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.