Digitizing Utilities Prize Round 2 Names Phase 1 Data Track Winners

Nine Teams to Advance to Phase 2 With Innovative Data Solutions

July 17, 2024 | Contact media relations

An illustration showing the project locations of the Digitizing Utilities Prize Round 2 Phase 1 winners across the United States.

The U.S. Department of Energy (DOE) Office of Electricity (OE) today announced nine Phase 1 Utility/Data Challenge-track winning teams of the American-Made Digitizing Utilities Prize Round 2.

The nine selected teams were awarded $75,000 in cash prizes each for their efforts in the Utility Digitization/Data Challenge track (Track 1). Soon, the Office of Cybersecurity, Energy Security, and Emergency Response (CESER) will announce additional teams to be awarded $125,000 in cash prizes each for their proposed solutions toward the Utility Cybersecurity Challenge track (Track 2).

This $2.15 million prize, now in its second round, was launched in October 2023 with the goal of connecting utilities with interdisciplinary teams of software developers and data experts to transform digital systems and data analytics for utilities in the energy sector. New tools and data analytics are needed in the power sector to cope with the vast amounts of data being generated on the grid and the new demands on the system from electrification and renewable integration. Cutting-edge tools that utilize digital information effectively have the power to improve system performance and responsiveness.

“For the electricity sector to fully utilize the data it is creating, it must undergo a massive transformation in how it manages data quality, storage, and processing,” said Sandy Jenkins, OE’s Grid Controls Division director. “We’re confident that the teams moving on to Phase 2 of this prize have strong, outside-the-box solutions to transform power utilities’ data into actionable and reliable information while staying on pace with ever-evolving cyber threats.”

Throughout Phase 1, teams of developers were tasked with finding and connecting with a utility partner to identify a data or cybersecurity challenge and propose a solution to that problem. Winning teams demonstrated a thorough understanding of their solutions and ability to access relevant resources to be leveraged for the prize. Now in Phase 2, these nine teams will work with their utility partners over the course of four months to develop and refine their solutions for an opportunity to win additional funding.

Track 1: Utility/Data Challenge Track Phase 1 Winners

ChainSCADA, ChainSCADA: Blockchain Integration with DNP3

Utility Partner: Hingham Municipal Lighting Plant
This team will integrate blockchain-based PKI infrastructure to enhance security and trustworthiness of DNP3 communications, as well as streamline operations, improve regulatory compliance, and mitigate cybersecurity risks. Watch an overview of their proposed solution.

Enterprise Graph DB Team, Enterprise GraphDB to Better Data QA & Analytics

Utility Partner: Alabama Power Company
Project Partner: E Source
This team will establish a cloud-based analytics “storefront” (using CosmosDB) to query a comprehensive, analytics-ready graph database that is powered via automated data validation pipelines from enterprise data sources. E Source will leverage the storefront for preliminary analytics use cases that have been identified. Watch an overview of their proposed solution.

Grid Elevated, MIDAAS Platform

Utility Partner: Heber Light & Power
Project Partner: Grid Elevated
This team is developing the Multi-Source Data Acquisition, Analytics, Sharing, and Security (MIDAAS) Platform, a toolkit of secure data analytic modules built upon Grid Elevated’s data acquisition solution. The MIDAAS Platform provides the infrastructure to translate large amounts of data recently enabled by the energy transition to meaningful information to impact decision-making. Watch an overview of their proposed solution.

NC Storm-Based Outage Prediction, NC Storm-Based Outage Prediction

Utility Partner: North Carolina’s Electric Cooperatives (NCEC)
Project Partner: North Carolina State University
This team aims to develop a predictive analytics tool to forecast storm-based outages in advance of weather phenomena to aid in making staffing and supply decisions. They will work to create software that NCEC and other cooperatives can use to provide real-time estimates on the likelihood of storm-based outages with a three- and five-day lead time. Watch an overview of their proposed solution.

RPG Lab, EV Load-Accelerated Cable Failure and Replacement

Utility Partner: CenterPoint Energy (CNP)
Project Partner: University of Houston
This team plans to develop a data-driven proactive cable replacement method, aiming to address CNP’s concern on accelerated cable degradation and failure due to fast-growing numbers of electric vehicles. Particularly, they will focus on projecting EV adoption rate and estimate future load profiles, as well as predicting cable remaining useful life (RUL) and estimating when the cable would fail and must be replaced. Watch an overview of their proposed solution.

Team Climformatics, Proactive Climate Risk Mitigation for Utilities

Utility Partner: Xcel Energy
Project Partner: Climformatics Inc.
This team aims to build an advanced software application that serves as a decision support tool for utilities to evaluate and mitigate the climate risks threatening the utility assets and user communities. This tool will provide actionable analytics for extreme weather events that occur up to a year in advance. Watch an overview of their proposed solution.

Team Plentiful, Pre-Computed DERs and Pre-Approved Interconnection

Utility Partner: Portland General Electric (PGE)
Project Partners: Forth, Qmerit, Resilient Edge, Charli Charging, City of Tigard
This team plans to streamline installation and interconnection permitting processes by creating more holistic relationships between developers and utilities. Under this system, PGE will be able to preapprove sites for interconnection based on precomputed levels of DER deployment on those sites. Watch an overview of their proposed solution.

Team Simple Thread, Graph the Grid: Modern Hosting Capacity Analysis

Utility Partner: Dominion
Project Partners: Simple Thread, Right Analytics
This team aims to speed up the hosting capacity analysis and visualization process to free up engineers for higher-order work for Dominion Energy and their stakeholders. They plan to leverage previously built software products within Dominion in partnership with Simple Thread to accelerate the process of further automating and hosting analysis to comply with FERC Order 2023. Watch an overview of their proposed solution.

UtilityAPI, Standardizing Vendor Connectivity to Utilities

Utility Partner: Silicon Valley Clean Energy
Project Partner: LF Energy
This team plans to collaborate with technology companies and utilities to develop new standards that streamline third-party vendor registration and connectivity with utilities. Watch an overview of their solution.

At the end of Phase 2, up to three winners from Track 1 will win $200,000 in cash prizes and a $75,000 voucher to be used at a national laboratory. Learn more about the Digitizing Utilities Prize Round 2 Phase 1 winners and Phase 2 objectives on the official prize platform, HeroX.