Be part of the Energy Tech 2025 Conference at the SPARK VIRGINIA Pitch Competition, where Virginia’s most innovative minds in utility, energy, and climate technology compete for $10,000 in prizes ($7,500 grand prize winner; $2,500 runner up)! Taking place on March 6, 2025, at the Science Museum of Virginia during Energy Tech 2025 in Richmond, this exciting event will showcase groundbreaking technologies poised to transform Virginia’s energy economy. Eight startups will pitch their cutting-edge solutions to a panel of Virginia’s top investors, utility executives, and energy leaders. With only five minutes to present and five minutes for Q&A, these entrepreneurs will compete for funding, recognition, and the opportunity to accelerate their journey to commercialization.

Following a successful Round 1 and Round 2 of this prize series, the U.S. Department of Energy’s (DOE’s) Office of Electricity is excited to announce the $2.5 million Digitizing Utilities Prize Round 3: Resilient Grid Innovation. Round 3 of this competition aims to incentivize technology development partnerships with interdisciplinary teams of utility and energy sector partners with software developers and data experts to facilitate the transformation of digital systems, data analytics, and grid resource integration for the electric sector.

The program will bring together entrepreneurs from across the U.S. and the globe, empowering them to address climate mitigation, adaptation, and resilience. Founders will receive expert training, critical resources to accelerate their ventures, and an 8-week in-person residency at Halcyon in Washington, DC. The cohort is selected of up to 8 ventures from across the U.S. and the globe. Ventures receive training in Halcyon’s methodology on product-market fit, investment readiness, and leadership.

This program brings together founders from across the U.S., empowering them to address climate challenges, health barriers, and equity gaps. Founders gain 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 Atlanta. The cohort is selected of up to 10 ventures from across the U.S. Ventures receive training in Halcyon’s methodology on product-market fit, investment readiness, and leadership.

The Rice Alliance, the Houston Energy Transition Initiative (HETI) and TEX-E are partnering for the annual Energy Venture Day and Pitch Competition at CERAWeek, set to take place in the Innovation Agora in the George R. Brown Convention Center on March 12, 2025 with a special Pitch Preview event (free to attend) on March 11 at the Ion Houston. The Energy Venture Day and Pitch Competition features pitches from more than 40 energy ventures driving efficiency and advancements toward the energy transition. The fast-paced competition is designed to connect energy startups with venture capitalists, corporate innovation groups, industry leaders, academics, and service providers.

Smart Futures Lab offers an invaluable opportunity for growth in the tech space through a free incubator and accelerator program. Open to new majority tech founders, professionals, and students, looking to develop and scale their smart city innovation solutions. The Incubator Program caters to tech startups in the early stages of development, whether they are ideating, designing, or testing their products. The Accelerator Program is for mature companies looking to scale, build government partnerships, refine their business model, and find funding investors.

Launch your electrifying journey into the future of innovation! Join the world’s largest multi-sector commercialization program for emerging deep technologies. Pitch your groundbreaking innovations and connect with top-tier corporate, investment, military and federal leaders for partnering, licensing and investment opportunities. Whether you’re a startup, university TTO, federal lab, or federal awardee, seize the moment. Submit your commercially viable innovation now and connect with the largest gathering of tech-scouts and funding offices worldwide.

The E-Team Program, part of the VentureWell Accelerator, supports student ventures as you embark down the path you’re likely to take as an innovator and entrepreneur. We help you advance your invention through a powerful mix of up to $25,000 in grant funding, entrepreneurship training, mentorship by dedicated staff, national recognition, and networking with peers and industry experts.

The fifth edition of The Clean Fight will be focused on decarbonizing existing multifamily low-to-moderate income (LMI) and affordable housing. In collaboration with leaders in the affordable housing market at the Climate Friendly Homes Fund administered by The Community Preservation Corporation, we are seeking high impact, market-proven climate solutions that break down barriers to decarbonization and simplify the retrofit process for multifamily LMI and affordable housing within New York City and State. Our non-residential program will run from May-October 2025.

The purpose of the Community Wildfire Defense Grant is to assist at-risk local communities and Indian Tribes with planning and mitigating against the risk created by wildfire.

The Act prioritizes at-risk communities in an area identified as having high or very high wildfire hazard potential, are low-income, and/or have been impacted by a severe disaster. More details on these three priorities can be found in the Notices of Funding Opportunity (NOFOs).

The CWDG helps communities in the wildland urban interface (WUI) implement the three goals of the National Cohesive Wildland Fire Management Strategy (Cohesive Strategy):

• Restore and Maintain Landscapes: Landscapes, regardless of jurisdictional boundaries, are resilient to fire, insect, disease, invasive species, and climate change disturbances, in accordance with management objectives.
• Create Fire Adapted Communities: Human populations and infrastructure are as prepared as possible to receive, respond to, and recover from wildland fire.
• Improve Wildfire Response: All jurisdictions participate in making and implementing safe, effective, efficient risk-based wildfire management decisions.

The objective of this NOFO is to enhance grid reliability and resilience in the face of growing uncertainties and in the age of digital information systems and networks. It is critical to quantify and clearly communicate risk and uncertainties to decision-makers and human operators. This NOFO would seek applications to conduct Research and Development and Demonstration (RD&D) activities that advance the state of the art for power system uncertainty and risk metrics to help human operators receive actionable information to better understand, predict, prevent, and mitigate cascading failures in power grids. This is a newly developing field for the power sector with few, if any, commercial tools. It is therefore assumed this topic area will require an academic or research institution to be heavily involved in the project to achieve program objectives. Therefore, DOE is restricting eligibility to universities, colleges, DOE FFRDCs and non-profit research institutions or think-tanks to serve as the prime applicant. Prime applicants are encouraged to apply in partnerships with electric sector partners and technology providers to ensure the research remains relevant to industry.

The U.S. Department of Energy (DOE) seeks to accelerate innovative solutions to address new load growth from computing, manufacturing, buildings, and transportation through use of a Partnership Intermediary Agreement (PIA). This PIA complements the Connected Communities 2.0 funding opportunity, launched in July, which is designed to validate technology innovations at the grid edge—where electricity distribution transitions between utilities and end users—in real-world situations to help ensure grid readiness for load growth. Here, the PIA will accelerate collection and reporting of performance data at the grid edge, especially from electric and gas distribution systems working with utilities, and associated analysis to increase acceptance of new technologies and planning strategies as viable approaches for efficient infrastructure investment.