The U.S. Department of Energy’s (DOE’s) Office of Electricity is excited to announce the $2.5 million Digitizing Utilities Prize Round 3: Resilient Grid Innovation.
Donor Name: U.S. Department of Energy (DOE)
State: All States
County: All Counties
Type of Grant: Awards and Prizes
Deadline: 05/02/2025
Size of the Grant: $100,000 to $500,000
Grant Duration: Grant Duration Not Mentioned
Details:
Round 3 of this competition aims to incentivize technology development partnerships with interdisciplinary teams of utility and energy sector partners with software developers and data experts to facilitate the transformation of digital systems, data analytics, and grid resource integration for the electric sector.
The electric industry sector is facing an explosion of data coming from a variety of sources. New types of sensors have been deployed with fast-streaming datasets (one such example is data from phasor measurement units), challenging utilities’ traditional methods of data acquisition, use, and storage. Meanwhile, big data analytics products and related services for the utility industry are limited; most of the available products having only modest electricity domain expertise.
Electric sector stakeholders are facing an emerging need to capitalize on large datasets, both internally generated data and externally generated data (e.g., weather data, topographic data, information related to vegetation), to improve reliability and resilience and meet the changing system dynamics from renewable integration, which is another key emerging challenge area. Utilities are beginning to leverage information and communication technologies and automation techniques to create new business opportunities and manage market-driven change.
DOE invites utilities and other energy sector partners to connect with interdisciplinary teams of software developers, data experts, and risk and decision scientists to facilitate the transformation of digital systems, data analytics, and risk-informed resource integration for electric utilities. Non-utility or energy sector partner teams must partner with an energy sector partner in order to be eligible to compete in the prize.
These challenges can include not only using data with analytics, but also developing pipelines for processing, data quality assurance, data storage, and deletion.
For this prize, an energy sector partner must be located in the United States and could include any of the following:
- Rural electric cooperatives
- Utilities owned by a political subdivision of a state, such as a municipally owned electric utility
- Utilities owned by any agency, authority, corporation, or instrumentality of one or more political subdivisions of a state
- Investor-owned electric utilities
- Regional transmission operators/independent system operators
- Electric aggregator
- Electric wire owning and/or operating entities.
DOE intends for the solutions developed under this prize to be shared as examples with the broader energy sector community on how to solve data and/or resource integration challenges.
Competitor Tracks and Prize Pools
The Digitizing Utilities Prize Round 3 offers a total prize pool of $2.50 million across two tracks and a bonus prize.
- Track 1: Resource Integration Under Uncertainty
- Phase 1: Teams will connect with an energy sector partner to identify a challenge or opportunity and propose a plan on systematic characterization and communication of uncertainties to improve energy resource utilization, adequacy, and integration for operations and planning.
- Teams must demonstrate a deep understanding of the challenge and propose how they will collaboratively identify and address the problem with stakeholders. Up to eight winners will each receive $75,000 and will move on to Phase 2.
- Phase 2: Teams further their solution(s) and demonstrate their technologies that addresses the identified challenge. Teams also demonstrate how their methods and process could be used by other key stakeholders in the future. At the end of Phase 2, up to three competitors will be selected as a winner and will receive a cash prize of $200,000.
- Phase 1: Teams will connect with an energy sector partner to identify a challenge or opportunity and propose a plan on systematic characterization and communication of uncertainties to improve energy resource utilization, adequacy, and integration for operations and planning.
- Track 2: Sensors and Datasets for Integration of Inverter-Based Resources and Large Loads
- Phase 1: Teams will connect with an energy sector partner to identify a challenge or opportunity and propose a plan to validate an approach that utilizes new grid-sensing capabilities. The proposed approach should use measurements from sensors deployed in a power grid and their correlation with additional data sources.
- The team’s plan should specify how research datasets will be made publicly available if the team is selected to participate in Phase 2. Up to eight winning teams will receive $75,000 each in cash and will be eligible to compete in the next phase.
- Phase 2: Teams will work with their energy sector partner to implement their solution and contribute to public repositories of grid data, such as the Grid Event Signature Library or Open Energy Data Initiative. Datasets should not be submitted directly, but a link to the data on an open repository should be included in the application.
- At the end of Phase 2, up to three winning teams that successfully present their progress toward implementing their solution will receive $200,000 each in cash.
- Phase 1: Teams will connect with an energy sector partner to identify a challenge or opportunity and propose a plan to validate an approach that utilizes new grid-sensing capabilities. The proposed approach should use measurements from sensors deployed in a power grid and their correlation with additional data sources.
- Bonus Prize – Extremes Applications
- Extreme events include but are not limited to hydro-climatological events such as wildfires, tornados, ice- and snowstorms, hurricanes, floods, heatwaves, and droughts. Moreover, considerations of “compound events” that assess the combination of interacting extremes across multiple spatial and temporal scales are encouraged.
Eligibility Criteria
The competition is open only to private entities (for-profits and nonprofits); nonfederal government entities such as states, counties, tribes, and municipalities; and academic institutions; subject to the following requirements:
- A competitor may only submit a single submission per track. Competitors who choose to submit to both tracks must submit using different innovations/solutions.
- Multiple submissions from the same entity or institution can be summitted as long as there are no overlapping team members.
- A group of individuals competing as one team may win, provided that the online account holder of the submission is a U.S. citizen or permanent resident. Individuals competing as part of a team are eligible to participate if they are legally authorized to work in the United States.
- Private entities must be incorporated in and maintain a primary place of business in the United States.
- Academic institutions must be based in the United States.
- DOE employees, employees of sponsoring organizations, members of their immediate families (e.g., spouses, children, siblings, or parents), and persons living in the same household as such persons, whether or not related, are not eligible to participate in the prize.
- Individuals who worked at DOE (federal employees or support service contractors) within 6 months prior to the submission deadline of any contest are not eligible to participate in any prize contests in this program.
- Federal entities and federal employees are not eligible to participate in any portion of the prize.
- DOE national laboratory employees cannot compete in the prize.
- Entities and individuals publicly banned from doing business with the U.S. government, such as entities and individuals debarred, suspended, or otherwise excluded from or ineligible for participating in federal programs, are not eligible to compete.
- Individuals participating in a foreign government talent recruitment program sponsored by a country of risk and teams that include such individuals are not eligible to compete.
- Entities owned by, controlled by, or subject to the jurisdiction or direction of a government of a country of risk are not eligible to compete.
For more information, visit DOE.
