The American-Made Community Power Accelerator Prize is a $10 million prize competition designed to fast-track the efforts of new, emerging, and expanding solar developers and codevelopers to grow multiple successful community-benefiting distributed solar projects. Round 3 of the prize seeks organizations that have the desire and ambition to develop and finance a portfolio of two or more projects that, in aggregate, total at least 1 MW AC of distributed solar generation. To be eligible, no single portfolio project may exceed 5 MW AC. Distributed solar projects may include but are not limited to:

• Community solar
• Behind-the-meter virtual power plants (VPPs)
• Distributed energy resource (DER) aggregations
• Microgrids
• Commercial and industrial (C&I) solar
• Multifamily projects.

The Clean Energy Careers for All (CEC4A) opportunity will support workforce development programming that broadens participation and engages individuals from many different groups within science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM) in ways that promote interest in careers that support the nation’s transition to clean energy. Eligible participants are non-profit 501(c)(3) educational organizations, including engineering, scientific, and technical societies that can reach across various levels of future workforce populations. CEC4A will provide up to 10 awards of ~$300,000 each.

The Building Upgrades Inspiring Local Transformation (BUILT Nonprofits) funding opportunity will support nonprofit building improvement projects that reduce energy use, lower carbon emissions, and generate short and long-term energy cost saving so that operational dollars can be redirected toward mission-critical work. Eligible nonprofit participants are 501(c)(3) organizations who own and operate their own buildings.

Each year, Design Challenge teams create high-performance, low-carbon building designs that address real-world issues such as community impacts, affordability, and resilience. Finalist teams are invited to the competition event at the National Renewable Energy Laboratory in Golden, Colorado, in April 2025 to compete against U.S. and international teams.

The Build to Scale (B2S) program supports organizations that strengthen entrepreneurial ecosystems to support entrepreneurs as they build and scale technology-driven businesses—and the employees in the new, good jobs they create—to make and deliver new technology products and services. B2S grants fund programs that support innovators, entrepreneurs, and startups transforming ideas into the critical, emerging technologies of the future. On Sept. 9, 2024, EDA launched the FY24 Notice of Funding Opportunity (NOFO) for the $50 million B2S program. EDA expects to make 40 to 50 awards, with expected award amounts spanning from the low hundreds of thousands of dollars up to $5 million.

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 goal of the Technical Assistance (TA) program is to assist transmission planners in incorporating energy equity as an objective in their planning. The TA will be targeted to transmission planners including Regional Transmission Operators (RTOs), Independent System Operators (ISOs), Power Market Administrators (PMAs), and utilities. The ITP TA will be delivered through a two-tiered approach—Tier I: Capacity Building and Tier II: Advanced Capacity Building. In Tier I, participants will learn how to better integrate energy equity in transmission planning through consultation, presentations, workshops and webinars, and other relevant resources. Tier II is designed to offer an advanced technical assistance program on energy equity in transmission planning through deep-dive analysis, modeling, and analytical support (e.g., framework development, proof of concept, etc.).

JUMP (Join the discussion, Unveil innovation, Make connections, Promote tech-to-market) into STEM is a building science competition for undergraduate and graduate students at U.S. colleges and universities. JUMP into STEM aims to attract bright students from a variety of majors to building science. The JUMP into STEM program seeks to inspire the next generation of building scientists, focusing on creative ideation and diversity in the building science field. The diversity objective is inclusive of an interdisciplinary mix of majors and representation by students from backgrounds that are underrepresented in STEM. Challenge topics for this year are Building Affordability, Managing Peak Power Demand in Building, and Taking Comfort to the Extreme.

DOE’s Grid Deployment Office (GDO) released an up to $325 million Funding Opportunity Announcement (FOA) for the Programa de Comunidades Resilientes, an initiative to improve community-level energy resilience for vulnerable and disadvantaged populations across Puerto Rico. Specifically, this program seeks to provide funding for solar and battery storage installations across two types of vital infrastructure: community healthcare facilities, as well as community centers and other common areas in public housing and privately owned subsidized multi-family properties.

Revolving Loan Funds (RLF) are used to provide no-interest or low-interest loans for eligible brownfield cleanups, subgrants for cleanups, and other eligible programmatic costs necessary to manage the RLF. Applications will be evaluated based on the extent to which the applicant demonstrates:

• a vision for the cleanup, reuse and redevelopment of brownfield sites and a strategy for leveraging resources to help accomplish the vision;
• the environmental, social, health and economic needs and benefits of the target area(s);
• strong community engagement;
• reasonable costs, eligible tasks, and appropriate use of grant funding;
• the capacity for managing and successfully implementing the cooperative agreement;
• and other factors.

The EPA’s Brownfields Program provides funds to empower states, Tribal Nations, communities, and nonprofit organizations to prevent, inventory, assess, clean up, and reuse brownfield sites. This funding opportunity will award assessment grants to develop inventories of brownfield sites, prioritize sites, conduct community involvement activities, conduct planning, conduct site assessments, develop site-specific cleanup plans, and develop reuse plans related to brownfield sites. A portion of the Assessment Grant funding must be used to conduct site assessments.

This funding opportunity provides funding for States and Tribes to develop inventories of brownfield sites, prioritize sites, conduct community involvement activities, conduct planning, conduct site assessments, develop site-specific cleanup plans, and develop reuse plans related to brownfield sites. Applicants may request funding up to $2,000,000 to address sites contaminated by hazardous substances (i.e., sites with potential contamination of hazardous substances, pollutants, or contaminants) and/or petroleum (i.e., sites with potential petroleum contamination) throughout their jurisdiction. Recipients will be required to assess sites (a minimum of 10) throughout their geographic boundary(ies). All sites selected during the period of performance (i.e., sites that were not identified in the original workplan) must be located in an underserved and/or disadvantaged community.