Expanso at LF Energy Summit
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Last week, some of the Expanso team traveled along to the LF Energy Summit in Belgium to learn more about distributed energy systems and spread the good word of Bacalhau - and we thought we’d let you know how we got on!
What is the LF Energy Summit?
The LF Energy Summit, hosted by the Linux Foundation, brings together technologists from across the open-source community with a shared goal: tackling climate change head-on. We strongly believe in the future of renewable energy and the role of open-source in driving its rapid adoption, so joining the LF Energy Summit felt like a natural fit for us.
Who was there?
In addition to your favorite Bacalhau builders, there were a whole host of people from across the energy, tech, academic, and government sectors. With speakers from industry giants like Google, E.On, and Octopus Energy, as well as innovative startups shaping energy infrastructure at the core and edge, the event featured a range of fascinating talks, panels, and deep-dive discussions.
Some stand-outs for us were:
How open-source project EVerest can help stabilize the energy grid.
How Rome is using SOGNO to transform its energy grid and build flexibility into its foundations.
Mark van Stiphout of the European Commission spoke about the EU-wide action plan to digitalise the energy system.
What did we learn?
Unsurprisingly, renewable energy is everywhere! What might surprise some, though, is the massive role open-source software plays in driving its adoption. Over the course of two days we encountered more industries, systems and projects powered by open-source than you could shake a stick at!
To name just a few:
A project to develop and maintain an open-source software stack for EV charging stations.
A plug-and-play, cloud-native, microservices project for enabling the next generation of data-driven monitoring and control systems
A project designed to automatically and efficiently distribute locally-produced renewable energy over a DC grid to interconnect with AC Grids.
Open-source charge management software for building reliable and resilient EV charging networks.
An initiative to develop a “reference design” and “industrial grade” open-source real-time platform that can run virtualized automation and protection applications.
An open-source project to model complex energy systems with high performance.
A software platform that enables hardware monitoring and control in the public space
A project to build an open-source PV forecast that can provide the expected generation in kw within 0 to 48 hours for a single PV site.
A multi-protocol translation gateway for power systems based on industrial IoT
A capability model for a grid operator
That’s an impressive list, but the journey is just beginning! If we took away one thing from the summit, it’s that there’s still a lot of work ahead! With the International Energy Agency (IEA) reporting a staggering 13.9% increase in global renewable energy capacity in 2023, and solar power expected to overtake coal in 2025 - we believe now is the time to double-down on the value of open-source in energy.
The Expanso SideBar Event
We love meeting people and giving back to the community, so we hosted an Expanso “SideBar” meet-and-greet after the Summit. Hosted at the nearby, world-famous Delirium Café, we grabbed a corner for everyone to gather, relax, and share insights from the day.
We believe that the best conversations flow when people are together, and that certainly proved true! Over 50 people joined us to chat about renewable energy and distributed computing, with ideas flowing just as freely as the Belgian beer! We’re thrilled so many chose to spend time with us, and we can’t wait to catch up again soon. Community is at the heart of open-source, and open-source drives innovation—so we’re proud to play a part in helping these communities grow.
In fact, we had so much fun meeting with people that we’re going to do it again! If you’re at Big Data London on the 18 - 19th September 2024 - or you’re just in the area, we’ll be running another SideBar event near the Olympia in London. If you’d like to come along, let us know, all are welcome, and the beer’s on us!
Until Next Time!
So, that was Expanso at the LF Energy Summit. The Linux Foundation have really outdone themselves putting on this event. If you’re involved in open-source, energy, or distributed computing, we highly recommend attending the next one - we’ll definitely be there!
Get Involved!
We welcome your involvement in Bacalhau. There are many ways to contribute, and we’d love to hear from you. Please reach out to us at any of the following locations.
Commercial Support
While Bacalhau is open-source software, the Bacalhau binaries go through the security, verification, and signing build process lovingly crafted by Expanso. You can read more about the difference between open-source Bacalhau and commercially supported Bacalhau in our FAQ. If you would like to use our pre-built binaries and receive commercial support, please contact us!
This article is really inspiring. I did my Bachelor in Technology in Electrical Engineering and wrote a thesis on role of grid connected solar photovoltaics. The role of smart grid to stabilise a distributed energy grid looks real promising. Bringing compute to the edge is something that can do wonders. Thesis: http://ethesis.nitrkl.ac.in/218/1/Thesis.pdf Sean, this is 15 years old, the world used to use MATLAB Simulink and SCADA then. Now the world does compute on edge and uses Python. Cheers, Naval