America is defined by its innovation and "can do" approach to solving the challenges of today and tomorrow. The Electricity Industry Technology and Practices Innovation Challenge (EITPIC) taps into American ingenuity to make the nation’s electric grid stronger and more resilient. Through the challenge, the Office of Electricity seeks ideas from industry, academia, and other innovators for technologies or solutions that can address existing or emerging vulnerabilities and threats to the electric sector or mitigate interdependencies between the electricity sector and other sectors.

The inaugural challenge winners, announced August 21, 2019, developed ideas that could significantly improve today’s electric industry practices. Read more about the winners’ proposals here.

  • Southern California Edison: Proposed virtualizing components of electric grid substations and operating them using a human-machine interface (HMI).
  • George Washington University: Proposed developing a smart measurement unit (SMU) to measure and interpret existing phasor measurement unit (PMU) data at the source, rather than in the control room. The SMU would provide event detection, classification, and measurements that would enhance existing sensors.
  • University of Houston: Proposed enhancing existing energy management systems (EMS) with a stochastic, security-constrained, economic-dispatch model that would better account for networked microgrids and flexible transmission.
  • Siemens Corporation: Proposed developing a green technologies digital companion that combines semantic technologies, machine learning, and augmented reality to give grid operators better visibility into the grid’s status. The companion could enable predictive capabilities using different data sets such as weather and charging infrastructure.
  • International Business and Technology Service Corporation: Proposed using a small, low-cost wafer sensor, currently being used in other applications such as data storage, to measure current. The device is small enough to be added to existing grid components such as PMUs or micro-PMUs.
  • Washington State University: Proposed developing a data processing user interface to support quality of service (QoS)-aware data-driven synchrophasor workflows resulting in reduced computational runtimes and hardware costs.
  • University of Houston: Proposed a scenario-based, stochastic, long-term expansion planning (S-LTEP) strategy that addresses uncertainties, incorporates renewable power, and considers a large set of scenarios that are aggregated to reduce computational complexity in current transmission planning models.

For more information about the challenge, please visit the challenge page at https://netl.doe.gov/OEElectricityChallenge. And for questions regarding the challenge, please email OEElectricityChallenge@netl.doe.gov.