Thirteen teams move into the next phase
The U.S. Department of Energy’s Office of Electricity announced 13 Phase 1 winners on 31 August 2026. DOE says each team receives $75,000 to advance data-driven tools intended to improve utility detection, planning, outage response and grid security.
Several projects touch the grid edge where distributed energy connects
The selected concepts include load forecasting, high-resolution grid-edge sensing, outage data integration and distribution-system model correction. Those are not consumer products, but they illustrate how utilities are investing in visibility as flexible loads, inverter-based resources and distributed generation become more important.
Better grid data does not remove local interconnection rules
For Melnti users, the practical lesson is that digital grid tools can improve planning and operations over time, while a solar or storage project still has to meet the utility’s current connection process today. This Energy Watch item is technology and grid-operations context, not a claim that a particular project will receive faster approval.