New prize targets data analytics and software development to tackle challenges facing electric utilities .
October 11, 2022
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On October 11, the Office of Electricity launched the $1.1 million Digitizing Utilities Prize. This new competition seeks interdisciplinary teams of software developers and data experts to transform digital systems in the energy sector through data analytics, processing, quality assurance, storage, and deletion.
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 data sets challenging the traditional methods of data acquisition, use, and storage in utilities.
Electric sector stakeholders are facing an emerging need to define how to capitalize on large data sets, both the ones that they create, and data from other sources, to improve reliability, resilience and meet the changing system dynamics from renewable integration.
In the Digitizing Utilities Prize, competitors will form robust teams with utility partners to meet real-world challenges to improve how the energy industry manages, stores, and processes large data sets. Teams of developers must demonstrate a robust understanding of their selected problem and propose their own solution.
DOE invites anyone, individually or as a team, to compete and work with utilities to build digital transformation solutions. The solutions developed under this prize will be shared as examples for the broader utility community on how to solve data related challenges.
The deadline to enter is Thursday, January 26, 2023.
Learn more at https://www.herox.com/digitizingutilities.
The prize is part of the American-Made Challenges 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.
Since the American-Made Challenges prize program launched in 2018 to support U.S. entrepreneurship and innovation in clean energy, DOE has awarded about $100 million in cash and incentives to competitors in more than 30 prizes spanning solar, water, geothermal, buildings, hydrogen, energy storage, transportation, technology transitions, manufacturing, and more.