LF Energy is an open source foundation focused on creating a technology ecosystem to support rapid decarbonization with a ‘neutral, collaborative community to build the shared digital investments that will transform the world’s relationship to energy’. According to a new report from LFE, the energy sector is in the midst of a major transformation, with 76% of utilities implementing digitalization plans, and 64% using open source to ‘accelerate innovation’. LFE’s remit excludes fossil fuels. However, since major oils are moving into renewable energy, particularly Shell, now a major sponsor of LFE, and microgrids and electrification of oil and gas facilities is on the agenda, Oil IT Journal popped in to the 2023 LFE Summit to see what’s happening.
Host Lucian Balea from RTE (France’s electricity network utility) welcomed Shell as a new top level LFE member, observing that while Shell was the only oil company on board, many service companies like Aveva and GE are involved. Currently there are some 25 LFE projects up and running.
Mark Van Stiphout from the European Commission gave a keynote on the ‘contribution of open source to the green deal’. Europe is the first continent with a ‘climate neutral continent’ objective, in particular to reduce its dependency on Russian gas. The Council has set a target of 42.5% renewables by 2030 (today it is 30%). Internal combustion engine vehicles are to be phased-out and replaced by e-vehicles. Gas and oil boilers to be replaced with heat pumps(!). What role has open source software in the transition? Open source is ‘the key to future energy’. Open source supports innovation and ‘perennial’ IT solutions. The EU has launched a digital twin of EU electricity grid, a joint venture between EU distribution system operators. Since ‘we don’t know exactly what will be needed in 2030, an agile, open source state of mind is needed to support the EU electricity grid of the future’.
Chris Xie (Futurewei) wondered what our energy future might be with pervasive ICT* and AI. The CO2 emissions of ChatGPT3 have been put at the equivalent of 56 years of emissions from a single US home. 6G mobile networks will herald even higher power consumption. The challenges of ICT and AI power consumption need to be addressed by promoting ‘carbon-efficient’ programing languages and ‘zero bit, zero wait’ mobile networks. Network carbon intensity is coming under the radar of the ITU telecoms organization. Rust is low, C is ok, Java worse with Python worse still**. LF’s Anna Hermansen described ongoing collaboration between LF Research and Futurewei. Two new reports have just been published. ‘The Open Source opportunity for microgrids’ and an ‘Energy Transformation Readiness Study’. The latter found that while open source is used more that proprietary software, take-up is hampered by performance, support and security barriers. More generally, attempts to reduce the carbon intensity of ITC are tracked by the Green Software Foundation with a web page dedicated to the State of Green Software.
* Information technology and communications.
** More on the topic here.
Mary Sotos, Director of the US DoE’s Federal Energy Management Program (FEMP), highlighted the role that Executive Order 14057 is playing in ‘catalyzing America’s clean energy industries and jobs’. She highlighted FEMP’s energy data and sustainability website and the REopt optimization platform that is used to evaluate distributed energy resources for integrated energy systems.
Nicolas Omont (Artelys) explained how the main EU electricity coordination centers (Coreso and TSCnet) are using the open-source library PowSyBl in a ‘continent-wide coordination of the power grid’. Note too that Artelys, a provider of decision support and optimization tools, has an oil and gas footprint with notably, downstream activity for TotalEnergies.
Steve Dahlke from the US Electric Power Research Institute cited Presidential Executive Order 14057 which calls for 24/7 carbon-free electricity. EPRI with, notably Iron Mountain, is studying energy use in data centers. Despite earlier deals signed for Google, Engie, Microsoft and others, there are ‘not too many buyers for carbon-free electricity today’. Pricing is an issue as are ‘asymmetrical financial and operational risks’. ‘Emissionality’, strategies that minimize emissions reduction – possibly by including non renewables, may reduce demand for carbon free energy. Data quality is also an issue.
LFE has spread its net far and wide and some of its projects appear rather thinly populated. The 2022 Carbon Data Specification Consortium (CDS) project that sets out to ‘track the carbon intensity of consumed energy and the carbon emissions associated with power systems, to guide grid decarbonization, and decision-making’ provides a lot of information on the developing spec. But despite its claimed aim of ‘accessibility’, trying to make sense of the various websites, Git repositories and documentation is a bit of a run-around.
More from the LF Energy Summit home page.
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