Linux Foundation introduces significant software releases

Software updates have been introduced to six releases in recent months, Linux Foundation Energy has announced, alongside other developments.

LF Energy, which develops open source solutions, states “major software releases” have been issued by the six projects.

Arras Energy, a tool for the development and deployment of smart grid and renewable energy resource integration technology that was originally developed at the Pacific Northwest National Laboratory and subsequently upgraded with California Energy Commission support, has been officially transferred to LF Energy with the release of HiPAS GridLAB-D Version 4.3.1 (chiba-1).

The release includes support for new use cases; a new fire danger tool; voltage, current and power flow violation detection capabilities; and new support for historical, current and forecast weather.

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FlexMeasures, an intelligent energy management system to support real-time energy flexibility scheduling, has had the release of version 0.1 of the new FlexMeasures client.

The FlexMeasures client, which is written in Python, is in use in a new service with smart heat storage control and in another project to optimise and automate vehicle-to-grid charging, while among future features anticipated is the addition of sensors.

OperatorFabric, a modular, extensible, industrial-strength, and field-tested platform for systems operators, has been released in versions 3.15.0 and 3.15.1.

Together these add new features including the ability to better detect loss of connection, as well as bug fixes and tasks.

Power Grid Model, a high-performance library for steady-state distribution power system analysis, has been released in version 1.5.0.

New features include short circuit calculations according to the IEC60909 standard as well as improvements to the documentation and C API.

PowSyBl (Power System Blocks), an open source library dedicated to electrical grid modelling and simulation, has had its last release train with the powsybl-dependencies 2023.2.1.

New features include support of ZIP and exponential load monitoring, load and line asymmetrical extensions, refactoring of tie lines and basic implementation of asymmetric AC load flow.

RTDIP, which provides easy access to high volume, historical and real-time process data for analytics applications, is under investigation to assess the potential of generative AI to query structured data with the RTDIP SDK version 0.5.0.

An example is whether generative AI could query time series data to answer a question such as ‘What was the average actual power generated by turbine 1 at ACME wind farm on 6 May?’

These six projects are among 25 that LF Energy is implementing, which together have seen some 8 million new lines of code added over the past year, the organisation said in a statement.

“Open source is experiencing tremendous momentum in the energy sector after years of innovation,” said Arpit Joshipura, Interim Executive Director, LF Energy.

“Software, community, projects, and deployments are all experiencing growth. This progress cannot happen fast enough if we are going to meet the ambitious decarbonization goals set by national and international bodies.”

LF Energy also records the addition of six new members over the past year to bring its membership to approach 75.