Energy Infrastructure
Power grids around the world are evolving with increased demand, sustainability goals, and the need for resilience against disruptions. Integrated models of distributed resources break the grid into networks of microgrids that combine storage and generators, operate in connected or disconnected modes, and serve critical infrastructure under real-world disruption scenarios. Optimizing these systems requires modeling thermal generation with higher-fidelity cubic cost functions and evaluating performance across multiple simulated scenarios. Participants will use quantum computing methods, including entropy quantum computing for optimizing cubic cost functions, to improve cost efficiency and resilience in microgrid networks while benchmarking performance against classical approaches.
Phase 1 focuses on three things: building your team, selecting your Challenge track, and developing your initial concept.
Team Composition
The Global Industry Challenge is a collaborative competition; teams can be formed locally or internationally with between 1 and 5 teammates.
Find teammates here.
Join a team here.
Teams may have between 1 and 5 participants. We recommend 3 to 5 members to balance the workload effectively. Strong teams are diverse in skill. We encourage you to fill the following roles:
• Coder
• Data / Technical Lead
• Content / Domain Expert
• Business / Commercial Lead
• Project Manager / Team Coordinator
What do I submit for Phase 1?
Create a 1‑page (plus cover page) maximum PDF, using 11‑point Times New Roman font and single spacing, and submit it through the relevant Aqora Competition.
File Format Requirement: TeamName__Phase1_VersionX.pdf
Include the following details:
- Cover Page (not included in page count) GIC 2026 Cover Page.docx
- Team Qualifications for Tackling the Challenge (Education, Job Title and Organization)
- Brief Description of the Steps You Will Use to Solve this Challenge
- High‑level overview of your proposed solution
- Technical approach, including how you will utilize quantum computing feasibility and advantage over classical methods
- Projected industry impact
First Phase Submission Deadline: Sunday, April 5, 11:59 PM (EST).
Judging Criteria
Teams will be evaluated on two dimensions. First, technical proficiency: judges will assess the depth and quality of your team's quantum computing knowledge and execution capability. Second, a higher weight is placed on conceptual feasibility: your Phase 1 submission must define a credible, technically grounded approach that benchmarks quantum methods against classical baselines and articulates measurable industry impact.
The power grids of countries around the world are changing and developing with increased demand and awareness of issues like sustainability and climate change mitigation. At the same time, the resilience of these grids is of vital importance as disruptions to electricity can cause widespread damage in a region.
In planning a nation’s power grid, an integrated model of distributed resources can make a power grid more robust by breaking it down into a network of subgrids, or microgrids. These microgrids combine storage and generators to supply energy to consumers, while being isolated from each other to maintain the load locally, representing a highly flexible and optimizable building block for modern energy infrastructure, providing an opportunity to optimize power delivery by automatically switching from connected to disconnected modes and serving critical infrastructure. While thermal power generation is typically modeled with a quadratic cost function, the addition of a cubic term to the cost function provides better fidelity to real-world operation. Entropy quantum computing represents a method of optimizing cubic cost functions that could provide faster optimization of a network of microgrids.
Your challenge is to use quantum computing methods to optimize the cost functions of a network of microgrids under multiple simulated scenarios that may be faced in real-world power grids.
