Co-Innovating with IonQ: How One Utility Is Solving Power Grid Complexity

At a Glance

• The Challenge: Surging data center loads, renewables, and microgrids create a complex combinatorial optimization bottleneck for power grid reconfiguration.
• The Solution: EPB, Chattanooga’s energy and connectivity provider, partnered with IonQ to train an in-house quantum workforce and run hybrid algorithms on the IonQ Forte Enterprise system.
• Key Results:
  
  • 95.8% Parameter Reduction in grid neural network architectures.
  • Faster Solver Times using quantum hardware-derived distributions.
  • Optimal Power Loss Minimization on Test Case Majority (small optimality gap of 0.2%–2.18% on remaining cases).
• The Blueprint: Establishes a "Utility-in-the-Loop" framework for applying quantum computing to real-world industrial infrastructure.

The Modern Power Grid’s Computational Bottleneck 

Power grid complexity is exploding due to surging energy demand and the increasing challenges of managing modern grids which integrate a variety of distributed energy resources and switching assets, such as renewables, microgrids, and electric vehicle loads.

These factors are creating the need for greater use of Distribution Network Reconfiguration (DNR), the operational task of open and closing sectionalizers and tie switches to make changes to network topology to minimize power outages, balance loads, and allocate power for distributed energy resources. The DNR challenge is made more difficult due to the consistent increase in switching assets–distribution feeders, sectionalizers, and tie switches. Coupled with the monitoring and sensor data coming from these assets, the need to manage overall power flow across the grid amounts to a massive real-time combinatorial optimization challenge for utilities. But, it is one that IonQ’s quantum computers are ready to tackle.

To this end, IonQ has been working closely with EPB, an energy and connectivity provider serving more than 202,000 residential and business customers across metro Chattanooga, Tennessee, to explore the operational benefits quantum computing can provide for the company, including the ability to leverage quantum to address such optimization challenges. Recently, the team published three papers detailing the quantum applications for challenges such as DNR.

The Co-Innovation Engine: EPB Evolves into a Quantum Powerhouse with IonQ’s Help

EPB is no stranger to quantum or to leading the energy and fiber optics industries. Years ago, it expanded from providing electricity across its service area by deploying a 100% fiber optic network accessible by every home and business and using it both to launch America’s first community-wide gig-speed internet and as the communications backbone for one of the most advanced and highly automated power distribution grids in the nation.  EPB’s pioneering role in converging energy and fiber optics infrastructure later became the basis for its expansion into quantum networking. Starting in 2016, EPB joined with public and private sector partners to use fiber optic loops between some its electric substations to test a quantum cybersecurity technology under a DOE grant aimed at advancing technologies to secure the national power grid. The success of those early efforts led to an R&D 100 award and EPB’s decision to launch America’s first commercially-available quantum network. Most recently, EPB took the effort a step further by working with IonQ to establish the EPB Quantum Center, the first quantum hub in the US with a commercial quantum computer - the IonQ Forte Enterprise - and a quantum network under one roof.

Now, the company that started as a power utility is fast becoming a powerhouse of applied quantum innovation. Over the last 12 months it has evolved from a firm with no dedicated quantum applications team to one with a growing Quantum Computing Fellows program and an expanding library of breakthrough research conducted on IonQ’s commercial hardware.

[View Janet Rehberg, CEO, EPB, explain why IonQ was the natural partner for its quantum platform strategy and how stakeholders throughout the region intend to use it.]

This transformation resulted in a fruitful collaboration between EPB and IonQ, and was enabled by EPB’s commitment to develop its own quantum team. The company in 2024 earned a $4 million grant from the National Institute of Standards and Technology that helped it address what has been a longstanding need across the entire quantum sector to educate, train, and encourage a deep-bench quantum workforce.

The funding helped EPB draft and deploy a team of eight quantum fellows who were trained on a quantum curriculum co-developed by EPB and IonQ. The new team was quickly put to work on hybrid-quantum classical research projects aimed at power grid optimization.

EPB’s new quantum team got hands-on access to an IonQ Forte Enterprise system, allowing it to gain experience building algorithms, refining mathematical encodings, and executing circuits on real QPUs. The resulting research papers present groundbreaking findings on the benefits quantum and hybrid quantum-classical approaches can provide in confronting the modern power grid’s combinatorial optimization challenges.

The papers also represent the tangible ROI that can result from both government investment and a corporate commitment to quantum workforce development and readiness.

Many industrial firms and corporate enterprises that want to explore quantum may feel daunted by their own lack of a quantum workforce and quantum applications expertise. EPB’s rapid evolution as a quantum company and its quick development of a quantum workforce show that what you need most to get started is a complex challenge to solve, full corporate buy-in on tackling it, and a co-development framework with supportive and experienced partners like IonQ to bridge the skills gap.

Three Case Studies in Applying Quantum to Grid Optimization Challenges

What happens when quantum-experienced engineers meet a new quantum workforce ready to tackle industry-specific problems through access to state-of-the-art quantum computing systems? The collaboration between EPB and IonQ has yielded three research papers that go a long way toward showing how quantum capabilities can help EPB find answers to its most pressing power grid optimization challenges.

The papers collectively share a focus on the same problem in DNR, yet attack the challenge and deliver benefits in distinct ways.

Throughout all of this research, models were tested and validated on the IonQ Forte Enterprise system.

Utility-in-the-Loop: A Blueprint for Industrial Quantum Computing

Hardware-in-the-loop testing, which refers to validation of researched models and simulations on real-world infrastructure, has been foundational to industrial benchmarking for decades. In this case, EPB and IonQ are doing “Utility-in-the-Loop" verification. We are using real commercial quantum hardware and actual power grid topologies (the ‘utility’) to bring quantum algorithms and models out of the lab and academia and into the real world.

A key highlight of EPB-IonQ research collaborations is that researchers used domain-specific, "constraint-native" encodings that helped them bypass barren plateau and other hurdles presented by unconstrained quantum optimization approaches. For example, mapping power grid topology directly into quantum registers helped produce better results without penalty terms. These methods may provide a blueprint for how industrial quantum computing could continue to evolve.

Conclusion & Call to Action

Beyond what can be learned from EPB’s research into quantum benefits for optimization of modern power grid infrastructure, there is a broader takeaway here for organizations looking to leverage and explore quantum computing. EPB’s approach to building up its own quantum business and workforce, and its close collaboration with IonQ to pursue its quantum goals have created a template that public utilities, government agencies, and enterprise organizations worldwide can leverage to achieve their own specific goals.

For any utility leaders, enterprise innovators, and prospective quantum workers wanting to learn more about what quantum can do for their organizations, IonQ is here to help with enterprise co-development programs, quantum hardware solutions, and more.

Explore IonQ Enterprise Co-Development with the IonQ Applications team.

[Editor’s Note: This research was funded by NIST Grant GONANB24D219-1 “Empowering the Future Grid: Quantum Training for Software Innovation & Utility Applications.”]

Note to Investors Regarding Forward-Looking Statements

This article contains forward-looking statements. All statements contained in this article other than statements of historical fact are forward-looking statements, including statements regarding IonQ’s quantum computers’ ability to tackle optimization problems. In some cases, you can identify these statements by forward-looking words such as “increasing,” “surging,” “becoming,” “blueprint,” “evolve,” “can,” and other similar expressions. These statements are only predictions based on our expectations and projections about future events as of the date of this article and are subject to a number of risks, uncertainties and assumptions that may prove incorrect, any of which could cause actual results to differ materially from those expressed or implied by such statements, including, among others, those described under the heading “Risk Factors” in our annual Report on Form 10-K for the year ended December 31, 2025 and our Quarterly Report on Form 10-Q for the quarter ended June 30, 2026 filed with the Securities and Exchange Commission. New risks emerge from time to time, and it is not possible for our management to predict all risks, nor can management assess the impact of all factors on our business or the extent to which any factor, or combination of factors, may cause actual results to differ materially from those contained in any forward-looking statement we make. Investors are cautioned not to place undue reliance on any such forward-looking statements, which speak only as of the date they are made. Except as otherwise required by law, we undertake no obligation to update any forward-looking statement, whether as a result of new information, future events or otherwise.

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