U.S. Department of Energy Partners with Connected DMV to Explore Quantum Approaches to Energy Infrastructure Planning
Quantum-Enhanced Strategic Siting of Energy Storage and Microgrids
Connected DMV, the operator of Quantum World Congress, today announced that the U.S. Department of Energy Office of Technology Commercialization will sponsor an energy infrastructure planning use case in the 2026 Global Industry Challenge (GIC) — inviting teams from around the world to explore how quantum computing can improve long-term planning for energy storage and resilient microgrid infrastructure.
The challenge will ask participants to investigate how hybrid quantum optimization techniques can support one of the most complex problems facing modern energy systems: where and how to deploy energy storage and microgrids to maximize reliability, resilience, and economic efficiency across large-scale power networks.
The Global Industry Challenge is hosted by Connected DMV as part of the broader ecosystem around Quantum World Congress and the Potomac Quantum Innovation Center, bringing together researchers, developers, entrepreneurs, and industry experts to collaborate on solving real-world industry problems using quantum computing and adjacent technologies such as artificial intelligence.
“The Global Industry Challenge exists to move quantum computing from theory into practice,” said George Thomas, President & CEO of Connected DMV. “Energy infrastructure is one of the most complex environments in the world, and it represents a powerful proving ground for emerging computational approaches.”
A Critical Infrastructure Challenge
Electricity demand across the United States and globally is increasing rapidly due to the growth of AI-driven data centers, electrification, industrial expansion, and distributed renewable energy generation. At the same time, power systems must become more resilient to extreme weather, supply disruptions, and cybersecurity threats.
Grid planners must therefore solve a highly complex decision problem: determining where to locate energy storage systems and microgrids, how large they should be, and how they interact with transmission networks, generation sources, and fluctuating demand.
These decisions require modeling thousands of potential configurations across multiple years while accounting for variables such as:
Load variability and industrial demand growth
Renewable generation variability
Transmission constraints and grid topology
Weather-driven disruption scenarios
Infrastructure investment trade-offs
Classical computational approaches can struggle with the combinatorial complexity of these planning models. The 2026 Global Industry Challenge invites teams to explore whether quantum optimization and hybrid classical-quantum methods can provide new approaches to exploring these massive decision spaces.
The Technical Challenge
Participants will investigate quantum formulations of energy infrastructure siting and sizing decisions, including mapping planning models to QUBO and variational optimization frameworks.
Teams will develop and benchmark hybrid quantum algorithms designed to improve:
Combinatorial search efficiency
Scenario exploration across thousands of infrastructure configurations
Investment trade-off analysis for long-term grid planning
Robustness of solutions under uncertain conditions
Finalist teams will run their solutions across leading quantum computing systems, including platforms provided through qBraid, with access to architectures from IBM, D-Wave, QCi, IonQ, QuEra, Rigetti, IQM, and others, alongside GPU-accelerated simulation environments.
Participants will benchmark results against established classical planning solvers to evaluate where quantum approaches may offer advantages in exploring complex infrastructure decision spaces.
Part of a Global Effort
The Global Industry Challenge has rapidly become one of the most ambitious international programs focused on applying quantum computing to real industry problems.
The inaugural 2025 Challenge attracted more than 600 innovators from over 60 countries, culminating in live winner announcements at Quantum World Congress 2025.
Participants included researchers, startups, industry professionals, and students working across six continents to deliver solutions for challenges sponsored by organizations such as The World Bank Group, JPMorgan Chase, Wells Fargo, and MITRE.
By connecting industry-defined problems with a global community of innovators, the program helps accelerate both practical quantum applications and the development of the next generation of quantum talent.
Looking Ahead
The 2026 Global Industry Challenge will include multiple industry tracks spanning energy infrastructure, advanced materials, and dynamic systems forecasting, each defined by a leading industry or government partner.
Participants will form global teams, develop technical proposals, and execute their solutions across a three-phase program running from March through July 2026, with winners announced live at Quantum World Congress 2026 in College Park, Maryland.
Hosted virtually and open to participants worldwide, the program continues to expand the global quantum ecosystem while pushing the boundaries of what emerging computing technologies can achieve in real-world applications.
Teams interested in participating can learn more and register through the Global Industry Challenge platform.