The Digitizing Utilities Prize Round 3: Resilient Grid Innovation is a $2.4 million initiative from the U.S. Department of Energy’s (DOE) Office of Electricity, administered through the American-Made Challenges platform. Building on the success of its two preceding rounds, this prize aims to transform digital systems, data analytics, and grid resource integration for electric utilities by fostering interdisciplinary technology development partnerships. These efforts respond to the increasing volume and complexity of data facing the electric utility sector and the urgent need for innovative digital infrastructure solutions.
The electric sector is experiencing a surge in data streams from advanced monitoring equipment such as phasor measurement units. Traditional utility methods are being challenged by these rapid data inflows, while currently available analytics tools often lack the depth of expertise specific to the electricity domain. Utilities must harness both internal and external datasets—including environmental and topographical data—to maintain and enhance grid reliability. The DOE sees this transformation as critical for unlocking new business opportunities, facilitating market-responsive operations, and building system resilience.
To this end, the prize targets teams of software developers, data scientists, and decision-making experts, particularly those partnered with U.S.-based energy sector organizations. Eligible partners include electric cooperatives, municipally or politically owned utilities, investor-owned utilities, regional transmission organizations, aggregators, and wire-operating entities. These collaborations are expected to develop and demonstrate tools that improve the management and integration of digital and physical grid assets. Solutions should be replicable, allowing insights to benefit the broader utility community.
The prize is divided into two main phases: Phase 1 offers up to 16 awards of $75,000 each to develop planning materials, and Phase 2 offers up to 5 awards of $150,000 in cash and $75,000 in technical assistance vouchers. Phase 2 also features two optional $50,000 bonus prizes: the Impact with Public Research Data Bonus Prize, rewarding contributions of contextualized grid data to public repositories, and the Federated Grid Data Security Bonus Prize, which supports privacy-preserving collaborative analytics tools across multiple utilities.
Applications for Phase 1 opened on January 12, 2026, and will close on April 9, 2026. Judging begins on April 14 and winners will be announced by June 2. Phase 2 opens the following day for Phase 1 winners only and closes on December 3, 2026, with final judging and a virtual demo event scheduled in December. Winners will be announced in February 2027. There are no pre-application requirements or cost-sharing obligations.
Eligible applicants include U.S.-based private entities (nonprofit and for-profit), non-federal governmental units (such as municipalities and tribal governments), and academic institutions. All submissions must be in English and entered through the HeroX platform using provided templates. Questions may be submitted via the competition forum or directly to the Prize Administrator at DigitizingUtilitiesPrize@nrel.gov.
