LF Energy Summit Europe 2026

Open source tools can improve transparency, collaboration, and speed in energy system planning, but real adoption requires more than publishing code. Drawing on work with system operators and energy institutions in Europe and Africa, this session shares practical lessons on turning open source models, data, and software into trusted planning workflows that organisations can use, maintain, and scale.

The session will focus on the transition from promising open source projects to production grade use in institutional planning contexts. It will cover the technical foundations needed for adoption, including enterprise grade applications, interoperability with existing tools, planning grade data infrastructure, reproducibility, and comparability across studies. It will also cover the institutional foundations: governance, maintenance, sustainable funding, long term support, training, and local capacity building.

The central argument is that adoption depends not only on code quality, but on trust. Energy institutions need confidence that open source workflows can integrate into existing processes, remain reliable over time, and be supported by credible communities and organisations.

The session will be structured as a combination of short presentations and a panel.
The idea is to debate the way through which research projects can reach commercial success with the support of open source. The debate will done with the support of experts that have been involved in relevant EU projects and that are committed to use open source as a way to build sustainable development after the funding period.
The idea is not only to debate the experiences but also to open the discussion on how to build the right conditions to have many success stories.

Grid resilience is not a new idea. European energy systems have been built for stability, interoperability, and cross-border operation for generations, long before "digital sovereignty" became a policy priority. Energy was at the very heart of European integration from the beginning.

As the grid becomes software-defined, resilience takes on a new dimension. What does continuity of operation mean when critical infrastructure depends on software? And what does the energy sector's knowledge of large-scale, stable transitions offer to the European digital sovereignty debate?

The energy sector sits at a unique intersection: highly regulated, yet positioned to lead other critical sectors. It already operates at continental scale with common standards and complex governance. Interoperability is not a preference here—it is a structural necessity.

The Strategic Roadmap for Digitalisation and AI in Energy is part of the European Commission's Tech Sovereignty Package. This session explores what energy sector expertise in resilient, interoperable, open infrastructure can offer the EU's sovereignty agenda, and what this industry’s leadership might look like in practice.

As the energy sector undergoes rapid digital transformation, Open Source Program Offices (OSPOs) are emerging as strategic enablers within grid operators. Building open source readiness requires more than just technical adoption. It demands cultural and operational transformation. From aligning legal, finance, and executive leadership to equipping engineering teams with the right tools and practices, OSPOs play a critical role in guiding this shift.

This panel brings together OSPO leaders from Cresym, 50Hertz / Elia, and TenneT to explore how open source is reshaping collaboration, innovation, and the digital landscape in the utility sector. As several of these OSPOs are relatively new, the discussion will offer fresh perspectives on the challenges and opportunities of establishing and scaling such capabilities. Panelists will share firsthand experiences in launching and growing OSPOs, navigating internal alignment, and fostering cross-organizational collaboration.

Moderator:
Jonas van den Bogaard, Alliander - confirmed

Speakers:
Geethu Joseph, Cresym
Sven Fritzsche, Elia / 50Hertz
Hugo Pfister, TenneT

LF Energy and the broader energy Open Source ecosystem offer a growing number of promising projects, but for many utilities the challenge is no longer awareness alone — it is understanding which projects are relevant for their operations, how to evaluate them, and how to connect them to real business needs .

E.ON's OSPO built a practical evaluation approach for LF Energy and other industry projects. The goal was to turn the evaluation into something internal stakeholders could understand, discuss, and base their decisions in.

The presentation will introduce the evaluation framework we used to assess selected LF Energy projects and highlight key findings. However, the focus will be on what happened after the OSPO-internal evaluation: how the insights helped us identify the most relevant business units, how we engaged with these teams through targeted user interviews, and how this created a solid baseline towards adoption.

Regulatory frameworks in the energy sector often favor capital expenditures (CapEx) over operational expenses (OpEx), creating a structural disincentive for TSOs and DSOs to develop and publish open-source software. In this talk, we unpack the root causes of this bias and present preliminary findings from our Linux Foundation–funded research. Finally, we outline pathways to realign incentives and enable broader adoption of open source for energy infrastructure.

In an era of rapid energy transition, grid operators face complex software procurement decisions. This session introduces an open-source quantitative framework enabling utilities and regulators to benchmark the total value of OSS adoption. The framework structures decision-making by enumerating benefit and cost components and distilling them into intuitive indices for relative efficiency.

Topics covered in this session:

- OSS Benefit-Cost Framework: A deep dive into the model’s four primary components: Total Cost of Ownership (TCO), Risk Factors (e.g., vendor lock-in, cybersecurity), Strategic Value (e.g., operational efficiency, innovation), and Social Benefits (e.g., sustainability, equity). We will demonstrate how to adapt and extend this framework for specific utility contexts.

- Ecosystem Report: A summary of the current energy software ecosystem using the framework to highlight real-world trends and the strategic advantages of public digital infrastructure.

Attendees will gain a methodology to move beyond qualitative arguments and effectively capture the diverse value OSS offers to the global power grid.

The open source energy community is building the tools that will shape the global energy transition. But who is building those tools and who is being left out of that conversation?

Women remain significantly underrepresented in open source energy modelling worldwide. This is not just an equity issue. It is a capability gap. When the people building energy planning tools do not reflect the diversity of the communities they serve, the solutions themselves fall short.

This session introduces a first-of-its-kind mentorship programme designed to bring more African women into open source energy modelling, developed in partnership between LF Energy, the World Resources Institute, Centre for Net Zero and Open Energy Transition.

The programme builds structured, supported pathways connecting aspiring women energy experts with experienced practitioners. Crucially, it is designed not just to prepare women for the open source community but to prepare the open source community to welcome and sustain them.

Panellists will share how the programme was conceived, how the partnership was built, what the curriculum looks like, and what the community can do to support and sustain it.

At the LF Energy Summit of 2024, Alliander’s OSPO team presented their internal process for preparing projects to be released as open source. One presentation highlighted the tooling and automation in place to review the codebase prior to open sourcing.

After two years of working with this setup, Alliander is improving the automation approach based on the lessons learned during this period. In this presentation, the team of Alliander will share the new insights, the planned improvements and the progress made so far:

Teams now run the pipeline themselves, rather than the OSPO. This required the policies to change to reduce the number of false-positives that would cause confusion. Ideally the automation could be run on the developer laptop and as an open source pipeline on pull-requests after becoming open source. In the meantime Repolinter is no longer maintained, raising the question for revival or replacement. License review of dependencies still requires expertise of the OSPO given the number of false-positives.

The OSPO SIG is the place to continue knowledge sharing and collaboration on this topic in the LF Energy community.