure. Nobody died. No guns were pulled. No standing armies and no politicians. But open source ate software. So open source plus collaboration for non-differentiating layers. Foundation of LF Energy. So when we think about the grid of the future, we are talking about really fundamentally moving from fixed centralized systems to loosely coupled systems that are resilient, manageable and observable. Very much like the internet. We need to use automation because you know what? The grid is going to be far more complex than any power systems engineer can manage. And so we have to abstract the complexity and find the tools that are going to enable us to make high impact changes frequently and predictably with minimal toil. Because we are democratizing innovations to make them accessible for everyone. Because solving climate change in the US or in Denmark or in France or in Spain is not enough. We have to do it for the whole world. So I think I mentioned earlier that it's not possible to network electrons. Like we network packets. But it is possible to network the data or the metadata about an electron. And that's where the future is taking us. Luckily we have learned a lot from the internet, from cloud computing. I mean distributed computing and distributed energy. Distributed energy would not be possible without distributed computing. It would not be possible without innovations in 5G and what we've done in LF networking. It wouldn't be possible without distributed ledgers. We need all of this. These are the foundations for the digitalization of energy, which is the reason why even though some of what we work on really is very, very sensitive to power system engineers. It is also possible that a lot of it can be, you know, you can jump in. You can participate. You can be part of this. So this slide is inspired by LF edge. And it'll look pretty familiar to those of you who are working in the edge world. What we've done though is we've overlaid parts of our functional architecture to understand where interactions are happening. And the other thing that's I think notable about this is that control is really shifting when it comes to the grid. And that as we push intelligence out to the edge, we have to come up with new ways of actually managing communication technology. The other thing that I would add in looking at this slide really is about the time sequence and that there's really considerable differences in time when you're talking about like an inverter at the edge and where you're talking about system control or gateways to markets. But distributed energy represents exponential complexity and it's no longer possible for somebody sitting in a control room to manage the complexity of the grid. And this will be increasingly true as electric mobility and vehicles which represent both loads and resources are participating. So this is a pretty generic view of digitalization. But what you have in energy is really black boxes. And so if you were to talk to most utility executives, they would, you know, procurement and how hardware and software are put together. They're composed inside of black boxes. And so the same kinds of disruptions that occurred in telecommunications in particular are really happening inside of energy where you have these market disruptions around disaggregation, software defined on networks and data planes and control planes and then automation and virtual functions. And then you have a very kind of common open source project based stack. The reason why I'm showing you this is that the next slide that I want to go to is the taxonomy that we want to use to define our efforts. Because, you know, for years I've been trying to find some kind of a visualization that actually expresses the architecture of the grid of the future. So towards that end, as we all went to work from home, we began a series of three six-week sprints. And in the first sprint, we had Dan Kahn come and talk with us. And so for those of you from CNCF or who come from a cloud-native background, what you'll see is on the left is the very simple taxonomy around which the cloud-native interactive landscape was built. Now a lot of people look at that landscape and say it's a landscape from hell. I, however, look at it and see something slightly different and actually really exciting because I see an understanding of what are the softwares in a place? What are the differences in those softwares? What is proprietary? What is open source? What are the projects of CNCF? And in doing that, I think that Dan and the team from CNCF have provided the world with a great opportunity. And so towards that end, we all decided we wanted to do the same thing. So last summer, a group of power system engineers from high-medium and low-voltage, in other words, they were transmission system operators and distribution system operators, got together to really look at, you know, how are we going to think about a fit for the future grid? So, you know, what I'm going to show you is, you know, it was created last summer and we kind of had it at a version .5. So the first thing that they did was that they divided up the architecture into five quadrants. The next thing they did was began to look at the core components in each of these quadrants. And then they went down a third level. Now this is a particularly interesting, you know, it's basically a taxonomy. That's the way I look at it. And the critical nature of creating a taxonomy is that it begins to organize the mental model around which we both invest and conceive of managing the grid of the future. And the intention of this group of engineers and enterprise architects was to harmonize high-medium and low-voltage, generation, aggregation, and behind-the-meter. And in doing that, I think that they have been quite successful at being able to articulate a taxonomy around which actors at a global scale can begin identifying investments. Now, in a kind of stretch goal of what I'd like to see happen is I would like to actually have this become a taxonomy for something that we're referring to as the Alexandria Project in which you would eventually be able to click on any of these and you would get standards, reference architectures, open source, closed source, and you would begin to be able to see a developer community because all of these things are really different. You know, digital twins are really different than configuration or then metering or then modeling and state estimation. So all of these things are just radically different because you know what, the grid is the biggest machine on the planet. Now, within the context of LF Energy, this is where we are today. And these are our projects today and these are our working groups and groups that are in planning. All of these things are open and we would love to have all of your participation. If I look out over the next six months, I believe that we will probably have another four to eight new projects, maybe even more than that come in. It's hard to say. Things have slowed down on one level during the pandemic and on another level, I think that people have really used this time well. I know that we as a community have really used this time well. So coming back to the taxonomy. This taxonomy also lives in Google Sheet. It's accessible. You know, I think that if you are at our wiki, you can get access to those things and all of those things are very visible, very present and very much live. So we want you to work on it. And the work that we're doing around the functional architecture is to really organize what projects we work on, what's next, what's coming down the pike. And I would tell you that probably in the next six months, there's anywhere from six to eight projects that are coming on an immobility project is beginning to spin up. A demand response project is beginning to spin up. We are looking at various different aspects of modeling. The asset monitoring and predictive maintenance is spinning up VPP and microgrids. So it's tremendously busy and, you know, most of our software right now, you know, it's all coming from our members and the members that are putting software and are coming from Europe because they're probably a few years ahead of where we are in the United States. There's this thing in energy and in utilities which is that policy at a kind of federated level, federal level, like the European Commission, sets policy and that policy drives markets and that markets drives behavior. And so there's a really strong commitment on behalf of the European Union to move to 100% decarbonization by 2050. And the implications of that are that there are things that the European Commission wants to see in order to be able to ensure that there is an evolution of the marketplace and of that decarbonization. And so the kinds of things that they really want to see are collaboration. They want to see people working together. And there are many, many other people that aren't even on, you know, that are either, that are attending and participating, that are in process of becoming members. We have some big members that are coming on in the relatively new, you know, in the near term. So, but again, you know, this is a beginning. I'm not apologetic about it. Really just sort of practically speaking. This is where we are. This is where we're starting. And when I imagine where we may be in five years and seven years and 10 years, I imagine that we'll have hundreds of members and we may have hundreds of projects that are along that functional architecture. So when we started working from home, we began a process that just started out as a couple of meetings and ended up being three six-week sprints. And we're culminating on July 8th with a virtual experience that is starting at 2 p.m. Central European time. And we'll have seven tracks that we're working with. We have security data architectures and infrastructure. And then we have four use cases, asset monitoring, configuration of 61-850 in the digital substation project, digital twins and microgrids. And there also be opportunities at the workshop to add breakout rooms and interest groups on the fly. So bring your friends, bring your colleagues. It's free. If you do a search, I think that you look up LF Energy and technical architecture workshop 2020. I think you'll be able to find it. And I hope that you'll join us. It's going to be fun and it's going to be a great way to extend what it is that we're doing and get feedback on it as we grow. So, you know, as I want to conclude here, I often will show when I'm talking pinecone seed from General Sherman. And it's a sequoia. And it's a sequoia in California. And it is the largest living thing on Earth. And it comes from a seed that's a little bit bigger than a walnut. And that walnut, when it has the right conditions, the right amount of water, the right amount of warmth, the right amount of sun, good soil, will grow. And it will grow for hundreds and thousands of years. And that's how I think about LF Energy is that we have a seed, we have really good DNA, and we're going to grow for a long time because we need energy and we need power to be able to live our lives. You know, the hero's journey is, er... Cleaner. Clean power sources. LF Energy is a new Linux foundation project that supports multivendor collaboration and open-source shared technology innovation to help create the electricity and power systems of tomorrow. All because we believe in the future that we share. Use your voice. Use your vote. Use your keyboard. This is such a critical moment in time. We need everyone to get on board. So really think deeply about what it is that you're doing with your life and whether... You know, what is important? What is going to be the most important thing? How are you going to live with yourself? And I say this not as an act of guilt or... But really as coming from a place of wisdom that when you are with yourself and you're taking your last breath on this planet will you feel as if you did your best to bring this about? And you know, we're just beginning but we need you. We need organizations. We need corporations to join us. We need to create the conditions to transform the paradigm of energy and power from domination to democratization because your world depends on it. For further information, this is my email. This is the website. You can go to membership and join. We would really love to have you. Help feed the mothership. Help make us become the center of gravity to transform energy. Thank you very much for your time and I look forward to taking questions in a few minutes. Hi everyone. Thank you very much for listening and staying through this. Gosh, you know, you take a moment in time and you capture it. What turns out is that I don't actually have enough bandwidth to be able to join you by video. But I see that there still are a group of folks that are left in the session and would love to have you all either, you know, add your thoughts, feelings, perceptions, you know, and listening to it. I realize that these are really challenging times and I believe that LF Energy is a hopeful beacon in that time for projects that really can move forward the power of together. So, you know, there was also a terrible sound burst that I tried to do the video and it didn't really work out well. So anyway, live and learn. Here I am. I see you guys on. Are there questions that you have? Are there ways that I can, you know, we can open this conversation up about what's next? What's on your minds? What are the things you're working on? How would you like to move things forward? So I think, given that I'm not getting a lot of feedback, can make that offer one more time. What I would suggest is if you go to the LF Energy website, you will see a join button for the technical architecture workshop. We have almost 200 folks that have signed up and we have seven tracks. Folks have been working on this for weeks and I believe that it's, you know, we're just kind of waiting for you. We're about to throw a big party. We'd love to have you come. Let's see. So I'm going to just answer directly James' question. I would appreciate your thoughts regarding grid transformation in North America with its highly regulated market. So my understanding is I'm not really sure that the U.S. is regulated more highly than Europe. I think that both of them are regulated. Perhaps I see that the biggest real difference is that most utilities in Europe are owned by the state and that there is an expectation and assumption of social contract. And so when you talk to grid operators in Europe, really their expectation is to invest all whatever profits and monies come in directly back into the grid. So the grid in Europe is far more stable than the grid in North America. We have deferred like we have with our roads a lot of investments. However, I think that if we have a new administration and I'm going to act as if that's what's going to happen, I think that we will be moving really rapidly forward with regards to grid transformation and the removal of fossil fuels from the grid. Probably 75% to 80% of a carbon that's put out into the environment is either coming through electric mobility or is coming through mobility and transportation or coming through the grid and the fossil fuels that we use for generation. So as we as a country move forward and begin to take much more seriously, climate change and I think we will have an opportunity to rapidly transform. With that said, some of the opportunities that I think exist in North America which eventually will make their way back over to Europe really have to do with this notion of self-similar nodes or kind of the fractal grid. And as I view the fractal grid is that it's kind of nodes that are self-similar and can be replicated. We call them sometimes microgrids or virtual power plants or mini-grids or neighborhood grids or community grids. And I truly believe there is a great opportunity for acceleration there. However, if I were to look at the hardware issues I think that we're probably five to ten years away from being able to have the kind of interoperability that we need. So there's a lot of blocking and tackling that we need to do. And what I would want for the utilities around me in California or in the rest of the United States it's that they really begin to think of themselves as technology companies and in that way actually begin to learn about data and how to manage data because grid transformation is going to require enormous data literacy. And at this point we're not quite there. Another question. From a developer point of view how can you make the case for LF Energy as something that is worth exploring and working on? You know, that's a great question. My thought is that there's enormous adjacencies. In other words, that there are companies who are particularly prodigious at managing data and or managing customer relationships who are in a position to be able to actually begin providing energy services. And that if utilities in North America and distribution utilities in Europe don't actually begin to provide that I think that we'll see incumbents coming in there. So I can see some of the folks that are on the call are coming from many different places in terms of OEMs, vendors, suppliers not so much in the utility space. But I think that there's a great opportunity for cloud folks. We're going to have a whole infrastructure track. We're working with AWS and Microsoft and IBM to put together this infrastructure track. The issue of transitioning cloud-native applications and platforms into the energy is real and alive and we need you there. So really I think that there are all kinds of adjacencies and the case is it's a multi-trillion dollar transformation. It is going to happen. And then one last question. I was wondering if in sparsely populated areas whether they're good areas to start transformation. I think that they are good places, rural areas if what you're trying to build is resilience and redundancy or in developing markets the ability to actually provide electrification that doesn't exist. And with regards to microgrids I think that that's incredibly important if we're talking about areas that have high voltage that are being stepped down to distribution system. I think that there's an enormous amount that can be done and you'll see that most of the projects that we have right now are in fact geared towards transmission and distribution and the transmission distribution interface. But yes, I think rural areas and areas that don't have electricity there's tremendous opportunity for leapfrogging. So I think that we're up against the time boundary. I want to say thank you to everyone for staying on this long. My email is sgoodman at LFenergy.org. I would welcome conversations with people. I really hope that you'll come to the workshop. We're beginning. And I ask everyone to look ahead 30 years, imagine yourself 30 years from now looking back and recognize that this is a tiny sapling but one day I really do believe it will be a mighty sequoia. So thank you very much everyone. And thank you for all the technical support that we've gotten. And I hope next year that I will have some better bandwidth. Thank you.