The current energy sector must shift from legacy control systems, which are rigid and hardware-bound, to digital, software-defined systems that enable greater sustainability, resilience, and intelligence. To support this transformation, LF Energy, a Linux Foundation initiative, has empowered industrial partners for over seven years to collaborate through community-driven OSS projects, accelerating innovation across the digital energy ecosystem.

This talk offers a beginner-friendly introduction to LF Energy and its key projects, with a demo highlighting their role in virtualizing substations, forecasting energy, and simplifying operations through automation. These projects show how IT and AI technologies enhance grid safety, which is critical because failures in energy systems can disrupt public infrastructure. However, unlike pure IT systems, energy infrastructure relies heavily on physical hardware, making large-scale digital adoption more complex. LF Energy’s open innovation model, focused on IT/OT convergence, helps overcome these barriers by enabling redundancy, virtualization, and collaborative development, which leads to a more reliable and intelligent energy future.