The U.S. Department of Energy’s (DOE’s) Water Power Technologies Office (WPTO) launched the Hydropower Operations Optimization (H2Os) Prize, in partnership with the National Renewable Energy Laboratory (NREL).
The prize aims to support a reliable, resilient grid, and offers a combined cash prize pool of up to $75,000. The goal is to encourage the development of solutions that help advance hydropower’s contributions as the U.S. works to decarbonize the power grid by 2035.
The H2Os Prize is intended to challenge innovators to use modeling, data analytics, and machine learning to create new ways for hydropower systems to coordinate with existing grid scheduling practices and meet water management needs, such as water supply, environmental flow requirements, and flood management.
The competition also is intended to support WPTO’s Hydropower and Water Innovation for a Resilient Energy System (HydroWIRES) Initiative by focusing on hydropower’s complementary role as an integrator of variable renewables, like wind and solar.
Through the competition, WPTO hopes to discover solutions to address a number of hydropower technology development goals:
Hydropower scheduling solutions that respect the water system’s physical and operational constraints
Economic and environmental benefits resulting from hydropower generation based on feasible hydropower output and electricity market energy prices.
Unique and innovative flexible solutions that apply to a variety of facilities within a range of modeling and institutional workflows.
The prize will run in three phases of increasing complexity, all open to new and returning competitors. The Phase 1 submission window closes on May 20. The H2Os Prize is funded by WPTO and administered by NREL in partnership with RTI International. More information may be found here.
