Oct 15, 2026

KFUPM Students Win First Place in Energy Hackathon

A team of KFUPM students won first place in the Power Grid Fault and Outage Prediction Systems challenge within the Smart Control track at the inaugural Energy Hackathon, held in Riyadh under the patronage of His Royal Highness Prince Abdulaziz bin Salman bin Abdulaziz, Minister of Energy.

The hackathon was organized by the Ministry of Energy alongside the Kingdom’s hosting of the World Petroleum Congress. It brought together more than 6,700 participants who formed over 1,200 teams from 40 cities across Saudi Arabia. Participants included teams from leading companies and universities, as well as individuals from various nationalities.

The winning team comprised Alwaleed Khaled Alharthi, a Software Engineering student specializing in Artificial Intelligence and Machine Learning, and Akram Mebarkia, a Computer Networks and Cybersecurity student.

Competing against seven teams that reached the final stage in the same track, representing companies and universities from across the Kingdom, the students presented their solution to a panel of five energy sector experts during a three-minute pitch. Their project focused on predicting faults and outages in the electrical grid through an efficient artificial intelligence system designed to operate locally with minimal computing resources.

The solution was developed based on an in-depth field study of the energy sector and its operational requirements. In addition to its accuracy and fast execution, the system was designed to be scalable across Saudi Arabia’s power grid and included communication mechanisms for reporting faults and outages.

As one of six winning teams, the students will advance to an entrepreneurial empowerment stage supported by the Ministry of Energy. Through a month-long enablement program and continued mentorship, they aim to develop the prototype into a commercial product, deploy it in the field, and eventually scale it across Saudi Arabia’s power grid.