Guest: Boris Dolley (LinkedIn)
Company: RTE (Twitter) | Organization: LF Energy (Twitter)
Show: State of Energy 

Here is a blog summary of our interview with Boris Dolley. Please watch the full interview above as the summary barely scratched the surface of our discussion.

LF Energy is the ‘tree’ that Dr. Shuli Goodman planted in 2018 to benefit future generations, knowing quite well that she would not sit under the shadow of this tree. She passed away recently after a long fight with cancer.

At the 2023 LF Energy Summit in Paris, Boris Dolley, Director of OSPO and Sustainable IT at RTE, recalls the time when Goodman reached out to some European DSOs and TSOs like RTE and Alliander to work on energy transition, climate change, to try and make a better future.

Her message hit the right spot, and European companies started to think “What if open source would be a way to accelerate what we need to accelerate here, not only for our own needs but for all the people and the planet?” Goodman worked closely with the Linux Foundation and LF Energy was created.

The Foundation has today become a backbone for energy companies, enabling them to build software-driven technologies to help them with their transition and help us fight the climate crisis.

In this long interview recorded at the event, Dolley talks about how companies like RTE transformed their internal culture to boost the adoption and contribution to open source technologies. Within a short span of time, the Foundation has become home to many transformative technologies that can benefit the entire energy sector on the planet.

Dolley believes that much of the grassroots open source that is happening in Europe can be attributed to Europe having a lot in common, such as in health, education and of course, ICT. He explains how having public money to share what you do through open source can have an impact on day-to-day actions.

The public sector can now produce open source easily, demonstrating the risks and opportunities it presents, whereby private companies are able to see the advantages of building a business model based on open source.  Dolley talks about companies like Red Hat and Atlassian who are demonstrating the power of leveraging this business model and discusses whether the software is better from a cybersecurity perspective.

Dolley goes into depth about how open source helps facilitate the need for speed with the power system changing so rapidly. He talks about the reflexes that are intrinsic to the open source community and how that makes it sustainable by design for many years to come in the future.

This summary was written by Emily Nicholls.