American-Made Program

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Digitizing Utilities Prize Round 3: Resilient Grid Innovation

Help electric utilities facilitate the transformation of digital systems, data analytics, and risk-informed resource integration

Energy, Environment & Resources Government

stage:

Pre registration

prize:

$2,500,000

Energy, Environment & Resources Government

Summary

Timeline

Updates1

Forum1

Teams170

Resources

FAQ

Overview

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 $2.5 million Digitizing Utilities Prize Round 3: Resilient Grid Innovation. Round 3 of this competition aims to incentivize technology development partnerships with interdisciplinary teams of utility and energy sector partners with software developers and data experts to facilitate the transformation of 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 and resilience and meet the changing system dynamics from renewable integration, which is another key emerging challenge area. 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 or energy sector partner 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 aggregator
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.

Challenge Updates

Prize Reopening for Submissions in January 2026

Sept. 17, 2025, 9:01 a.m. PDT by NREL Prize Moderator

Competitors,

Thank you for your continued interest in the Digitizing Utilities Prize Round 3. The U.S. Department of Energy (DOE) has been evaluating all funding opportunities, including prize challenges, to ensure appropriate resources are allocated efficiently, and that the Department's initiatives are in line with the statutory mission of DOE and the policies and priorities of the Administration and DOE. We appreciate your flexibility and patience during this process.

Prize administrators are pleased to inform you that after DOE's review, we are continuing Round 3 of the Digitizing Utilities Prize with a modified timeline and forthcoming rules document. Please closely review the HeroX timeline for updated deadlines. We look forward to seeing your submissions in January 2026.

In the meantime, please reach out to our team at digitizingutilitiesprize@nrel.gov if you have any questions or are an energy sector partner or utility interested in working with a prize team on a challenge or opportunity that you have identified to improve energy resource utilization, adequacy, and integration for operations and planning.

Plus, don’t forget to follow the prize on HeroX to receive important competition updates including a notification when the updated prize rules document is available.