UNIFI Grid Forming Inverter Consortium

I am an engineer at one of the industrial partners that recently won a 25M grant to form a "grid forming inverter consortium".

The project is early stage, but one goal of the project is to develop some embedded control libraries for implementing the standard to serves as a reference implementation. In some of the early meetings, I have suggested using Rust rather than C for these libraries, as historically domain experts in inverter controls are not the best at writing safe, portable, and performant embedded C code. I think Rust could be potentially a much better option.

Anyways, I'd like this email to be a bit of a call to arms for all fellow Rustaceans interested in grid forming inverters and renewable energy. Let me know your interest level, experience, and general feelings on the maturity of Rust for embedded. I will keep the community posted on progress as well as potential ways to get involved.

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This is really promising!

I would expect a bit of push-back from some of your stakeholders/domain experts because this tends to be a fairly risk-averse industry and C is what everyone is already familiar with, but the Rust language and ecosystem are definitely up to the task.

You may want to get in contact with Ferrous Systems as they have a lot of experience in the embedded Rust world. We've used their services in the past at work and were quite happy with them.

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