Prizes to help utilities advance electric grid reliability and resiliency through digital data
January 15, 2025
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WASHINGTON, D.C. — The U.S. Department of Energy’s (DOE) Office of Electricity (OE) today announced its selections for Round 2 of the American-Made Digitizing Utilities Prize and launched Round 3: Resilient Grid Integration. Through this prize program, OE is committed to accelerating the development, research, and demonstration of new technologies in the electricity sector to advance reliable, resilient, secure, and affordable grid operation.
“These days, electric utilities and regulators have access to a massive amount of data from various sources and mining that data for actionable insights is the key to improving electric grid reliability and addressing challenges to resiliency,” said Gene Rodrigues, Assistant Secretary for the Office of Electricity. “This program connects utilities and regulators with teams of experts who can help them to better plan, monitor, and operate the assets on the utility grid.”
Digitizing Utilities Prize Round 2 (DUR2) Phase 2 Winners
In December 2024, OE hosted its inaugural virtual Demo Day where DUR2 Phase 2 competitors of the Digitizing Utilities Prize were invited to pitch their progressive solutions to a panel of industry experts. Presentations included engaging demonstrations and a live Q&A that allowed viewers an inside look at each team’s approach to solving data challenges for their utility partners.
The following Phase 2 teams were awarded cash prizes for their efforts during the final phase of this competition:
- Track 1: Utility Digitization/Data Challenge Winners ($200,000 and a $75,000 National Lab voucher per winner)
- Grid Elevated (Salt Lake City, UT)
- Team Simple Thread (Richmond, VA)
- Enterprise Graph DB Team (Birmingham, AL)
- Track 2: Utility Cybersecurity Challenge Winner ($300,000 per winner)
- Fend Incorporated (Arlington, VA)
DOE’s Cybersecurity, Energy Security and Emergency Response office provided the funding for the Track 2 winner.
Read more about DUR2, including Phase 1 winners of Track 1 and Track 2, on HeroX.
Digitizing Utilities Prize Round 3 Launch
Round 3 of Digitizing Utilities Prize is a two-phase competition that aims to incentivize technology development partnerships with interdisciplinary teams of utilities (and other energy sector partners), software developers, and data experts to facilitate the transformation of digital systems, data analytics, and grid resource integration for the electric sector. For the Digitizing Utilities Prize Round 3: Resilient Grid Innovation, DOE has a specific interest in problems and solutions related to improving energy sector resilience to extreme events.
This round will address grid issues, such as decision-making under uncertainty, sensors and/or analytics testing, and validation of use cases that use data to integrate distributed energy resources onto the electric grid while ensuring reliability and resiliency. Utilities and regulators will provide data experts and researchers with details about what challenges to address, as well as related data on energy use, weather, synchophasers, system performance, and fire assessment. With the launch of Round 3, OE acknowledges that understanding and harnessing devices at the point of integration onto the grid (the “grid edge”) is critical for a more resilient electric grid.
Round 3 of this prize offers a total prize pool of $2.5 million across two competitor tracks and a bonus prize. The Digitizing Utilities Prize Round 3: Resilient Grid Innovation contains two tracks:
- Resource integration under uncertainty
- Sensors and datasets for integration of inverter-based resources and large loads.
Interested parties may respond here. Competitors may apply to either or both tracks.
Phase 2 competitors in both tracks will also have the opportunity to take home the $100,000 Extreme Applications Bonus Prize, awarded for the submission that best considers extreme events, including tornadoes, fires, hurricanes, heatwaves, and others, as part of their proposed solution.
Interested applicants can learn more about the prize, read the official rules, stay up to date on key competition deadlines, and register for upcoming informational webinars on HeroX.
The Digitizing Utilities Prize is in response to OE’s Electricity Advisory Committee’s report “Urgent Needs to Reliably Facilitate the Energy Transition,” which outlined the need for DOE support in grid reliability and resilience.
The Digitizing Utilities Prizes are part of the American-Made program, which incentivizes innovation through prizes, training, teaming, and mentoring by connecting the nation’s entrepreneurs and innovators to America’s national labs and the private sector.