LF Energy Summit Europe 2026

The EV charging industry is undergoing a massive transformation, mirroring the broader tech shift toward Software-Defined Vehicles (SDV) and Software-Defined Networking (SDN). Welcome to the era of Software-Defined Charging (SDC).
Historically, charging stations were built using rigid hardware blocks, requiring separate microcontrollers for every new functional domain: from complex protocols (ISO 15118) to load balancing and UI. This fragmented, bare-metal architecture slows innovation, drives up BOM costs, and makes feature updates nearly impossible.

SDC changes the paradigm by decoupling hardware from software. By consolidating high-level logic onto a centralized computing unit, manufacturers can drastically reduce complexity and completely transform the product lifecycle. Instead of deploying static hardware that quickly ages out, SDC enables a continuous software lifecycle via over-the-air updates, keeping field assets relevant for years.

In this talk, we will explore how the open-source EVerest project acts as the operating engine for SDC, enabling the hardware ecosystem to mix-and-match physical components, build flexible satellite systems, and utilize digital twin testing.

In this demo, Daniel Roesler, founder of DRX Gateway, will show a demonstration of the first implementation of LF Energy's CDS protocols on the DRX Gateway platform. The demo will include three parts: (1) how a utility can launch and configure a server that complies with CDS specifications, (2) how external companies can automate connecting to that server using CDS standardized protocols, and (3) how secure data exchange and communication can take place using CDS specified APIs. The goal of this demonstration is to show how important the CDS project is to unlocking scalable connectivity in the energy industry.

As buildings become active participants in the energy transition, understanding flexibility at the building and occupant level is becoming increasingly important for addressing grid congestion challenges. While many energy system models rely on simplified representations, detailed grid-integrated building models can provide deeper insight into how HVAC systems, EV charging, distributed energy resources, and occupant behavior interact with the grid in practice.

This talk presents CityLearn as an open-source platform for studying coordinated energy flexibility strategies across buildings and districts. Recently integrated into the LF Energy community, CityLearn enables researchers and practitioners to explore how building dynamics and occupant-centric control approaches can reveal flexibility potential often overlooked in simplified representations. The session will discuss advanced control strategies for HVAC systems, electrical storage, EV charging, and occupant comfort, together with the importance of connecting detailed building intelligence with broader power grid modeling frameworks to better capture realistic building-grid interactions.

GEISA, the Grid Edge Interoperability and Security Alliance, is an effort within LF Energy to enable application interoperability in edge devices like smart meters and distribution automation devices. To ensure implementations comply with the specification, a dedicated conformance application has been developed to validate that the specification is correctly implemented on target hardware. In this talk, Kévin will present the role of the conformance application as well as the benefits to use and extend it.

We ran a comparative AI audit of the microgrid standards corpus — IEEE 2030.5, IEC 61850, CIM, OpenADR 3, ISO 15118, IEEE 1547, SunSpec — using Claude, Mistral, and a locally hosted model with identical prompts and metrics. This lightning talk shows the convergent findings: which clauses already cover AI-agent operation on DER, where the gaps are, and the v0 interface contract (GAIFARE) we drafted in the ORES repo to fill them — capability declaration, bounded authority, decision auditability, data governance. Prompts, metrics, and gap map are public.

Home Energy Management Systems (HEMS) increasingly operate in non-stationary conditions: changing tariffs, evolving household behavior, new DER assets, and fragmented device ecosystems. Most current deployments still rely on static rules and periodically retrained models, which degrade under drift and are hard to maintain at scale.

This session presents a self-evolving HEMS architecture that closes the loop across three core tasks:
(1) classification for safety/reliability monitoring,
(2) regression for PV/load forecasting, and
(3) optimization that converts natural-language user goals into executable schedules.

An LLM-centered orchestration layer coordinates rule engines, ML models, user/context memory, and control APIs to support transparent interaction, adaptive decision-making, and continuous improvement. We share field-oriented case studies showing improved robustness in detection, better forecasting performance, and practical end-to-end scheduling execution.

The talk focuses on reusable architectural patterns and deployment lessons relevant to open, software-defined energy systems.

This demo introduces Smart HEMS-Benchmark, an open benchmarking framework for residential DER systems that is entering the LF Energy project onboarding process. It addresses a key gap in today’s ecosystem: the lack of transparent, standardized, and reproducible evaluation for HEMS performance across technologies, regions, and policy settings.
We demonstrate an end-to-end workflow across three layers: (1) location and sizing assessment with long-horizon techno-economic analysis, (2) HEMS algorithm benchmarking under standardized scenarios, and (3) VPP participation benchmarking for grid-service and market-oriented use cases. The demo covers uncertainty-aware simulation (load, PV, price, device behavior), multiple tariff models (fixed, TOU, dynamic), and policy regimes (e.g., net metering, net billing, non-export).
By combining open datasets, consistent metrics, and repeatable pipelines, Smart HEMS-Benchmark enables fair comparison from baseline strategies to advanced AI-driven control, supporting both research and real-world deployment decisions.

OpenADR is a protocol to connect the grid to smart energy. Utilities send events to EMS & aggregators, who adapt scheduling for their flexible assets to improve thr local grid situation.

In this session, we bring OpenADR to an actionable implementation, fully based on open-source software (two LF Energy projects, in fact!). We present a new plugin to the Cloud EMS FlexMeasures, which enables FlexMeasures sites to receive OpenADR events (acting as an Virtual End Node or "VEN", in OpenADR terms). OpenLEADR is used to add such signals from the utility side (acting as a Virtual Top Node, or "VTN").

The use case we present in this session is that a utility sends congested time slots on a daily basis to charge point operators in its network. This use case is currently being piloted in the Netherlands with OpenADR.
We will show how utilities can enter and broadcast these congestion signals with OpenLEADR. The CPOs will take these dynamic limits into account in their optimized charge scheduling. We'll show how an existing behind-the-meter orchestration is built in FlexMeasures (where much more than "just" EV charging can be modelled), and how the new event will influence this planning.

Charging elements and energetic flow of the test bench setup

Typical Use Cases and Car Communication
The difference in demonstration sites within BiFlex-Industrie research project
DC bidirectional with ISO 15118-20 as standardized charging communication protocol for EV and EVSE

Software Tools
Smartphone charging App
Nymea IoT Demo Server (it is for Linux)
LF Energy EVerest Framework for car charging
Connection API
Implementation concepts of home automation and control architecture
Why extensibility matters
Separation of concerns. Advantages of ripe special domain tools against locked systems and cloud-based approaches.

Hardware Concept
Test bench DC-Charger with EVerest
Car simulation with chargebytes Charge Control L
Enabled ISO 15118-20 protocols with TLS
Optional mobile phone App as remote control and UI

Demonstration
Automated charging strategy creation
Forecasting and environmental condition parameters influence charging

Conclusion
Making use of volatile renewable energy by charging and discharging electric cars is valuable, publicly available and technically prepared

In this presentation, Daniel Roesler, the maintainer of multiple LF Energy CDS working groups, will give an overview of the CDS project (cds.lfenergy.org) and all the exciting things that have been happening in the past year. With all of the major changes happening in the energy landscape (EVs, AI, fuel shortages, higher bills, grid balancing, etc.), now more than ever utilities need ways of effectively and scalably connecting to many different external organizations (customers, aggregators, smart devices, etc.). The CDS project aims to offer free, open, and secure standardized protocols for solving the huge problem of utility external connectivity. Daniel will also delve into the innovative parts of the various CDS specifications that make CDS more appealing than ever. Daniel has over a decade of experience in utility data protocols, including implementing APIs for multiple utilities and participating in multiple regulatory proceedings in the United States and Canada.

Demo of the FlexMeasures project, a framework to optimize behind-the-meter energy flexibility continuously:

- Motivation & Use Cases
- Concepts & Architecture
- Going through the first starter's tutorials
- Show example data (visuals) from a building optimization
- How the UI allows non-developers to work with data & settinga
- How developers can script such a site (asset setup, data upload, forecasting, scheduling) from 0 to 100
- Roadmap & ways to collaborate / extend

This panel will explore the evolution of the world's first open reference code base for SunSpec Modbus and IEEE 2030.5, two communication standards now embedded in grid modernization efforts in several global regions. The discussion will examine how open-source development transformed these protocols from specification documents into deployable, production-grade software infrastructure used throughout the DER ecosystem.
Speakers will discuss historical developments of SunSpec interoperability frameworks and the emergence of open repositories like pysunspec2 and Open SVP, and the recent contribution of a production-hardened IEEE 2030.5 stack developed through commercial deployment experience. The panel will also address technical gaps, cybersecurity considerations, certification challenges, and the importance of collaboration in scaling interoperable energy systems.