 Hi, this is your host Soplin Bhartiya on behalf of the Linux Foundation and today we have with us two guests. First of all, our regular Shili Goodman, executive director of LF Energy and Luchyan Balia, R&D program director and open source manager at RTE. Shili Luchyan, first of all, welcome to the show. Thank you so much. It's really good to be back. Thank you. It's a pleasure. Shili, we have talked to each other, everybody knows you, but Luchyan, we are talking for the first time. So, can you first of all tell us a bit about RTE, what do you guys folks do and what is your engagement with the LF Energy project? Yes, of course. So, RTE is the French Power Transmission System Operator. I guess we are quite an unusual player in the open source landscape, so our experience with open source is quite recent. And in fact, three years ago, RTE decided to embrace open source to accelerate our digitalization strategy. And moving towards open source, we asked ourselves about the proper governance framework to foster open source collaborations. And at that time, we had the opportunity to meet Shili and was working with the Linux Foundation and on her side. She wanted to set up an ambitious initiative dedicated to the energy sector and the energy transition. So then our interest matched very well and we started the successful collaboration to build LF Energy. So, and I must tell that I'm very proud to see how LF Energy has grown today. Thanks for sharing the story. Also, how you Shili played a critical role in bringing you on board. Now, Shili, let's hand over the virtual mic to you. Today we are going to talk about CPath project. Can you tell us a bit about the project itself? What is it all about? Well, I think that one of the most important things about the transition that we're making with regards to energy is to virtualization and to software-defined infrastructure. And so this is precisely what Luchem and the team are going after with CPath is to create kind of a first offering, a first approach towards open source and the virtualization of substations. Luchem, I want to know from you, of course, you are part of LF Energy, but from your perspective, from Artie's perspective, how do you see the CPath project also as Shili was talking that everything is becoming software-defined, everything is kind of becoming virtual. So talk about the project from your perspective and this transition that she talked about. Yeah, so power systems, power grids are complex systems. You have all the loads, the generators, the grid equipment that interact in real time. And to operate safely power grids, you need to act on levels to handle some continous hazards such as outages, fluctuations in consumption or production. And for that, so today we have two kinds of levels, human-activated levels and automated levels. And with the energy transition and the fact that we are moving to a more complex system with more distributed players, distributed variation sources, but also distributed levels to control the grid, we need to rethink about our grid control architecture and we want to unlock the capability to innovate, to bring advanced and adaptive automation functions at the edge of the grid. So when I talked about the edge of the grid, it's the power grid substations, in fact. And to unlock this innovation and meet our challenges, we see two key concepts for that and these are inspired by the telecom industry, in fact. So those two key concepts are virtualization and cross-industry open-source collaboration. So I can develop if you want the benefits from virtualization and open-source, if that makes sense. Yeah, it does. So, for instance, first of all, virtualization, of course it's easier to deploy a grid, operate software than hardware. So following the path of the telecom industry, we expect that virtualization will unlock innovation, will help us to accelerate, but also to reduce deployment, operation and maintenance costs. But then in the end, we don't want to end with several virtualization platforms that would be vendor-specific virtualization platforms deployed on the field. So we need a cross-industry collaboration and this is what open-source brings. So it brings, first of all, the open-source through the leverage development model will help us to get the solution in a timely and cost-effective manner, but also it will facilitate cross-industry collaboration. And on this topic, we have at the crossroads of IT and operational technology. And so in terms of competencies, mixing competencies from all the parts of the industry will be essential to achieve our goals. If you can talk a bit about, number one is how do you see these projects at LF Energy? Number two is that you did talk about the benefits of going software-defined is easier than hardware and virtual also. But at the same time, when we look at all these projects, it also opens up the space for others' players so that you are not investing all your resources, R&D, the energy sector, a lot of players are there, which are in some cases, this is not a very competitive market, but still, how does it help to bring these projects under the umbrella of LF Energy, which kind of leads to cross-validation but also a lot of collaboration? Yeah, so indeed, I think that, well, speaking frankly, the CEPAS project is disruptive from our, let's say, ecosystem. We have vendors that are used to build devices and to sell devices. And I guess it's not easy to make a shift to virtualization so becoming a software company and not only that, but playing in an open-source context. So this is really disruptive. But we looked at the example of the telecommunications industry where players, actors, such as AT&T managed to transform their ecosystem through open-source collaborations such as the ONAP project that developed some of the virtualization stack that is currently used to run the 5G networks. And this convinced us that transformation is feasible, is achievable. But first of all, RT is a quite modest player even compared to AT&T. We are a smaller company. So in order to shift the ecosystem, we need to be credible. So we need to partner. That's why we partner with LF Energy because it gives us credibility, visibility. It offers a governance framework that is attractive for collaborations and we believe that this is the only way to grow the community, to reach the critical mass that will allow to make this transformation. And I guess that we will enter into a virtual circle where the community will grow. This will convince the industry that this is a future. It happened in the telecommunications. And for us as an end consumer, it's essential to achieve these goals because this is a way to meet the challenges of the energy transition and the development of renewables in a cost efficient manner to get all the innovation that we will need to deliver a good service to our consumers, to the energy consumers. Since you're comparing with Telcos and one transition that they went through was also they moved away from a lot of proprietary black boxes to a lot of white box commodity hardware. Can you talk about what is, since you earlier mentioned that hardware is difficult than software, so can you talk about is there something similar going with the hardware part of in the energy sector as well where you're moving away from a lot of proprietary boxes towards the white boxes or maybe open source of commodity hardware as well. So that's the vision. So today in Power Substation we have devices that perform some automation functions and even some very fast automation functions that we call protections. For instance, these protections ensure that in case of short circuits or if lightning strikes a power line that we open the circuits very fast so that we don't endanger people or we don't damage equipment. And the vision is so currently it's quite difficult to innovate in that field because you have to go on the field to replace the equipment, et cetera. So with C-Pass we want to move to a new world where those functions will be deployed as software on quite generic hardware in the substations and that will open a lot of possibilities in terms of new software, new innovation that will be deployed at the edge of power grids. What kind of roadmap you have for LF Energy for 2021? Well, we have three projects that we're launching in the next week which is really quite extraordinary. We have a microgrid project, HIFI, that is launching next week. We're doing a global press release, Fledge Power, which is a power system take on industrial IoT. And then the third project that we are launching is SWANYO which is at the distribution level are the software for calculation, state estimation that are really in the beginning of the transition from these hard SCADA systems into really being able to bring industrial IoT into the power system network operations because they're going to be so necessary for being able to orchestrate and choreograph the networks in much the same way that we think about choreographing the networks of the internet or telecommunications. It's a very simple and within energy it's really about balancing supply and demand and the new paradigm when you begin to bring renewable and variable energy is that in order to manage those peak times we have to be able to choreograph how we are in relationship. So all of our projects are in that direction. We have a series of microgrid projects that are supposed to start coming in, Q2 from Australia, really trying to bring on an open source data platform and we're in advanced conversations around that. So I often describe and feel like we've got 100 plates spinning at the same time because we're really... I see that between now and November when COP26 happens in Scotland that the world is really looking for places for being able to collaborate at scale. Decarbonization of our economies is going to be complicated and intense. Power systems leads that. So the projects that we're really focusing on right now are really directed towards power system transformation. And that's the software. If you have software reach out to me because what we want is to create an ecosystem and a community of utilities and vendors and suppliers that are building this system together. It is the largest networked system on the planet. It's like a massive mycelium network underneath our planet which is really all about energy and how we manage energy and power. Awesome. Lucian, Shalit, thanks for taking time out today and talk about not only this project but also the whole evolution that is going on which is software driven, open source driven and it's virtual. And I look forward to talk to you again. Actually, as you said, a lot of projects are already in the pipeline so we'll be seeing each other a lot. Thank you. I hope so. Thank you, Swapno, for everything. I appreciate it. Thank you, Swapno. Pleasure.