The Energy and Food Sovereignty Nexus Prize encourages Tribal Colleges and Universities (TCUs) to develop student-led demonstration projects that increase their knowledge on clean energy and food sovereignty on TCU campuses. Projects may include but are not limited to:

• Greenhouses heated or cooled by geothermal (ground-source) energy
• Greenhouses powered by wind or solar
• Solar arrays that provide shade for crops to grow or livestock to graze.

TCUs are encouraged to incorporate local traditional crops and/or livestock into their designs, as well as relevant clean energy systems to ensure food is sustainably grown for their environments. Students’ valuable exposure and hands-on experience in energy and food sovereignty can then be shared to benefit Tribes.

Sponsored by the Office of Technology Transitions (OTT) at the U.S. Department of Energy (DOE), the American-Made EnergyTech University Prize (EnergyTech UP) challenges student teams to compete for cash prizes for successfully identifying a promising energy technology, assessing its market potential, and creating a business plan for commercialization. Faculty are challenged to create innovative implementation plans that expand energy technology commercialization.

Students: Develop and present a business plan that leverages National Laboratory-developed or other emerging energy technologies developed by students, faculty, or industry. Throughout the competition, they receive mentorship and materials to help them succeed, all while competing for more than $400,000 in cash prizes.

Faculty: Develop and implement educational activities to engage more students in energy technology commercialization and entrepreneurship topics at their institution. While faculty have always been, and remain, welcome and encouraged to mentor a team competing in EnergyTech UP, this new track is designed to incentivize and support faculty directly, with more than $100,000 in cash prizes available.

The Seeding Critical Advances for Leading Energy technologies with Untapped Potential (SCALEUP) Ready program provides a vital mechanism for the support of innovative energy R&D that complements ARPA-E’s primary focus on early-stage transformational energy technologies that require proof of concept. This program focuses only on scaling and pre-pilot projects of promising technologies that ARPA-E has previously funded. A SCALEUP Ready award would substantially build upon innovations achieved under the original ARPA-E award.

The American-Made Large Animal and Solar System Operations (LASSO) Prize offers $8+ million in cash prizes to multi-stakeholder teams that develop impactful projects to deepen our understanding of the co-location of solar photovoltaics (PV) and cattle grazing operations (cattle agrivoltaics). The LASSO Prize is designed to bring solar developers, farmers, ranchers, and other stakeholders together to form teams; build pilot sites; identify best practices, use cases, costs, applicable business models, and associated energy and agricultural outcomes; host field days; and more!

The NSF Trailblazer Engineering Impact Award (TRAILBLAZER) program supports individual investigators who propose novel research projects with the potential to innovatively and creatively address national needs and/or grand challenges, advance US leadership, and catalyze the convergence of engineering and science domains. TRAILBLAZER will support engineers and scientists who leverage their distinctive track record of innovation and creativity to pursue new research directions that are distinct from their previous or current research areas.

For more than a decade, the BNEF Pioneers program has identified a group of game-changing technologies or innovations annually – each with the potential to accelerate global decarbonization and halt climate change. Applicants are shortlisted by the BNEF Pioneers team, and finalists are judged by a panel of BNEF experts. Winners must prove they offer a novel, substantial, scalable and competitive solution. In 2025, the program will focus on three global climate challenges and will award the Pioneers prize to innovators with scalable, impactful and equitable solutions to these challenges.

The program will bring together entrepreneurs from across Africa, empowering them to address climate resilience and food security. Founders will receive expert training, critical resources to accelerate their ventures, a one-week in-person residency in Washington, DC, and a one-week in-person residency in Nairobi, Kenya.

Recognizing that it takes significant investment to open and develop new export markets, USDA launched the $1.2 billion Regional Agricultural Promotion Program (RAPP) in 2023 in response to a bipartisan request from the U.S. Senate Committee on Agriculture, Nutrition, and Forestry.

RAPP aims to diversify and expand market opportunities for U.S. food and agricultural products beyond the traditional top customers. Instead, RAPP will focus on enhancing U.S. exports to new markets in parts of the world – including South and Southeast Asia, Latin America, the Middle East and Africa, and others – where the middle class is growing and the desire for high-quality food and farm products is increasing. Gaining market share in these diverse and dynamic markets will help U.S. exporters better weather global shocks and better compete in an increasingly volatile global marketplace.

RAPP funds are available to U.S. agricultural trade organizations, state regional trade groups, agricultural cooperatives, and state agencies that conduct approved market development activities to expand exports, address trade barriers, and showcase American agricultural products in new and diverse markets.

The Technologies to Emend and Obviate SYnthetic Nitrogen’s Toll on Emissions (TEOSYNTE) program will emphasize strategies that lower the application of synthetic nitrogen (N) fertilizer on corn and sorghum fields. Lowering the application of synthetic N fertilizer would reduce greenhouse gas emissions as well as significantly lower farmers’ operating costs while maintaining crop yields. Small businesses can apply for the SBIR/STTR soliciations under this program.

The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA), as part of its Small Business Innovation Research (SBIR) program, is seeking proposals from the small businesses to develop novel environmental technologies in the following topics areas: clean and safe water, air quality and climate, homeland security, circular economy/sustainable materials, safer chemicals.

The AI for Climate and Nature Grand Challenge is a global $100 million initiative from the Bezos Earth Fund. The Grand Challenge is exploring new ideas for multiplying the impact of climate and nature efforts using modern AI. The first round of awards will focus on sustainable proteins, power grid optimization, and biodiversity conservation, in addition to embracing visionary wildcard solutions for climate and nature. The Bezos Earth Fund will determine the final slate of Seed Grantees who will be invited to participate in Phase 2.