LF Energy announced a new open source project called SEAPATH, or Software Enabled Automation Platform and Artifacts (THerein), that will provide grid operators with an open source, real-time platform to run virtualized automation technologies. 

Although the move toward renewable energy is a step in the right direction, clean energy sources are subject to variable conditions that cause fluctuations in power supply and demand that current power grid and control systems simply can’t handle. 

To manage this variability, Shuli Goodman, executive director of LF Energy, said the grid must be digitized for virtual functions, automation, software integration, and disaggregation of hardware and software to help manage, coordinate, and choreograph flexibility services at scale and modulate energy flows. 

LF Energy’s Digital Substation Automation Systems (DSAS) initiative seeks to solve these challenges by optimizing digital substations through open source technology to accelerate the effort toward carbon neutrality by 2050. 

DSAS came together in 2019 with GE Renewable Energy, Schneider Electric, RTE, Alliander, and other energy-sector organizations as founding members.

The initiative formally launched in June with its first project: CoMPAS, or Configuration Modules for Power industry Automation Systems. 

Deploying modern protection, automation and control (PAC) system technologies is a critical first step to update substations. But interoperability between PAC components from different vendors continues to be a barrier to innovation.

CoMPAS aims to build standardized and broadly-applicable software components that optimize PAC systems to ease and accelerate the deployment of equipment, Lucian Balea, R&D program director and open source manager at RTE, explained. 

It’s essentially a configuration model. Its software components address configuration tools for power system automation according to IEC 61850, an international standard for electrical substation systems, Balea said.

LF Energy's SEAPATH is the second project under the DSAS umbrella with a more “long-term goal” in comparison to CoMPAS. “We want to change the way that automation functions are built and deployed from physical devices to virtualized functions,” Balea said. 

SEAPATH aims to consolidate multi-provider automation and protection applications with redundant hardware requirements to create an interoperable digital substation platform that grid operators can use to manage services. 

According to LF Energy the project will help with time and cost-efficiency, scalability and flexibility, innovation, vendor-agnostic implementations and the convergence of utility practices. All of which, Balea noted, are essential to keeping pace with the energy transition. 

RTE developed and contributed the initial code for the project in partnership with Savoir-faire Linux, an open source integrator and LF Energy’s newest general member.

“We need to demonstrate that these collaborations work,” Balea said. “Demonstrating how we can work together to bring effective solutions to those challenges we have to solve is a way to convince the others to join LF Energy so we [industry vendors] are not the blocking factor.”