Prize will help utilities advance electric grid reliability and resiliency through digital data.
November 21, 2024
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WASHINGTON, D.C. — The U.S. Department of Energy’s (DOE) Office of Electricity (OE) today announced its intent to launch the American-Made Digitizing Utilities Prize Round 3: Resource Integration in early 2025. The $2.15 million prize aims to connect utilities and regulators with interdisciplinary teams to help transform digital systems and data analytics for the 21st century electric grid.
This round of the Digitizing Utilities Prize 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. Utilities and regulators can choose to work with the interested teams to find solutions that address identified challenges.
In partnership with the National Renewable Energy Laboratory (NREL), OE seeks input and interest on two topics (interested parties may respond here):
- Prize focus areas
- Request for utility and regulator challenges
“These days, electric utilities are confronted by a mountain of data from various sources and mining that data for actionable insight is the key to modernizing utility planning and operations,” said Gene Rodrigues, Assistant Secretary for the Office of Electricity. “That’s why we are connecting utilities and regulators with teams of data experts who can help them unlock proactive solutions for preserving reliability and bolstering resiliency on an increasingly complex electric grid.”
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.
This prize will be part of the American-Made Challenges Program, funded by the U.S. Department of Energy, which incentivizes innovation through prizes, training, teambuilding, mentoring, and connecting the nation’s entrepreneurs and innovators to America’s national labs and the private sector.