Digitizing Utilities Prize Round 3: Resilient Grid Innovation

Following a successful Round 1 and Round 2 of this prize series, the U.S. Department of Energy’s (DOE’s) Office of Electricity is excited to announce the $2.4 million Digitizing Utilities Prize Round 3: Resilient Grid Innovation. 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.  

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. 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 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.  

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. 

Prize Pools 

Progress phase competitors are also eligible to compete in the following optional bonus prizes offered during the Progress phase:  

Impact with Public Research Data Bonus Prize (Optional)

Contextualized information about grid events and uncertain conditions is incredibly helpful for improving system reliability. Curated datasets with contextual labels can help catalyze the development of new grid reliability tools through new techniques, including artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning (ML). Competitors who have demonstrations that result in contextualized grid datasets and who contribute data to public repositories of grid data are eligible to be awarded the Impact with Public Research Data Bonus Prize. 

This data could be anonymized or could be a subset of the total data collected to make it suitable for public release. Submissions that include contributing data from multiple sources to existing public repositories, such as the Grid Event Signature Library (GESL) or the Open Energy Data Initiative (OEDI), are of particular interest. Data sets must not be submitted directly, but a link to the data on an open repository should be included in the bonus prize narrative. See Section 4.6.7 for additional details.  

Federated Grid Data Security Bonus Prize (Optional) 

Competitors who demonstrate a technology that enables secure, collaborative, and privacy-preserving learning across grid systems are eligible to be awarded the Federated Grid Data Security Bonus Prize. The modern electricity system depends on analyzing vast amounts of operational data, yet utilities and vendors often cannot share this information due to privacy, regulatory, and security concerns. This prize rewards innovations that make it possible to train and improve cybersecurity or operational models across multiple organizations without exposing sensitive data, strengthening the sector’s collective ability to detect, prevent, and recover from cyber events. Energy sector partners advancing the safe use of distributed or federated analytics to enhance trust, transparency, and resilience in both operational technology and information systems are encouraged to compete.  

Competitor Eligibility 

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. 

Read more about competitor eligibility in the updated Official Rules document.