The U.S. Department of Energy’s (DOE’s) Office of Electricity is excited to the $2.4 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: Grant
Deadline: 04/09/2026
Size of the Grant: $10,000 to $100,000
Grant Duration: Grant Duration Not Mentioned
Details:
Round 3 of this competition aims to incentivize technology development partnerships with interdisciplinary teams of software developers and data experts to transform 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.
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 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 aggregators
- Electric wire owning and/or operating entities.
Prize Pools
The Digitizing Utilities Prize Round 3 offers a total prize pool of $2,425,000 in prizes.
- Phase 1 — Plan: $75,000 cash prize each
- Phase 2 — Progress: $150,000 cash prize each and $75,000 voucher each
Eligibility Criteria
All-Phase Eligibility Subject to the following requirements, 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. This competition is not open to individuals competing solely or as a member of a team that is not part of a for-profit or non-profit entity.
- A competitor/team may only submit a single submission.
- Multiple submissions from the same entity or institution can be summitted as long as there are no overlapping team members. Private entities must be incorporated in and maintain a primary place of business in the United States. Individuals competing as part of a team are eligible to participate if they are legally authorized to work in the United States.
- Academic institutions must be based in the United States and have federally-recognized accreditation.
- DOE employees and DOE support service contractors, 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 program4 sponsored by a country of risk5 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.
Progress Phase Eligibility
- Only winners of the Plan phase are eligible to compete in the Progress phase.
Bonus Prizes Eligibility
- Only Progress phase competitors are eligible to compete for the bonus prizes.
- Competitors may only submit a single submission per bonus prize.
For more information, visit DOE.
