Open source: The key to utility digital sovereignty

Open source collaboration is not merely a technological choice for the energy sector but a strategic imperative for navigating the complexities of today and tomorrow, writes Alex Thornton, Executive Director, Linux Foundation Energy.

Imagine the scenario. You’re a utility that invests in a key new technology, such as digital substations or grid-optimised EV chargers. These technology assets are strategically important to delivering affordable, reliable energy to your customers.

Smart physical assets rely on digital connectivity with the utility and other entities to coordinate, orchestrate and optimise the power grid. Everything is going swimmingly until the fateful day when the OEM goes bankrupt, exits the market, fundamentally changes license terms, is banned due to cybersecurity concerns, or loses favour for strategic geopolitical reasons.

You’re now left holding a bunch of stranded assets that are now ‘dumb’ devices with limited means to manage them and no way to achieve your original strategic goals. How can you avoid this fate and ensure long term security of your digital supply chain?

Utilities and grid operators are in the business of procuring and maintaining assets over decades. Historically, these assets have been physical infrastructure – transformers, poles, wires and the like.

Through years of hard-earned experience, utilities have developed playbooks for managing the supply chain for these physical assets through quality control evaluations, supplier risk assessment, insurance liability and guarantees around long term maintainability. With the rise of digitalisation, distributed systems, virtual power plants (VPPs), AI and software-defined automation, the utility supply chain is evolving to also incorporate digital assets, creating a hybrid physical and digital backbone that operates the grid.

These digital assets move at the speed of IT, evolving far more quickly than physical infrastructure and requiring a more active approach to ensuring long term maintainability and security of supply.

The traditional dilemma: Build vs buy

Digital supply chain management is an important part of a common decision among any technology leader: build it yourself or buy from a vendor. Both approaches have their merits and drawbacks.

Utilities frequently opt to buy solutions for several compelling reasons. Purchasing technology products can accelerate deployment, address immediate needs when in-house expertise is limited, potentially reduce initial costs as the vendor spreads R&D investments across multiple customers, and provides a trusted vendor for support when something goes wrong.

Building and maintaining a team of IT experts is also costly and time-consuming, while traditionally being viewed as outside of the utility’s core business.

However, relying solely on purchased solutions often comes with significant, and underestimated, long-term risks, many that can compromise the digital supply chain. Vendor lock-in creates dependencies that hinder flexibility and innovation. Long-term maintainability is a serious concern, especially for critical infrastructure expected to operate for decades.

Interoperability cannot be guaranteed from these 'black box' environments that implement flavours of various standards and often entails significant integration efforts. Scalability to meet new needs in a changing context is also an issue, as once you get past the requirements stage, anything that wasn’t specified well or changes means extra cost, time and inefficiency for the end user.

Even the best written support contracts cannot guarantee a vendor will never go bankrupt or be subject to events like mergers and acquisitions, at a global scale. This can result in changes of strategy for product lines and discontinuation of support, forcing costly upgrades to newer versions due to customisation or integration with other IT systems.

Such risks exist with power system hardware, but are significantly higher with digital solutions due to the speed of innovation. Will a vendor still support their proprietary solution in 20 years? Stranded assets become an increasingly large risk as the maintenance timeframes increase.

In contrast to buying commercial products, some utilities have chosen to build their own solutions to reduce supply chain risks, maintain control, ensure transparency and tailor systems to their specific needs. While this approach offers unparalleled customisation, it can be time consuming, expensive and duplicative.

Many utilities face similar challenges and require comparable solutions, leading to wasted effort when each organisation develops in isolation. Additionally, most utilities are technology operators, not developers, and lack the in-house critical mass of expertise to develop and maintain homemade solutions.

Open source: A strategic middle ground

This ‘build or buy’ dilemma is a false choice. A powerful third option exists: collaborative innovation through open source technology. This approach captures the best of both options to address long term support, interoperability, changing standards, sovereignty over data and technical assets.

By embracing open source building blocks, utilities can achieve a balance between control, speed and cost-effectiveness. Open source is a proven model for collaborative development, allowing organisations to share the burden of creating fundamental technology assets. These shared components can then be combined and customised to meet individual requirements.

Open source accelerates development and deployment by leveraging existing, vetted code. It provides full transparency, enabling utilities to understand, modify and extend the technology as needed. This level of control is crucial for maintaining digital sovereignty and ensuring long-term adaptability, mitigating that risk of stranded assets.

For utilities that require external support, vendors can provide productised and customised versions of the open source technology. Vendors, in turn, can focus on higher level innovation rather than wasting time and money on undifferentiated, low level and common elements.

While it moves data packets instead of electric power, the telecom industry offers a blueprint for utilities to follow for open source collaboration to create robust digital supply chains. Fiercely competitive with one another, telecom networks have historically been vendor-led, proprietary and slow moving, with standards-based black box equipment deployed globally.

However, in the 2010s telecom operators realised that they could innovate faster, compete more effectively and ensure long term system maintainability if they worked together on foundational building blocks through open source, such as with the Sylva project. The result is a wave of innovation through 5G and 6G that has drastically improved telecom capabilities while lowering consumer costs.

Utilities are one such customer who benefits, no longer needing to roll out their own private networks at massive cost. Even the US Department of Defense is supportive, stating “we want an open-source platform for the future of 6G and beyond".

Real-world implementations: Leading by example

Several pioneering utilities are demonstrating the efficacy of an open source approach. RTE is driving SEAPATH, an open source hypervisor for digital substations, in collaboration with industry partners like Alliander, Enedis, National Grid, ABB, GE Vernova, Schneider Electric, Savoir-faire Linux and Welotec.

Few systems are more mission-critical than primary substations, and SEAPATH has enabled RTE to begin digitalising them with confidence, transparency and full control over the software that runs them, without fear of a vendor changing license terms or withdrawing support 30 years from now.

Southern California Edison leads GEISA, an initiative focused on grid edge interoperability and security, alongside Portland General Electric, Utilidata and Sense. Intended to streamline the cybersecurity, deployment, scaling and operation of next-generation grid edge computing and applications, the GEISA execution environment supports grid operations, orchestration of distributed energy resources, AI and other advanced functionality at the edge.

GEISA includes conformance testing for a consistent, industry-wide, multi-vendor, interoperable, approach to securely deploying grid edge applications. This unlocks value for all involved, allowing vendors to focus on innovation rather than infrastructure while reducing the security audit burden on utility IT teams and accelerating the pace of technology deployment.

Europe's drive for digital sovereignty

A continent lacking a homegrown tech giant, Europe is increasingly recognising digital sovereignty as an area of strategic importance across the entire economy, and even more so with mission critical infrastructure such as energy.

The European Commission often funds research projects resulting in meaningful open source outputs, such as with SOGNO, interSTORE and AI4REALNET. Because the outputs are open source, the projects can live even after the funding ends.

While the Commission has planted these seeds, European utilities and vendors must harvest the fruit from these EU-funded research projects to ensure they transition into production use. Utilities should signal market demand for solutions built on open source components. Vendors should answer this market demand by using these open source components to accelerate their commercial product development.

Navigating a complex and uncertain future

The electric grid and the industry that supports it are undergoing unprecedented transformation. Rapid technological advancements, evolving market dynamics and geopolitical uncertainties are reshaping the landscape. In this environment, maintaining digital sovereignty and control over critical infrastructure is essential.

Counterintuitively, the best way to achieve this control is through collaboration. By adopting and signaling market demand for open source building blocks, utilities can manage loosely coupled supply chain dependencies, ensuring long-term maintainability, customisation and resilience. This approach fosters innovation, reduces risk and empowers utilities to control their digital destiny. Vendors benefit by building commercial products on top of the open source core, redirecting R&D to more strategically important areas to deliver better products, faster.

The energy sector stands at a pivotal moment. Embracing open source collaboration is not merely a technological choice; it is a strategic imperative for navigating the complexities of today and tomorrow. By working together, utilities can build a more secure, affordable, interoperable and innovative energy system.

About the author

Alex Thornton currently serves as Executive Director of Linux Foundation Energy, where he works to cultivate open source technology and standards for rapid energy system decarbonisation. Prior to LF Energy, he served in leadership positions at energy and climate innovators as well as in advisory roles with other climate tech companies. He also has consulted on energy policy for the European Commission.