LF Energy Summit: Leveraging Technology to Realize Grid Decarbonization
Last month, I had the exciting opportunity to represent Singularity Energy at the Linux Foundation Energy Summit in Paris, France. I was able to present some electricity delivery research that our team has been working on over the last few months (watch the panel here). We also got to hear from experts across software, power systems operators, and academia about everything they’re doing to further grid decarbonization. Here are some of the most exciting trends I noticed during the conference:
Power system operators are seeing the benefits of using open software.
Throughout Europe, power system operators at all scales, from distribution operators in individual cities to operators in charge of continent-scale coordination, are starting to use open software. This shift brings exciting opportunities for collaboration and innovation. Two examples of this open software adoption on display at the LF Energy Summit were SOGNO and PowSyBl:
- Antonello Monti, professor at RWTH Aachen, shared how the open SOGNO platform has been deployed in Rome’s distribution grid to provide flexible demand. Deployment on a real grid is no easy feat: it requires interfacing with legacy data systems, providing a high level of reliability, and enabling a market for grid actors to buy and sell demand flexibility. But along with the challenges of implementation come opportunities, like a new project where the SOGNO platform could be adopted for use in EV charging hotspots. Check out the slides here.
- Nicolas Omont, from Artelys, shared how Europe’s Regional Coordination Centers (RCCs), which are responsible for ensuring safe, coordinated grid operations across Europe’s many grid operators, are using the open source PowSyBl to run security analysis of the European system. Check out his slides here.
Open software for power systems is good and getting better.
Power systems are an essential backbone of our world. That means that real-world deployment of open software like SOGNO and PowSyBl is only possible if the tools are reliable, scalable, and secure. The Linux Foundation provides administrative and financial structure for the open source projects it hosts, enabling them to achieve the reliability essential to real-world deployment.
The Linux Foundation’s growing collection of energy-related projects cover everything from grid modeling and operational tools like PowSyBl and SOGNO to data standards like the Carbon Data Specification that aim to make carbon data intelligible across tools and platforms. The diversity of LF Energy projects illustrates an important fact of the power system software landscape: decarbonizing the grid is complicated, and there’s not one tool that can do it all. Instead, the LF Energy Summit showed how powerful it can be to have a suite of tools and a community of experts applying those tools to real-world grid decarbonization.
Sometimes it’s about choosing the right tool for the job, not making the right tool for all jobs
At Singularity, some of our work requires running simulations of power grids. There are lots of tools to do this work, from the expensive proprietary solutions often used by grid operators in the U.S. to research tools like PyPSA used in university labs and designed to be easy-to-use. The wealth of options invites a simple question: what’s the difference, and which one is the right one to use?
The LF Energy Summit reframed this abundance of tools for me. There isn’t one right tool for all projects — instead, it’s all about choosing the right tool for your specific use case. PyPSA is a research tool whose simplified models are perfect for capacity expansion modeling, which can answer big questions about how to best achieve grid decarbonization in the decades to come. PowSyBl, on the other hand, is built for deployment in power systems. It might not be as easy to model the impact of a still theoretical battery technology (a perfect use case for PyPSA!) but it is possible to study, with high accuracy, the security of the entire European transmission system.
Research is essential for making informed decisions.
At the LF Energy Summit, I presented some of Singularity’s recent research on a panel hosted by Google’s Hallie Cramer, alongside Ana Radovanovic (Google) and Iegor Riepinwith (TU Berlin). You can check out the full presentation here.
Singularity has been using our CarbonFlowTM technology to trace the physical delivery of power through the transmission system from generators to loads. We’ve found that most generation is consumed close to where it’s generated, but that the locations of big load centers can change patterns of delivery. These limited locations of delivery have implications for electricity procurement as electricity consumers try to reduce their emissions. It was exciting to talk on the panel with Iegor, who uses capacity expansion modeling to study the impact of procurement decisions on grid decarbonization, about how different electricity procurement guidelines based on location or time-matching might impact the system as a whole.
Throughout the panel, one theme kept coming up: to decarbonize the grid, we need robust data and research to ensure we’re making effective changes. The hard work of all the attendees at the LF Energy Summit is helping us make data-driven strides towards a cleaner future.
