The Power of Partnerships: Advancing Quantum Technologies Toward Commercialization
“We think that quantum is that next wave that’s going to be able to bring that much value—if not more—to our community.”
Moderator Charles Wood (Chattanooga Chamber of Commerce) led Janet Rehberg (EPB), Shaun Gleason (Oak Ridge National Laboratory), Nicholas Harrigan (NVIDIA), and Rima Alameddine (IonQ) through a concrete case study: using a hybrid workflow (CPUs + GPUs + QPUs) to optimize EPB’s electric distribution grid.
What’s the pilot?
EPB operates 200+ distribution circuits and ~1,200 smart switches. The team is piloting optimal switch placement and feeder interconnection to balance load, cut voltage drop, and reduce line loss. The pipeline:
Front end: EPB’s large historical grid dataset → reduction/feature prep on an NVIDIA DGX system.
Quantum step: Topology optimization on IonQ hardware (exploring ~69 billion configurations across 36 on/off switch states).
Back end: Power-flow simulations on the DGX to validate stability before field changes.
Why partnerships?
ORNL brings HPC heritage (Frontier today; quantum-adjacent systems next), EPB provides real-world infrastructure and a commercial quantum network, IonQ supplies the optimization-capable QPU and algorithms, and NVIDIA’s CUDA-Q platform (formerly “cuQuantum/CUDA-Q toolchain” in this context) bridges classical and quantum execution for seamless hybrid development.
What it means
This isn’t “quantum versus classical”—it’s quantum with classical to deliver measurable utility outcomes now, while building skills, tools, and data pipelines that scale as fault tolerance arrives.
Session Photos
