LF Energy Summit Europe 2026

Building on the successful deployment of R#SPACE, which virtualizes substation automation functions, RTE launched the VIP’R R&D project to address a key question :
Can a 63 kV substation be reliably protected using virtual distance protection functions from different vendors (ABB and Schneider Electric) running on the open-source SEAPATH platform?

This demo will showcase IT and OT tests performed in RTE’s lab to demonstrate the real-time performance and deterministic behavior of the distance protection function within a SEAPATH cluster.
The session will include an open discussion with the audience on the test setup, results, methodology, and tools use with the participation of Schneider Electric.

As LF Energy SEAPATH adoption continues to grow across the energy ecosystem, making onboarding and first-time evaluation a key topic for new users and contributors.

This session will demonstrate how the SEAPATH community has streamlined the first-user experience to help newcomers get a functional SEAPATH instance running in their lab as quickly and smoothly as possible. Attendees will discover the latest onboarding improvements, including the refactored documentation, the new “Getting Started” experience, the SEAPATH Installer, and the different community resources available through the SEAPATH GitHub ecosystem.

Through a live demonstration, the session will guide users step by step from initial setup to a ready-to-use SEAPATH environment, while highlighting the tools and workflows that simplify experimentation, evaluation, and contribution. The presentation will also share lessons learned from community feedback and explain how these improvements are helping reduce the barrier to entry for industrial-grade virtualization in digital substations.

As the energy sector accelerates its transition toward decentralized power, the need for robust, open-source grid automation has never been greater. LF Energy’s SEAPATH project provides this critical framework, but a resilient platform requires an equally resilient foundation.

In this session, we are thrilled to announce a major milestone: the enablement of SUSE software for the SEAPATH project is officially complete. We will walk through the journey of bringing SEAPATH to the SUSE ecosystem, discussing the technical integration and how leveraging SUSE's enterprise-grade stack provides the security, stability, and lifecycle management that critical energy infrastructure demands.

Key Takeaways:

The Milestone: What the completed SUSE enablement means for the SEAPATH ecosystem and open-source energy innovation.

Under the Hood: How SEAPATH leverages SUSE technologies for optimal performance at the edge.

Real-World Impact: How operators can now confidently deploy mission-critical solutions on this stack.

Join us to see how SEAPATH and SUSE are ready to power the substations of tomorrow!

The tutorial features five presentations from experts contributing to the LF Energy CoMPAS project.

1.Driving CoMPAS Adoption with Better UX
Enhancing user onboarding, reducing training effort and minimizing errors throughout the engineering process.

2. Building an substation specification with CoMPAS
The presentation is focused on the role of top down engineering in Alliander's software defined substation initiative, their steps so far using CoMPAS, their lessons learned and their Outlook.


3. Quality You Can Trust: Raising the Bar for SCL Engineering
Introducing a new validation rules concept for higher SCL quality and efficiency.

4. Designed to Extend: How Developers Shape CoMPAS
Highlighting the design principles, extension points and best practices that enable developers to adapt CoMPAS to specific use cases, without compromising maintainability, upgradability or standards alignment.

5. Extend CoMPAS in Minutes: Build Your First Plugin (Live Coding Session)
By showcasing a real end-to-end example the session aims to demystify the development process, reduce entry barriers and empower new contributors to actively participate in the CoMPAS community.

Grid modernization requires moving beyond proprietary "black boxes" toward open, software-defined substations. This session explores the architecture and lessons learned from building Red Hat’s vPAC (virtualized Protection, Automation, and Control) demonstrator. Aligned with the LF Energy SEAPATH reference design, we share experiences how a single-server setup can host multi-vendor vPAC solutions (by ABB and Euto Energy) in different formats (VM and containers). A key highlight is the coexistence of these critical low-latency workloads with non-critical engineering workstations, running side by side on the same box.

Finally, we share validation results from real-time Hardware-in-the-Loop (HIL) simulations of a medium-voltage substation with 10 bays, proving timely trip responses in our lab environment. Discover how an open, enterprise-grade platform decouples hardware cycles from software innovation to drive grid agility.

Building on the successful deployment of R#SPACE, which virtualizes substation automation functions, RTE launched the VIP’R R&D project to answer a new question :
Can a 63 kV substation be reliably protected using virtual distance protections from different vendors (ABB and Schneider Electric) running on the open source SEAPATH platform ?
In this talk, RTE and Schneider Electric will present the results of tests performed, focusing on the real time performance and deterministic behavior of the distance protection function in a virtualized SEAPATH environment.

As the upcoming release of ABB's SSC600SW approaches, this virtual protection IED for vPACs aims to achieve full compatibility with the LF Energy SEAPATH platform. This presentation details the implementation work required to enable this integration, structured around two key areas.

The first part addresses the integration of a vIED within the SEAPATH ecosystem, using the SSC600SW as a concrete example. It covers the necessary VM configuration considerations and demonstrates how to integrate it with SEAPATH's Ansible inventory and playbook infrastructure.

The second part describes the comprehensive testing methodology employed to validate the functional IT scope of the vIED, ensuring reliable operation within the SEAPATH environment.

Utilities are engaged in a massive digitalization journey. A software-defined approach brings elasticity, efficiency and evolution to installations that need to operate and evolve for decades. It also open new use cases, like AI and IoT.

This session shows how LF Energy SEAPATH combined with Dragonwing platforms delivers one common Linux foundation platform running on a diverse ARM-based portfolio, from high-performance IQ9 and IQ8 Series down to low-power platforms.

A key enabler is the mainline upstream strategy: support in the Linux kernel and surrounding projects and preliminary support is already available in the SEAPATH GitHub repository. This can improve integration cost and provides a sustainable path for timely security updates aligned with NIS2 and IEC 62443.

The talk focuses on the capabilities utilities need first: real-time determinism, bounded network latency for IEC 61850 SV/GOOSE and PTP time synchronization. Dragonwing also unlocks LTE/5G connectivity (including utility bands 450 MHz) and AI at the edge with NPU for anomaly detection to LLM-based operator assistants.

Transmission substations are expected to host more monitoring functions, but each one adds hardware, wiring, panel space, engineering effort and lifecycle cost. In EcoPhi’s 400/225 kV digital substation project with RTE, the approach is one measurement layer supporting multiple virtualized applications.

EcoPhi’s QMU 800 acts as the digital measurement layer, sampling voltage and current signals at up to 2 MHz. The setup follows IEC 61869, allowing substation signals to be digitized once and reused by software applications. EcoPhi’s CMPC 800 provides the edge platform where applications run in a virtualized environment using SEAPATH.

This enables PQ monitoring, PMU/synchrophasor functions, PD monitoring, digital fault recording and digital fault location to run as virtualized applications instead of separate devices. By decoupling measurement from applications, the system reduces hardware duplication, panel complexity, copper wiring, installation, commissioning, maintenance and lifecycle cost.

The presentation will describe the RTE architecture, IEC 61869 setup, roles of QMU 800 and CMPC 800, and lessons from preparing a transmission-grade virtualized substation.

Open Substation is an informal, community-driven initiative to provide a full open-source software stack for Digital Substations. It is currently based on a handful of initial projects including SEAPATH (hypervisor) and OpenEnergyTools (IEC61850 implementation) with the aim to grow over time via new individual contributors and organisations.

Electrical equipment vendors all have access to labs and facilities that enable them to deploy production-grade virtual protection functions in real grids. However, these typically rely on key proprietary components and as such it's difficult for the general public to engage in an open-source way: academics, startups, enthusiasts...

In this lightning talk, we'll go through the steps that first led to the creation of Open Substation, how it's filling the gaps in the stack and most importantly, how you can take part.

Find out more on https://open-substation.codeberg.page/

E4S (Edge for Smart Secondary Substation Systems) is a DSO-driven Alliance developing vendor-neutral Edge specifications for secondary substations.

The initiative promotes an interoperable architecture that enables DSOs to integrate interchangeable components (whether proprietary or open source ones) while providing vendors with a common framework for innovation.

This session will present the E4S architecture and explain how interoperability and even interchangeability are pursued, by decoupling applications from hardware through:

- Open-source hardware abstraction solutions
- OSAL / PSL concepts enabling standardized access to specific devices whose drivers are not available in the Linux kernel

The presentation will be delivered by the lead and co-lead of the E4S Edge Node Software Working Group.