WASHINGTON, DC — Today, the Department of Energy (DOE) announced that 13 teams from 11 states will compete in the Grid Optimization (GO) Competition Challenge 3, which requires them to develop software management solutions to address real-world power grid conditions. The GO Competition—managed by the Advanced Research Projects Agency-Energy (ARPA-E)—echoes the Biden Administration’s commitment to create a more reliable, resilient, and secure American electricity grid.

“Creativity is at the heart of American success, as demonstrated by these intrepid GO Competition teams striving toward the goal to make our nation’s grid more resilient,” said Dr. Jennifer Gerbi, ARPA-E Acting Director and Deputy Director for Technology. “I look forward to seeing the solutions they develop that will help the U.S. ensure grid flexibility, reliability, and resiliency, as well as incorporate the new clean energy technologies that create the grid of the future.”

GO Competition teams participating in Challenge 3 could win up to $750,000. The following teams will participate in Challenge 3:

• Argonauts (Lemont, Illinois)
• Columbia University (New York, New York)
• Global Optimal Technology, Inc. (Ithaca, New York)
• GravityX (White Rock, New Mexico)
• Incremental Systems Corporation (Issaquah, Washington)
• Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory (Livermore, California)
• Massachusetts Institute of Technology (Cambridge, Massachusetts)
• Mississippi State University (Starkville, Mississippi)
• Powersense (Newport Beach, California)
• University of Florida (Gainesville, Florida)
• University of Pittsburgh (Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania)
• University of Tennessee: Knoxville (Knoxville, Tennessee)
• University of Texas at Austin (Austin, Texas)

The GO Competition began with Challenge 1, which tasked teams to find solutions to a security constrained optimal power flow (SCOPF) problem. Challenge 2 expanded upon the Challenge 1 SCOPF problem, and Challenge 3 extends the problem further by including time series data for weather, intermittent generation, unit commitment constraints, and consumption. Challenge 3 will include new models for emerging technologies such as storage, consumer participation (bid-in demand), distributed energy resources (DERs), and renewables and new temporal constraints and considerations including combined cycle plant configurations and reserve requirements. The Challenge 3 event is expected to kick off in early 2023.

The GO Competition is intended to provide fair and transparent comparisons of industrially-relevant algorithm performance on high-fidelity, open-access, large-scale power system models and a platform for the identification of transformational and disruptive methods for solving power system optimization problems.

Increasing the emphasis on grid resilience demands innovative management of more diverse and decentralized resources, which existing grid software is not equipped to handle. The GO Competition recognizes that innovation is needed to increase grid flexibility, reliability, and resilience while substantially reducing system costs and barriers to fully integrating emerging technologies.

You can access more information on Challenge 3 at the GO Competition website.

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