WASHINGTON — Today, U.S. Energy Secretary Dan Brouillette announced that the first round of winners has been named in the Department of Energy’s Grid Optimization (GO) Competition. The GO Competition, managed by DOE’s Advanced Research Projects Agency-Energy (ARPA‑E) is a series of challenges to develop software management solutions for challenging power grid problems. The competition’s intent is to create a more reliable, resilient and secure American electricity grid. The winners will share a total of $3.4 million, which is to be used to further develop their respective approaches and pursue industry adoption of their technologies. 

The goal of the GO Competition is to accelerate the development of transformational and disruptive methods for solving the nation’s most pressing power system problems. The competition consists of multiple challenge rounds, with the first challenge focused on designing an algorithm for security-constrained optimal power flow (SCOPF). The Challenge 1 SCOPF problem utilized twenty unique power system network models of different sizes with associated operating states.

The 10 GO Competition Challenge 1 teams receiving awards for their performance are in rank-order by their average overall performance across the four scoring divisions:

• gollnlp – Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory
• GO-SNIP – Lehigh University
• GMI-GO – Georgia Institute of Technology
• gravityx – Nathan Lemons, Hassan Lionel Hijazi
• Tartan Buffs – University of Colorado – Boulder
• NU_Columbia_Artelys – Northwestern University
• Pearl Street Technologies – Pearl Street Technologies
• YongOptimization – Mississippi State University
• GOT-TJU-OPF – Global Optimal Technology, Inc.
• PennStateUP – Pennsylvania State University

Future GO Competition challenges are expected to build on the models used in Challenge 1 and may include complicating factors such as solving larger network models, optimizing power flows over both transmission and distribution systems, and stochastic optimization.

ARPA-E developed the GO Competition with support from Pacific Northwest National Laboratory (PNNL). A summary of the GO Competition Challenge 1 can be found HERE. Additional information on the Competition, including information regarding the upcoming Challenge 2, can be found HERE.

###