All right. I think we can begin. So, good afternoon. Thank you all for being here at the on-campus
part of the Energy Dev Room. And as you might have seen, we kicked off the Energy Dev Room
this morning with an online section. And there was quite a bit of interaction. We had nine
great presentations, over 70 people in the chat. And yeah, of course, many, multiple
of that, of people actually watching the live stream. So, I was glad that the hybrid form
was working out. And yeah, we are here with the team that made this Energy Dev Room possible.
Nicholas Hoening, Dan Brown, Annalena Helsen, and Kajua Hermann. And some of them will be
presenting or have presented already. My name is Nico Rikke and I've been active in the energy
sector and the free and open-source software community for quite a while now. And I will
repeat some of the talks I did this morning. I assume most of you here have not yet seen
that talk, that speech. So, in the last couple of years, I've seen free and open-source software
take over the energy sector. And being active in that energy sector, I thought it would
be cool to have an Energy Dev Room here at FOSDEM like this. And FOSDEM gave us the opportunity
after we submitted a proposal. And then you responded with proposals. And we were overwhelmed
by the amount of proposals we got. We got submissions that ranged from home automation
to green software and energy system modeling. And by adding the online section in the morning
and bit shortening the talks, we were able to accommodate most of them. But still we
had to say no to a couple. So, maybe next year, right? Energy, of course, is a timely
subject. Our society runs on cheap and reliable energy. And that is something we can no longer
take for granted. Scientists, they warn us that we are acting too slowly. I need to ramp
up the adoption of renewable energy. The Russian invasion of Ukraine made matters worse by
disrupting supplies and causing a price hike. And so it is clear that our energy system
is under pressure. Citizens are protesting. Businesses are shutting down. And so society
needs solutions. And they also demand them. Unfortunately, it's not just a matter of installing
wind turbines and solar panels because these new sources of energy are decentralized and
they are weather bound by nature. And thus they require changes in energy management
and distribution. While energy generation consumption and distribution differs per country,
we can really speed up the worldwide energy transition by a tremendous amount if we avoid
the usual reinvention of the digital wheels. And we think that this is the mission that
unites us here today at FOSSTEM in this energy dev room. Today's presentations you'll see
or have seen will cover projects that model, manage and optimize energy. And unfortunately,
these solutions will not be sufficient to solve the energy crisis or limit climate
change by themselves. More impactful and direct changes will be necessary to achieve
those goals. But these projects can be the building blocks of the future energy system.
So the projects presented here today, besides being great projects, are available under a
free and open source license. And this is important because it enables collaboration,
mass adoption and customizations to fit specific use cases. And this really fits the energy
system in which everything is in a state of change and integration is needed to fulfill
the purpose. So I hope you all will take this opportunity today to learn, get inspired and
strengthen the free and open source software energy software community. So please raise
your questions after the presentations in the Q&A or join the online conversation in
the matrix chat room. And Alina will keep an eye on that. And so all of us would like
to thank everybody that made this all possible. So we'd like to thank the FOSSTEM organizers
and volunteers, the people that put in the effort to submit proposals, all selected speakers
and all of you for participating. Thank you and have a great conference.