The Rise of Open Source in Energy Solutions

Throughout my experiences at UVA as a CS major, I have personally seen and reaped the benefits of open source design and in particular, open source software. I was able to utilize Hadoop, a renowned piece of open source software used by several big companies today, to successfully create a marketplace that is able to make recommendations for users based on what they and other users have clicked in the past. Companies like Google and Amazon have become the powerhouses that they are today as a result of the rise of open source. We see how the shared communication has helped build the AI/Machine Learning community (the creation of AI’s playing optimally in games like Dota, Go, and Chess can all be attributed directly or indirectly to open source). The success that a lot of technology companies have found as a result of open source software has caused a lot of “traditional” sectors to turn towards open source in order to further push and accelerate the innovative process. In particular, the push to go green has caused the energy industry to look towards open source to address changing needs.

TenneT is one of the most recent examples of how the energy industry has started to tap into open source design. Currently, TenneT’s platform works on collecting and compiling energy usage data, as well as weather data to predict energy production and demand¹. Although this sort of big data usage is pretty standard in itself, it opens up a standard for communication between the tools that both energy producers and utility companies use. As a result, many power stations have replaced physical devices to monitor currents with software-based monitoring systems that can be integrated with other control systems¹. Alongside TenneT, Alliander is also a company that is working on open source technology. They launched the “Open Smart Grid Platform”, which was introduced to a Linux Foundation umbrella that essentially allows all of the energy companies to work with the same open source standards and software². This allows so that instead of everyone trying to design a new product, each new software can provide a foundation that all the other companies can build upon, thus defining software standards within the energy industry⁴.

In the renewable energy sector, open source was commonly seen as a “cheaper alternative” to having proprietary software. However, today we are seeing open source being encouraged even in the renewable energy sector in order to tackle problems such as data collection and storage, optimization, building rudimentary tools, etc. In particular, we can look at the A&S Energie’s experience. A&S Energy is a Belgian company that supplies electricity to around 60,000 households by burning 180,000 metric tons of non-recyclable wood every year³. However, A&S Energie struggled in terms of collecting management reports and data points, and often relied on very error-prone processes. As a result, a company called Factry created an open source, time-series database that supplies an open-source dashboard to management and individual operators. This always allows for operators to determine and keep track of the overall level of energy generation , to ensure that they are producing the right amount of energy that consumers are demand³. This has helped companies like A&S Energie produce renewable energy more efficiently and at a rate that is able to match the demands of their customers. The benefits of open source software in this realm, is that creating technologies that anyone can use allows renewable energy companies to collaborate with each other and determine the needs of the companies and the industry as a whole. This allows for more focused innovation particularly on the software being created.

By 2050, the EU aims to reduce carbon emissions by at least 80 percent⁵. California claims that it hopes to go carbon neutral by 2045. Goals like these require using alternative energy sources, particularly wind and solar¹. However, these sources of energy often vary in terms of production levels from day to day, as a result of changing weather among other things. These technologies thus present different and new challenges in regards to managing utilities and logistics. We can thus see the benefits that creating open source technology in the manner that Alliander, TenneT, and A&S Energie all did in helping tackle these new technological problems. Finding a consistent source of energy that is non-detrimental to the environment seemed very difficult to do even just 15–20 years ago. However, with the growth of open source design and software, companies can now work together to accelerate the process of innovation and help find new energy and software solutions that will allow these dreams of an eco-friendly energy world to become a reality faster than 2050.

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