Guest: Jonas van den Bogaard (LinkedIn)
Organization/Company: LF Energy (Twitter) | Alliander (Twitter) 
Show: State of Energy

As the largest distribution system operator in the Netherlands, Alliander is at the very core of the rapidly changing energy market. Like many operators, Alliander is keen to move toward cleaner, renewable energy and they believe that open source lies at the heart of this transition.

In this episode of State of Energy recorded at the 2023 LF Energy Summit in Paris, Jonas van den Bogaard, Open Source Office Lead at Alliander, talks about some of the key challenges the energy market is facing and how open source is helping to overcome them. He goes on to discuss Alliander’s own involvement in open source and the projects they are working on currently.

• Alliander is the largest distribution system operator in the Netherlands, responsible for 6 million customer connections and managing over 90,000 kilometers for the electricity grid to ensure that all households and companies have access to energy at all times.
• The energy market is changing significantly due to fossil fuels becoming more scarce and environmental factors. Van den Bogaard tells us that new initiatives are emerging around the world to conserve energy. He talks about the changes he is seeing and the effect they are having on distribution system operators (DSOs) like Alliander.
• Digitalization is helping companies like Alliander overcome some of these challenges, such as in the use case of steering supply and demand at times when maximum grade capacity may be reached. Van den Bogaard explains the different scenarios that they encounter in this use case.
• Van den Bogaard discusses the importance of open source saying 95% of organizations are using it in mission-critical environments and it is integral to many new innovations in the cloud-native space. He talks about why open source is important for Alliander, such as it leading to more stable software and fostering innovation with a limited budget.
• There are a couple of open-source projects Alliander is involved in, one is an open short term energy forecasting (OpenSTEF) project, and a power grid model project which they contributed to LF Energy this year. Van den Bogaard explains how the two projects are helping with congestion management.
• Van den Bogaard believes that moving to cleaner, renewable energy is key and that open source can help bring together great minds to work to overcome these challenges. He discusses Alliander’s motivations to embrace open source and why others should too.

This summary was written by Emily Nicholls.