Freelancer, in partnership with Arrow Electronics, is running a first-of-its-kind contest with a total prize purse of $250,000.00 USD. Sponsored by the Bureau of Reclamation, the Automated Maintenance of Protection Systems Challenge (AMPS Challenge) invites innovators and engineers from all over the world to contribute their ideas and solutions to further Reclamation’s mission of managing, developing and protecting water and related resources, through improving its efficiencies in monitoring and testing of electric power protection systems. If you have ever wanted to make an impact on large scale infrastructure, this is your opportunity.
After the 2003 Northeast blackout in North America, an outage that affected over 50 million people, a list of testing protocols was developed by NERC to prevent a power outage of the same magnitude and to improve system reliability. The list includes testing and maintenance protocols for electrical protection systems that are labor-intensive and often require Reclamation’s hydropower plants to be off-line. The AMPS Challenge seeks solutions to automate the testing of Reclamation’s existing protection systems at hydropower facilities while the equipment is online. Although the solutions are being requested for use in Reclamation’s hydropower facilities, they are broadly applicable to any protective relay system.
The challenge will be run in two phases with a total prize purse of $250,000.00 USD.
Phase 1
Phase 1 seeks individual or team submissions, in the form of a whitepaper, to provide innovations that will improve the reliability of power systems by automating protection system testing. Up to 10 entries will get $10,000.00 USD each and the opportunity to move onto Phase 2.
Phase 2
Phase 2 solvers will develop a lab prototype for functional demonstration and functional testing. Testing will be performed in the Denver area. The best prototype will be awarded up to $100,000.00 USD. In addition, up to $10,000.00 USD in awards will be presented for solvers that excel in individual benchmarks for a total Phase 2 purse of $150,000.00 USD.
Awards:- There is also the potential opportunity for a Cooperative Research and Development Agreement and collaboration time with Reclamation staff to develop solutions to a field readiness level of maturity.
Enter now to win your share of $250,000.00 USD\
Enter now to win your share of $250,000.00 USD\
Deadline:- Ongoing
