Dive Brief:
- LF Energy announced the Configuration Modules for Power industry Automation Systems (CoMPAS) project June 24 to accelerate global efforts to achieve carbon neutrality by 2050.
- CoMPAS should enable grid operators to manage the transition to clean energy, handling fluctuations in supply from renewable resources and demand from electric vehicles, according to LF Energy and its partners on the project.
- Those partners include Dutch utility Alliander, French transmission supply organization RTE, General Electric’s French subsidiary GE Renewable Energy, and Schneider Electric, a European automation and systems developer.
Dive Insight:
The growth of renewable energy and electric vehicles is creating new demands on power grids and LF Energy has brought together a number of players to help improve one aspect of that.
“We need to accelerate decarbonization,” Shuli Goodman, the group's executive director told Utility Dive. “As a global society, we are at a turning point in history,” she said.
LF Energy is part of the open source Linux Foundation and describes itself as "an umbrella organization designed to establish open, interoperable frameworks for accelerating the energy transition." Existing substation control hardware and software are both proprietary, according to Goodman.
She described the CoMPAS project as “cooperative and collaborative.”
“Digitalization not only will decrease costs, but also will change the competitive landscape,” Goodman said.
The Linux Foundation announced the launch of its Digital Substation Automation Systems (DSAS) initiative to enhance the power grid’s modularity, interoperability, and scalability along with the CoMPAS project.
CoMPAS’s software components will be developed according to IEC 61850, an international standard for electrical substation systems, according to an LF Energy statement.
A final version of the code will be debugged and deployed from LF Energy’s secure servers rather than GitHub repositories, Goodman told Utility Dive, in response to questions about cybersecurity.
LF Energy expects to have a version of its systems ready for use in a few years.
“CoMPAS will have an intermediate version of the platform for automation applications by end of 2021 and reach a qualified industrial-grade implementation by end of 2023,” Goodman said.
“Digital Substations are growing up and this is the first time that so many leaders in the energy space have come together to create software to speed up this technology,” Philippe Brun, solutions product manager at GE Renewable Energy, said in a statement.
“Utilities must realize going it alone is no longer an option,” Goodman told Utility Dive. “In Europe, they understand the need to work across borders. The U.S., Canada, and Mexico are going to have to work together going forward,” Goodman said.
