Today the U.S. Department of Energy Office of Electricity announced the winning teams of the Feeder of the Future Prize. Winning submissions will both influence future feeder deployments (greenfield) and provide an upgrade path to existing distribution feeders (brownfield).

 

Winners

The following five teams were named prize winners and will receive $8,000 in cash prizes for their submissions. 

GridForge Energy (California, Urban Track)

This team aims to unlock grid visibility and demand flexibility through distributed ledger technology using baselines and cryptographic fingerprints to prove that real, measurable changes occurred on a feeder during grid service events.

Grid Grit (South Dakota, Rural Track) 

This team’s solution involves the addition of adaptive conductors to rural single-phase and three-phase distribution construction, which enables instant load transfer and more efficient responses to storm-related outages.

Power Grid Innovation Team(New York, Suburban Track) 

This team’s solution proposes a modernized suburban feeder architecture that integrates looped topology, advanced automation, distributed optimization, and cyber-physical resilience. Their design addresses rising challenges posed by electrification, electric vehicle adoption, data center growth, climate-driven outages, and cybersecurity threats. 

Rural Grid Vanguard – EPE Consulting (Texas, Rural Track)

This team’s solution is an innovative hierarchical co-optimization framework that integrates long-term planning with real-time operational control of battery energy storage systems.

Smart Grid Design Lab at Purdue University Northwest (Indiana, Suburban Track) 

This team’s focus is on a resilient, interconnection-aware feeder, a software-centric suburban feeder that orchestrates real-time digital-twin prediction, federated anomaly detection, and large-language-model–assisted cyber-physical remediation into a coordinated decision framework.

 

Runners-Up

The following four teams were named prize runners-up and will receive $2,500 in cash prizes for their submissions. 

DBbun (Massachusetts, Suburban Track)

This team’s suburban feeder concept uses segmentation and tie switches to restore most non-fault customers within 20 minutes under cyber constraints. The approach evaluates hundreds of feasible feeder variants and selects designs that consistently achieve rapid restoration and low customer interruption minutes across uncertainty.

PEEC LAB (Arizona, Urban Track)

This team’s proposed solution is a hybrid solid-state transformer that integrates modular solid-state transformer stages in parallel with an existing line-frequency transformer to create a flexible, scalable, and controllable medium-voltage/low-voltage interface for urban feeders.

United Powerer (Texas, Rural Track)

This team’s solution involves a novel concept of self-sustaining, feeder-level, rural power systems with local distributed generation to ensure continuous power supply.

Xyflow (Ohio, Suburban Track)

This team’s project proposes a software “overlay” for suburban distribution feeders that learns from historical operations data and updates continuously with real-time measurements.

 

Congratulations to our winning teams and thank you to all the teams who competed in this prize!