The U.S. Department of Energy’s (DOE) Office of Electricity (OE) has announced its intent to launch the American-Made Digitizing Utilities Prize Round 3: Resource Integration in early 2025, worth $2.15 million.
The prize aims to connect utilities and regulators with interdisciplinary teams to help transform digital systems and data analytics for the existing electric grid. It will address grid issues, such as decision-making under uncertainty, sensors and/or analytics testing, and validation of use cases using data to integrate distributed energy resources onto the electric grid and ensuring reliability and resiliency.
Utilities and regulators will provide data experts and researchers with details about challenges to address, as well as related data on energy use, weather, synchophasers, system performance, and fire assessment. They are allowed to work with the interested teams to find solutions addressing identified challenges.
In partnership with the National Renewable Energy Laboratory (NREL), OE seeks input and interest on two topics:
- Prize focus areas
- Request for utility and regulator challenges
The prize is in response to OE’s Electricity Advisory Committee’s report “Urgent Needs to Reliably Facilitate the Energy Transition,” which outlined the DOE’s support in grid reliability and resilience. It 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.
