A grid intelligence platform for wildfire prevention, developed by the Department of Energy’s Oak Ridge National Laboratory with industry partner Southern California Edison, received a special Market Disruptor award in the 2026 R&D100 Awards, often called “the Oscars of innovation.”
The bronze award in the Market Disruptor category recognized the development of a new tool, called Multi-Event Grid Intelligence Platform for Wildfire Prevention and Resilience (AWARE), which helps utilities improve grid reliability and resilience, reduce outages and make better operational decisions.
AWARE detects, classifies and reports abnormal power grid conditions that can lead to wildfires, equipment damage and blackouts. It incorporates artificial intelligence to rapidly analyze waveforms that are a visual representation of grid behavior: recognizing abnormalities, identifying what happened and when, and clarifying the severity of the condition.
The grid intelligence platform can then automatically alert a utility to dangerous grid behaviors requiring immediate response — including low-current arcing that commonly causes wildfires but has historically been difficult to detect rapidly.
“We were all happy and surprised at the R&D100 Market Disruptor Award,” said Ali Ekti, who leads both the project and the ORNL Grid Communications and Security Group. “What is especially meaningful to us is seeing technology developed through public investment move beyond the laboratory and toward adoption by utilities. We are not just developing algorithms; our goal is to provide utilities with practical tools that can contribute to more reliable electricity and safer communities.”
Researchers have been validating the platform against five years of field-collected data at Southern California Edison, which is also providing feedback into the evolution of the algorithm and its integration features. The collaboration ensured the technology went beyond detection to interpretation, so the tool’s practical insights support operating decisions for utilities, edge sensor companies, grid operators and critical-infrastructure organizations.
Both Southern California Edison and GridVisibility, a company that makes grid sensors, provided letters of support to the award nomination.
“We believe AWARE’s value extends beyond a single algorithm or demonstration,” wrote GridVisibility CEO Scott Caruso. “It represents a practical advancement in how utilities and technology providers can use waveform data to support grid reliability and resilience. By combining advanced signal processing, machine learning, multi-event analysis and structured event reporting with scalable sensing architectures, AWARE helps address an important industry need: converting continuous waveform measurements into actionable event information.”
AWARE provides visibility into subtle and emerging grid disturbances. Unlike conventional tools that simply alert once when conditions exceed a certain threshold, the new tool can identify and classify multiple events within a single waveform. This capability reflects real utility conditions, where disturbances are often overlapping, repetitive or closely spaced in time.
Future development of AWARE will explore using measurements from sensors at multiple locations to estimate the location of grid disturbances. By analyzing differences in the timing and characteristics of events observed across the grid, this capability could help utilities more quickly narrow down where a disturbance occurred and prioritize field investigation and response.
The ORNL team that contributed to the AWARE platform include Ali Ekti, Ozgur Alaca, Ali Boyaci and Bruce Warmack. Southern California Edison team members include Kyle Chang, Hamed Valizadehhaghi, Vik Trehan, Michael Balestrieri and Kevin Richardson.
UT-Battelle manages ORNL for the Department of Energy’s Office of Science, the single largest supporter of basic research in the physical sciences in the United States. The Office of Science is working to address some of the most pressing challenges of our time. For more information, please visit energy.gov/science . — S. Heather Duncan