Alex Thornton is executive director of the Linux Foundation Energy.
The power grid is undergoing its greatest transformation since inception, with new challenges imposing problems it is not equipped to handle. Historically, we would solve problems by building infrastructure to handle the worst-case scenario. This has proven to be too slow and too expensive; we can’t build our way out of this problem. Instead, as former FERC Chairman Richard Glick stated, “we need to squeeze everything out of our existing grid.” To do so, we need to rapidly adopt data-driven, digital optimization of our physical assets, building only what we need.
As the power and utility industry digitizes, it can look to the tech industry for inspiration on how to innovate. Tech companies that compete with each other actually collaborate extensively through open technology and standards. This open collaboration has resulted in an explosion of innovation, solving problems bigger than any one company could alone. It has also led to improvements in cybersecurity, interoperability, long-term maintainability, and a reduction of R&D costs. Not coincidentally, organizations that embrace open collaboration are also the most commercially successful. They recognize that giving up a small precompetitive slice grows the size of the pie and benefits them in the long run.
What is open source?
Open source is a way of collaborating on digital research and development, and it is the de facto building block of modern technology. These open building blocks solve the most common challenges, are assembled together much like Legos, then customized as needed for a specific problem. Every single website, including this one, is using open source software under the hood. Every Android phone is built on top of open source Linux. The list goes on and on. Open source is a pervasive and proven foundation of our modern technology fabric.
There are myriad benefits of this approach to collaboration. By sharing investment in foundational building blocks, R&D costs for any single stakeholder go down. Innovation is accelerated by combining resources from multiple organizations. Interoperability is improved because many stakeholders must be able to work together and parallelize their efforts in a modular fashion. Long-term maintainability is addressed because the code is public and community-driven; no single company owns it. And, somewhat counterintuitively, cybersecurity is improved through absolute transparency. An entire community is constantly looking for bugs and vulnerabilities in the shared technology, often finding them before bad actors do. This approach is more effective than “security through obscurity,” the belief that hidden, black boxes are more secure.
Open source as a procurement strategy
Open source is a low-friction way for customers to collaborate with their vendors, arriving more quickly at product requirements and building minimum-viable products together. In this way, utilities can drive towards the industry-wide foundations that lift the entire market up. Because collaboration is in the open, NDAs and other legal agreements are unnecessary.
Investments in the grid are long term, with asset lifetimes of 20+ years being common, quite different from the new phone consumers buy every few years. One particular risk is stranded assets, which we see as EV charging operators shut down. What happens if a vendor stops supporting a product that relies on continued operation through cloud software or over-the-air updates? If the product is built on an open source core, this risk is mitigated. A new service provider can step in where the former exited, ensuring those assets don’t turn into expensive paperweights.
Utilities have complex digital footprints; they need to build heterogeneous systems with best-in-class components that work together seamlessly. Open source plays a role in this system interoperability by creating open interfaces between systems and allowing an ecosystem to emerge around them. By sharing an interface, components become more modular and plug and play.
Open source as a product strategy
Vendors may look at open source with a mix of curiosity and fear. While all technology vendors are already using open source inside of their products, employing it as a product strategy is a break from the past for most organizations. It was a challenging evolution for Microsoft, as well. In the early 2000s, it fought hard to kill Linux and open source because it saw Linux as a threat to its license-based Windows business. A decade later, Microsoft reversed course, announcing “Microsoft <3 Linux.” Microsoft realized that while it would lose a bit on Windows licenses, it would gain even more through providing more value-add services and support in a customer-centric manner. Microsoft’s stock went through the roof as it became a prolific contributor to open source.
There are a variety of models for creating successful businesses on top of open source. The key is often finding an area that is “precompetitive” and not part of a strategic moat. Commoditizing that through open source then unlocks investment in areas of strategic innovation and IP generation. One common model is open sourcing the “core” of a product, providing a free version that a DIYer can use to significantly accelerate their own development efforts. A business can then commercialize an “enterprise-grade” version that includes additional features and support. Another approach is providing consulting, training and support around an open source project.
Real world examples
Because of the benefits described above, open source solutions are rapidly being deployed in production by utilities around the world. A few such examples are listed below.
TROLIE establishes an open conformance standard and software ecosystem to implement transmission line rating exchange to comply with FERC Order 881. It came out of a collaboration between GE Vernova and MISO, and is being used by GE Vernova as part of its Limit Exchange Portal application.
FledgePOWER, a multi-protocol translation gateway for power systems from LF Energy based on the industrial IoT Linux Foundation Edge project Fledge, was commercialized by AVEVA to help French transmission system operator RTE support IEC 61850 communications with external systems like scanners and data centers in the cloud and substation networks. It is also deployed by the Jacksonville Energy Authority to facilitate data collection from substations and the integration of real-time data into both their on-premise historian and cloud-based systems.
SEAPATH provides a security hardened, real-time, shared digital foundation on top of which virtualized protection and control applications can be deployed for digital substations. It was originally developed by RTE, and it has grown into a thriving community with vendors including GE Vernova, Savoir-faire Linux, Welotec, Red Hat and others.
Getting started
The beauty of open source is the openness of the community. There are many free resources available from open source foundations like the Linux Foundation, LF Energy, TODO Group, OpenSSF and others that provide a good starting point. Often the best way to begin is to identify areas of interest and start participating in the community, through regular meetings, mailing lists, chat forums and events.
The energy transition is indeed a digital energy transition. Without strategic use of open source, we’re making it harder on ourselves than it needs to be. Open source is a powerful tool in the toolbox that addresses interoperability and long term maintainability risk for utilities, and unlocks innovation and revenue streams for vendors. Let’s collaborate and solve hard problems together.
