 Welcome everyone. Thank you for attending this panel on open source for energy systems and the impact that open source is having on the energy transition. I'm Dan Brown. I head communications at Linux Foundation Energy and we are very privileged to have a fantastic panel with us today. I will run through some quick introductions and then we'll jump straight in so that we can get through all of my questions and hopefully get through to some of your questions as well. So starting from my left, Jonas van den Bogard is digital strategy lead at Alliander, the Dutch distribution system operator, which covers energy transport and distribution for a large part of the Netherlands. Jonas ensures that open source initiatives contribute to Alliander's digital strategy and objectives. He also is a leader in the open source program office and represents Alliander on Linux Foundation Energy's technical advisory council. Next is Bryce Bartman, Chief Digital Technology Advisor at Shell. Bryce focuses on how emerging digital technologies, data and open source can contribute to Shell's digital strategy and provide solutions for the energy transition. He also sits on the LF Energy Governing Board and Technical Advisory Committee and actively contributes to the real time data ingestion platform project. Next is Hilary Carter, Senior VP of Research and Communications at the Linux Foundation, which means she's my boss. Hilary oversees the development of decision useful research projects and content programs that support open source as a paradigm for mass collaboration at scale. She started her career in financial services and has experience in corporate finance, research and analysis. She eventually pivoted to digital technology and initially focusing on mobile communications and digital media consulting. And before coming to Linux Foundation, she led a global research institute focused on blockchain. And last but not least is Christophe Villemeere, General Manager at Savile Affair Linux, which is an open source integrator, developing solutions on open source methodologies and transforming them into economic and industrial levers. Christophe is an engineer and entrepreneur. He's passionate about creating value through collaboration. At Savile Affair, he handles strategic partnerships and contributes to their growth of activities, including through Linux Foundation Energy and particularly the CPAP project in which Savile Affair is a leader. So now that that's out of the way, let's get to the interesting part. So I'm going to start with a question for the whole panel. And essentially, this is just to set the stage. So I would like all of you to tell me what you see as the biggest technological challenge being faced by the energy industry today. Should I start? Sure. Okay. Well, thanks everyone for joining us today. So I think the biggest technological challenges that we're facing in the energy sector is the energy mix is changing. But we are building it on infrastructure that's been around for a century. So how do we actually make that work and at the speed that we needed to? So I think that there's going to be technological challenges that Jonas is going to talk about around how a grid operator will make that work, how generation of energy works, how consumption of energy works, and then all of the technology that actually makes that all come together within a time frame that we needed to. So that to me is the biggest challenge that I think that we face technologically today. Thank you, Bryce Jonas. I would like to add that what you're already mentioning is that the energy mix is changing. And that is a huge impact on the way we produce energy, distribute energy, and transport energy. And we already see in the Netherlands that we are closing down fossil fuel power stations in order to reduce CO2 emissions. And we see a really strong increase in the number of solar panels, the number of wind farms, but also mobility is changing. We see in the Netherlands specific enormous uptake in electric cars. And that creates tremendous opportunities for a more cleaner and decarbonised world, but also creates huge challenges for companies like LEN. Christof? Hi everybody. For sure, digitisation is one of the biggest challenges. It's a challenge for all the ecosystem, for vendors, for tech companies like us, for all three utilities for sure. It's a challenge because we need to go faster, we need to speed and accelerate for having new solutions, new software, new systems to decarbonise the energy sector. And it's a big challenge for all that because we are moving from legacy OT system to move forward to IT system. And actually it's not only your tech challenges, it's human and organisational challenges for the company. So it's a big challenge. Absolutely. And Hilary? To follow on Christof's thought, from my point of view, not really being at the forefront of technological impediments. I see the challenges, the great challenges being ones of regulation in two ways, within the energy sector itself, but also regulation in other industries like financial services, as well as regulation like the CRA. Where the energy sector is concerned, it's just simply an impediment to the proliferation of clean energy systems and prosumer energy initiatives. We must work with regulators in tandem with technologists and organisations to help move these initiatives forward. In terms of financial services, a lot of innovations that drive consumers to make appropriate choices and incentivise the use of clean energy can be facilitated by innovative payment mechanisms that go peer to peer. And if governments are going to regulate these platforms, a.k.a. blockchains and other types of digital asset infrastructures, in a way that sets back that industry from being able to make advances, I see that as a problem. Agreed. Awesome. Alright, so let's change gears a little bit. Jonas, I'd like to go back to you, particularly since you represent Alli under utility. So from that electrical utility perspective, can you talk a little bit about why a distribution system operator like Alliander would get involved in open source in the first place? That's, you know, your industry typically has not been the most open source friendly historically. I also just mentioned that the energy transitions pose its large challenges for companies like Alliander. Traditionally, the Netherlands, for example, and even nowadays, has one of the most reliable energy grids in the world. However, we see that the grid that designed in the last decades is not designed for the rapid developments that are happening today. And we see that the demand for electricity is growing so fast, especially in the Netherlands, that we, as Alliander, have to say no to new business consumers that want to expand their businesses and the need for electric power. Even though we, as Alliander, have significantly increased our investment in expanding the grid over the last few years. And this really requires us to look to new solutions, and especially here, digitalization plays an enabling, but also a facilitating role. And I really believe that digitalization cannot happen without open source software. So open source software really plays an important role in building new digital capabilities to better use the capacity that's currently available in our grid and make new solutions like congestion management possible. Interesting. Kristoff, similar question, but from a different perspective. So I'd like to hear from you why you think a multi-vendor approach such as that represented by open source is needed to address these challenges. You, of course, are coming from an IT services company. So, you know, why wouldn't you be focused on selling proprietary solutions? Yeah, that's a complex question. But actually the multi-vendor approach was a bit pushed forward by the utilities like RTE, for example, the French TSO, also by Alliander. And it's good because it means that it's driven by the end user. But behind the multi-vendor approach, I mean, it's more interoperability, what we're talking about. And that's exactly what open source allows you to do. It's build faster, create cooperation and allows you to build partnerships and to develop faster your solution. And we need to have that approach. And actually, that's exactly what we do at SOA Fed and X for more than 20 years. I mean, building open source software and supporting them. And that's the particularity actually we see in the energy sector compared to other place where it's really, as I said, driven by the end user. And this is a positive way because then, I mean, the ecosystem of the vendors, which is traditional, evolve them because it's driven by the end users. And we see now that there is an ecosystem which is emerging. And the traditional vendor like GE, by example, is moving forward into this kind of solution. And then we are here to gather all of the team together. Fantastic. Bryce, let's go to you. From more of a generation perspective, obviously Shell does a lot of different types of power generation. What prompted you to get involved in open source? Yeah, so, I mean, we all know that the energy mix is changing. It's going to depend less on oil and gas and much more on electrification. And Shell has investments and parts of its business are invested in that direction. So we have one of the largest mobile charging or EV charging networks in the world. And that doesn't, you can't just deploy those as you like to. You have to work in collaboration with people like Allianza or companies like Allianza to make that happen. And so Allianza and Shell actually work together in what is called the energy transition campus in Amsterdam, where we've naturally been talking about how do we solve some of the challenges in the Netherlands specifically. But we've also then, and Jonas did a great job this morning talking about how you balance a grid when you have direct electrification through assets like wind farms and solar farms. So we have those as well. And again, it's another kind of point where we need to work together with the grid operators to make that all happen. So we were already talking to a number of the members. You know, Shuli was so engaging in trying to paint out the picture of where we needed to go as a company as well. We wanted to do more because I think, you know, as we go forward, everyone is going to want to do things more openly, more transparently, and just make sure I think there's a lot bigger interest in energy than there ever has been before. And so we want to, you know, make sure that we can also provide solutions on how we run our business in that kind of construct. And then I think the thing that's important through all of that and where open source really stands out is with things like standards, interoperability. And those are going to be how we can talk to each other across our different businesses. So it makes a lot of sense. And then I think, you know, the bigger picture is that we've all got to get to net zero by 2050 or earlier. And I think open source and collaborations that LF Energy put companies like ours in really helps us to achieve that. I can say from a foundation perspective, and I hope you'll agree with me, Hillary, I love hearing that. You know, the examples of actual real world collaboration that are being driven through open source is exactly what we're here to talk about. Music to our ears, Stan. Music to our ears. Exactly. So I will turn to you, Hillary, and maybe you can kind of give that foundation perspective. I know that you've done a lot of research recently in this space and kind of tie together what these three have just commented on in terms of, like, why open source for energy. Yeah, thank you very much. I think what's very inspiring about what I have heard from my fellow panelists is their foray into a community like LF Energy and understanding the link between open source and the energy sector. And the role that we're helping to play in that equation through research is to provide the resource, the data that can encourage others to come along and join this journey. And one of the very first conversations I had when I joined the Linux Foundation was in 2021. I met with the various executive directors across the org and Julie being one of them. And she was absolutely determined that we have a better understanding of the opportunity for open source and energy. And the best way we could create a picture of the landscape was through empirical research. And we kicked off one of two studies with the intention that we could put a stake in the ground through research, help others join in the community, and decided that we ourselves at LF Energy and Linux Foundation, we needed to have a better understanding about what the state of open source was in the energy sector worldwide. Particularly where it came to the DSO and the TSO and how well skilled our survey respondents were in terms of do they have the right technical skills to make the transitions necessary within the sector. So that was one study that we kicked off. And the second study was a qualitative report where we focused on what thanks to Luchin Balea from RTE and Arian Stam from Alieander, capturing the stories of these organizations, the DSO and the TSO, and why they made the decision to open source IP and collaborate in an open capacity within and across the industry. And what was the value that was created? How did they overcome barriers within their own organization? How did they get to yes? And if Luchin can do it and Arian can do it and others can do it, those stories become inspiring and pave the way for others. In fact the title of that report is the first part of the title is Paving the Way. So that's how through research we are supporting the various sector communities like LF Energy and encourage everybody to discover the reports. Those are all on our website so please check them out if you haven't already. But so following on what actually everyone said but Hilary particularly there about how we're seeing this collaboration and how we're seeing these actual real world implementations, let's get into some specific examples. So Jonas, I'll start with you. Give me an example of a real world example of an open source solution that Alieander is using and how it's benefiting you. I'm happy to. So we are involved in several projects but I want to highlight one project in particular. So as Bryce was mentioning we are working together with multiple organizations, Shell among them, is to create new solutions that allow us to steer supply and demand in periods when the maximum capacity is reached. And this can be due to too much production for example on a summer day where there's a lot of solar energy and wind energy, but little demand or in winter period when there is a very cold day and there's little sun or wind production at that moment. So we need a new capabilities to make that possible. And one of the solutions which plays a key role at Alieander is OpenStep. And OpenStep is an open source project for making forecasts for the load and electricity grid for the next hours to days. And why is this important for us as Alieander? For us it's really important to know when there's a risk that the maximum capacity is reached and for us it's also important that we know this in time. So we have time to take action when there's a risk that a maximum can be reached. And OpenStep provides us that insight and that's a very, very helpful project for us. And it's also really great that by open sourcing this open source project it enables us to do co-creation with new parties. Sometimes with parties we didn't expect to collaborate with when we started. But it's great that we found collaboration around OpenStep with Archie, the French TISO, which is also collaborating in OpenStep and currently replacing their legacy forecast solution for solution-based OpenStep. So it shows that open source can really help to bring together innovation budget and increase time to market and spend partly public money in a wiser and more effective way. Awesome. So Bryce, let's follow on that with you because I know Shell's also been involved in OpenStep. As Jonas mentioned, can you talk a little bit about that collaboration and feel free to bring up another project? Yeah. No, that's a good one because I think when we joined LF Energy I had to do the presentation for bringing a new project into LF Energy and the most supportive group was actually the OpenStep group. They gave me feedback before that they were really excited about it, which was, I guess, setting us off on the right direction from the very start. But at the heart of digitalization, I think if you look at anyone that's going to present a slide about it is data. It seems to be the integrator across everything. And so Shell contributed something called the real-time data ingestion platform, which is all about consuming real-time data into an open-source format that then you can query and use in your business. And we had a closer look at OpenStep because the reason why we built real-time data ingestion platform was to try and enable more data science and AI capabilities within Shell. And OpenStep by its nature is also machine learning based and analytics based. So we thought just naturally that the two worked together nicely. And so we're also talking on the governing body about how do we make LF Energy a more integrated set of capabilities instead of standalone products. So we started talking and then we decided that this was a great opportunity. So Shell is now working really hard as trying to get it done by this presentation today. I'm sure they're watching, but we're going to get this out very, very soon. The progress is amazing. And we're going to show how you can run the real-time data ingestion platform and OpenStep together, which I think is really exciting. We'll bring a whole new, I think, set of capabilities to both products. And I think we need to do that more. And so we're going to just from today learning a bit more about the other projects there in LF Energy. There's more that we can do and talk to them and see what we can do. And I think we need to, again, that's the part of points of open-source, is just collaborate more. Exactly. And that's the value of the foundation model as well because it gives folks a venue to do exactly that collaboration. Thank you for that. I want to bring Kristoff in. Could you weigh in with a project that several affairs have been involved with that you are seeing having real impact on the industry? Yes, for sure. Well, then I will speak about, as you said, the CPAS project. The CPAS project was actually launched in 2020 pushed by Allender and RTE and NS. So it's a brand-new project, but already was a huge impact. So CPAS is at the heart of the next generation of the digitized substation. So CPAS is an acronym like a lot of open-source projects, which means software-enabled automation platform and artifact therein. But more specific, you know, it's a reference design and it's an industry-algrade platform, real-time platform, that will host automation, production and control application of others to manage the digitized substation. And this project actually gets already an impact. It was really born in 2020, but then after three years of development, it's already a project which is at the early adoption stage of the Linux Foundation. And it's a project, as I said earlier, that's really also driven by RTE on the end user. This is the impact we see, because very quick it has allowed to emerge a business in the market around there. So RTE will have CPAS in production. It's not a secret, we can't say it's a solution. And also what it makes is that it drives, it motivated the vendors, traditional vendors, to use and to work on CPAS. GE, GE are actually GE Vernova in Bilbao. They are here today. Also make POC with CPAS. So we now have an ecosystem with end users, with vendor and with technologies like us that manage the open source project, that's our business model, to create quickly a real possible that make it run the digital substation quite quickly actually. And in June in the last LF Energy Summit, we actually launched the first commercial offer on supporting CPAS to help the actors to customize for the training and for the support. So in a very short time, we had a thanks to the cooperation of everybody and that's really the power of the collaboration through the LF Energy. This project gets an impact very quickly in three years to get in the market. That's amazing. I mean, Hilary, I hope you'll agree with me that it's just great to see the work that we're doing and the projects that we're hosting, having real world impact and driving this energy transition forward. Can you sort of sum it up for us? Give us the high level, like based on what you've seen, the work being done at LF Energy, the research that you've done, what impact is open source having in a measurable way on the energy sector? Thank you, Dan. And again, music to my ears, music to our ears. Across the Linux Foundation, I mean, it's... There's impact for the energy sector in numerous projects across the LF, not just LF Energy. And it's a spectrum of collaborative projects that are specific to open hardware. Obviously, open source software, open standards, open data. We know that energy efficiency is really important to Cloud Native Computing Foundation. Other projects that we've engaged in a research capacity were asking us to identify energy efficiencies. I'll give you two examples. Intel asked us to convene a roundtable to describe opportunities to understand the energy consumption in blockchains and to help spread awareness that not all software is energy intensive. There are better energy choices, but we need to know what those choices are. What are the structural differences and consensus mechanisms and how do they differ? Similarly, within the Hyperledger Foundation, which focuses on enterprise blockchains, we conducted a study on the energy impact of non-fungible tokens and not all are created equal. And so the idea around efficient energy consumption is one that exists across most projects at Linux Foundation. From Green Software Foundation, it's important at OS Climate. It's increasingly important to the organization broadly. And it's nice to see initiatives where they're trying to reduce the overall consumption and create more efficient hardware and more efficient software. Fantastic. All right, I do want to leave some time for audience Q&A. We have 13 minutes left. So just one more short question from me. This is for all the panelists. If you had one ask for the open source community who are not currently involved in the energy sector on how they could help us and help the sector move forward more quickly, what would it be? So we'll just go down the line so you can start, Jonas. So I think we showed and discussed a few great examples how open source enabled collaboration amongst multiple parties. And I think this is just a start. I think there's a tremendous opportunity out there to find new opportunities to collaborate both within the sector, but also today I would especially ask to also outside the sector and see if innovations from other sectors like the finance sector but also actually the other sectors like the Linus Foundation Edge, the developments in Linus Foundation IE and data can help also the challenges we have in the energy sector and see how we can leverage those innovations in those sectors to also help in the challenges we are facing in the energy sector. And I really want to add to that. I think energy is important to us all. We all benefit from a more cleaner, renewable and decarbonized world. Great. I was going to say something very similar. So I do think that there's so many amazing open source projects out there that have had great success. A lot of them in the Linux Foundation anyway and I'm sure a lot of them are sitting in this building today. So what I would love to get from them is just their experiences, their knowledge, just teach us. We just like to learn a little bit more. And I think we don't have to recreate something that seems to already exist and there is a formula to doing it. So don't let the word energy mean that you don't think you should participate. I think that you could be a great mentor to us and help us actually go in the direction we need to quicker. From my point of view, and I agree by the way with Jonas and Bryce, it's so important to show up. Half of the battle is won by just showing up and volunteering and being present which was why I'll go back to one of the first reports we published, sharing the story of Luchin and RTE's leadership and Aryan and Aliander's leadership and this stage setting and storytelling and being able to identify real human beings who've gone on real journeys to make an impact within their organization and within their industry and inspire others. And so sometimes it's really hard to put yourself out there and take a career risk on collaborating with your competitors. But trust that others have done it and we're here to help if you need to make that transition. And so I raise my hand as tribute to help engage any conversations as I know Dan and anybody on this panel would help likewise. I will maybe return the question what the energy sector needs to do to keep an open source community active to help them, to help the sector. Because, you know, adoption of open source is the key but as I'm used to saying, open source is not a free beer so it needs investments, it needs inhuman resources, in money to make the project working and active. And it's really the strength of the left energy that's to be, it's probably one of the lonely Linux foundation, you know, part that is really driven by a sector which is not tech driven. And it needs to, we need to have more actors. You know, we have the pioneers like I call them RT Allender, which was at the beginning, it's good that Charles joined the club but we need to have more, you know, legacy utilities from North America, from everywhere that come, that join, that invest to maintain the open source community active and then they will have other companies like us that will invest in return to keep the project alive. Awesome, I think that summed it up really well. Thank you for that. So we do have some time. If there are any questions, we'd be happy to take them. Let me borrow that. If you could speak into the microphone please for the people watching online. Okay, so this is a question for Kristoff. So in the electrical industry, there are a few premises we can hope to be true. So one is we have a mission critical service, a second premise. Sometimes things go wrong. So maybe Jonas has a blackout and that takes out power from Bryce's refinery. Okay, premise three, the utility needs to hold someone accountable. Okay, so the question is, how do you do that with virtualization and open source? Who's accountable? That's a very good question. And I will have not a simple answer because when you have a project which is still in development and co-construct by the actors, we need to work all together to make it accountable. And there is also a new business model to invent. The traditional business model was quite easy. You had the utilities and you have you, all the vendors vending a device, selling device and the accountability was easy. But now that we are moving from OT to IT solution, it complexify a lot the situation. And this is where the 11 energy ecosystem is really important also to leverage the ecosystem to make the piece of software we build together that will be used to identify the accountability and to work with other projects. I mean, in CEPAS, we use, for example, the October project. So we work with the October projects for that. There is all the work doing about the software bill of materials, S-BOM to try to make compliant the project. There is actually later presentation of CEPAS on that part with S-BOM and all the critical infrastructure piece of software that will be run. So to be honest, and we need to be honest, we don't have yet all the solution. We need to work together to identify your role, our role. This is the role also of Savoie Phelenux with building a commercial support on such a project. And there is also a reflection regarding such a vendor like G, but also your colleague from Schneider ABB that is used to sell device from hardware to software and to be accountable for everything. But now you will sell software sometimes with another hardware and with the users. So this needs to review also the license contract, everything. And it's also our role in maintaining the project to make sure that all the licensing is very clear, that we could identify the vulnerabilities to organize the way to solve them and that it's completely transparent for the risk assessment for the seller, the users and the integrators. Any other questions? Well, so far a lot of these solutions seem to revolve around electric energy. I know now in this panel, gas and I don't know, maybe even oil, like other energy commodities, hydrogen also are represented. How do you see that develop within LF energy going forward? Yeah, so we're a business of molecules, not electrons, essentially. So for us, I think a lot of people, when we came into LF energy, I think the word energy should represent molecules as well as electrons. And I think that a lot of the projects because of where they've come from are in that direction. But we are seeing, like in what we've contributed and then where we're seeing the integrations, we're seeing a lot of opportunities for being able to take what is already there and starting to deploy it into something like oil and gas. So I think there needs to be more. I'd love to not be the only oil and gas major sitting here talking about it. I think if we could get more people joining and participating, then we would probably have a little bit more representation in the code base as well. But I do think that because the direction of travel in the energy sector right now is more towards electrification and what that future looks like, we'll see businesses like ours trying to do more and more of that. So we'll probably be adopting that. And we are. I mean, where we think about wind farms and solar farms and EV charging, those are all kind of perfect examples of where we could deploy LF energy today. Great. We have time for another question if there is one. All the way in the back. No, you're fine. So in a prior session, there was discussion about cross collaboration between projects. And I would love to hear your thoughts around securing critical infrastructure. You know, we're represented here by, you know, critical. We see what happened with the pipeline under the sea and curious, you know, if you're especially with attacks, not just physical attacks, but attacks on our infrastructure and some thoughts, maybe LF energy could be working with Alisa, this secure infrastructure there. So that's a really good question. So security, especially in the energy sector, is very important because we are talking about mission critical environments. And we are happy that there's a lot of experience in the Linux foundation and especially in open security foundation that we can leverage also another energy. And one of the things we have been working on in the LF energy technical advisory committee is that we are helping the LF energy projects to take advantage of those new tools and best practices to also adopt in the energy specific projects. A good example is the open SF batch, which helps projects to identify where they have the best practices they have in place and where there's opportunity to improve. And we really make that mandatory to grow in the life cycle of energy projects to get a certain level on that batch. Yeah, and also part of the technical advisory committee, we were talking about this in a meeting in Paris. I think given the security challenges we have in Europe in particular, we know how vulnerable we can be if there are problems. And so one of the things we've seen is also by putting out your solution into the open and having other scrutinized it has already like the contributions we're making as a company are far better than we've ever made before that we probably would have been running on infrastructure that we own anyway. So by doing that just by its nature should help. But we want to do much more in this space because we also I think are going to be exposed to some challenges maybe with intelligent organizations that really want to attack technology that has been deployed by LF Energy. So we were doing a lot of work to understand what that really means and then how do we educate the contributors, the projects working on LF Energy to improve their security around their products? Yes, if I can add too. I mean it's really the strengths of the ecosystem of the Linux Foundation is leverage with all the projects for knowledge to make the project the best to attempt the goal. And also maybe a way to review the way we build projects. I mean on CPath because it was or to build projects with really cyber awareness from the start. And for the CPath project because the first use case would be the France the project has been really developed with the mapping of some of the recommendations of the French National and Cyber Agency. And we had a DevOps approach through tests to show and on GitHub you can see the 700 tests running and all the red for the green flag which maps all the requirements from the French National Cyber Agency. And this approach can be actually mapped to another agency from another country. So it's a way to develop the fact to get the transparency on the way that the project is secure on that way. But we know that cybersecurity now it's not a question of I won't be attacked. I will be attacked anyway so it's building resilient software to make sure that you're able to react quickly. All right, thank you all so much really appreciate a panel we are out of time but if you have more questions please track these folks down and thank you all for being here.