Applied R&D/New Applications of Mature Technologies
Urban Integrated Field Laboratories (IFL)
Apply to a new program from the DOE related to community-scale climate research. Research will focus on three tightly related scientific topics—atmospheric and environmental observations; modeling of climate change and impacts across urban regions; and simulating the climate benefits of deploying climate solutions and technologies in historically underserved communities across the U.S.
Urban IFLs will require multi-disciplinary teams that bring together the skills and talents of investigators from multiple research institutions. Academic and nonprofit research institutions, national laboratories, other federal agencies, and the private sector are all eligible to apply as Urban IFL team members. The lead organization of each proposed Urban IFL team must be an academic institution or a national laboratory. Locally-based team members and minority serving institutions (MSI) are expected to have significant roles in each Urban IFL.
Funding is to be awarded competitively and is expected to be in the form of five-year awards. The Department anticipates that $17 million will be available for this program in 2022. Requests should not exceed $5,000,000 per year.
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New York: NY Green Bank
NY Green Bank is a State-sponsored, specialized financial entity working with the private sector to increase investments into New York’s clean energy markets, creating a more efficient, reliable and sustainable energy system.
NY Green Bank is a cost-effective and complementary component of New York State’s portfolio of clean energy programs. NY Green Bank works with clients and counterparties to address and alleviate specific gaps and barriers in current clean energy capital markets through a variety of approaches and transaction structures. Since inception, NY Green Bank has utilized innovative approaches to financing structures to mobilize clean energy activity and private capital in New York State, reducing the need for further ratepayer funding.
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Strengthening American Infrastructure (SAI)
Strengthening American Infrastructure (SAI) is an NSF Program seeking to stimulate human-centered fundamental and potentially transformative research aimed at strengthening America’s infrastructure. Effective infrastructure provides a strong foundation for socioeconomic vitality and broad quality of life improvement. Strong, reliable, and effective infrastructure spurs private-sector innovation, grows the economy, creates jobs, makes public-sector service provision more efficient, strengthens communities, promotes equal opportunity, protects the natural environment, enhances national security, and fuels American leadership. Achieving these objectives requires the integration of expertise from across all science and engineering disciplines. SAI focuses on how fundamental knowledge about human reasoning and decision-making, governance, and social and cultural processes enables the building and maintenance of effective infrastructure that improves lives and society and builds on advances in technology and engineering. Successful projects will represent a convergence of expertise in one or more SBE sciences deeply integrated with other disciplines to support substantial and potentially pathbreaking, fundamental research applied to strengthening a specific and focal infrastructure.
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Miller Center Accelerator
The Miller Center Accelerator is designed for high-potential social enterprises with proven traction, working on women’s economic empowerment, climate resilience, or the intersection of both. This 6-month accelerator program combines mentorship with structured curriculum to help social entrepreneurs address gaps in their impact model, business model, and growth strategies, and ultimately move them along the path toward growth, significant scale, and investment.
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AWS Sustainable Cities Accelerator
The Sustainable Cities Accelerator is a virtual six-week, technical, business, and mentorship accelerator delivered by Freshwater Advisors and Public Spend Forum, along with other industry-leading partners. You will get to work with leading AWS technical experts to build and scale your cloud platform. Mobility and Transportation is the first cohort of 2022 for the AWS Sustainable Cities Accelerator.
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Ray of Hope Prize
The Ray of Hope Prize identifies the top nature-inspired startups in the world and fosters their growth by providing sustainable business training, communications support, and opportunities for non-dilutive funding—the top being a $100,000 equity-free prize. Armed with nature’s billions of years of research and development, these startups are uniquely suited to address critical environmental and social issues at scale.
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CTIA Wireless Foundation Catalyst
Catalyst is a competitive grants program for ambitious social entrepreneurs using the power of 5G and leading edge wireless technologies to enhance our lives and address pressing challenges in American communities. Up to six applicants will receive financial and non-financial benefits, with a first-place grant of $100,000.
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NREL’s Competitiveness Improvement Project
The distributed wind energy industry requires rapid innovation to reduce costs and increase customer confidence, but many companies that build small and mid-sized wind turbines lack the resources to develop, certify, and commercialize next-generation technology. Managed by NREL on behalf of the U.S. Department of Energy (DOE) Wind Energy Technologies Office, CIP awards cost-shared subcontracts and technical support to manufacturers of small and medium-sized wind turbines. Designed to make distributed wind energy technologies more cost-competitive and reliable, these awards help manufacturers of wind turbines less than 1 megawatt in capacity to:
- Optimize their designs
- Develop advanced manufacturing processes
- Perform turbine and component testing and certification
- Accelerate pathways for commercialization.
The goals of CIP are to make wind energy cost-competitive with other distributed generation technologies and increase the number of wind turbine designs tested and certified to national standards.
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Deploying Solar with Wildlife and Ecosystem Services Benefits (SolWEB)
The DOE will award $10 million for innovative solutions and strategies that maximize benefits and minimize impacts to wildlife and ecosystems from solar energy infrastructure.
DOE is interested in projects that will produce results with broad relevance to solar stakeholders by establishing methods, technologies, models, best management practices, or resources that facilitate ground-mounted photovoltaic energy generation, including utility-scale and community solar, or concentrating solar-thermal power that is compatible with surrounding wildlife. DOE is also interested in assessing and optimizing ecosystem benefits that solar energy facilities can provide, such as soil formation, pollination of food crops, and carbon sequestration.
To facilitate the formation of teams, SETO is providing a forum where interested parties can add themselves to a Teaming Partner List, which allows organizations that may wish to apply to the FOA, but not as the prime applicant, to express interest to potential partners.
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Partnerships for Climate-Smart Commodities – USDA
Up to approximately $1 billion will be made available for the Partnerships for Climate-Smart Commodities projects through this funding opportunity, which will build markets and invest in America’s climate-smart farmers, ranchers, and forest owners to strengthen U.S. rural and agricultural communities. Through the Partnerships for Climate-Smart Commodities, USDA will support the production and marketing of climate-smart commodities through a set of pilot projects that provide voluntary incentives through partners to producers and land owners, including early adopters, to:
- implement climate-smart production practices, activities, and systems on working lands,
- measure/quantify, monitor and verify the carbon and greenhouse gas (GHG) benefits associated with those practices, and
- develop markets and promote the resulting climate-smart commodities.
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Mining Cleantech Challenge 2022
The Mining Cleantech Challenge efficiently provides targeted connections between mining industry operators, OEMs, and clean technology solution providers with a mutually beneficial goal of meeting industry’s needs while at the same time introducing innovative solutions to the marketplace. Innovative solutions providers will complete a competitive vetting process, after which 10 – 12 companies will be invited to present their technologies to the partners and sponsor/judges. There are no geographic restrictions or requirements for participating companies. The program will be held virtually on zoom on April 21, 2022.
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CHEMICAL AND MATERIALS SCIENCES TO ADVANCE CLEANTECH AND LOW-CARBON MANUFACTURING
The DOE Office of Science program in Basic Energy Sciences (BES) announces its interest in receiving new applications to advance basic and fundamental chemical and materials sciences that underpin clean energy technologies and low-carbon manufacturing. The goal is creation of foundational knowledge to support the
development of approaches that will minimize climate impacts of energy technologies and manufacturing. For this FOA, clean energy technologies include approaches to capture, produce, convert, store, and use energy that reduce or eliminate unwanted emissions such as greenhouse gases (e.g., carbon dioxide, methane, etc.). These technologies also include approaches such as direct air capture (DAC) and carbon storage/sequestration to decrease emissions that have been
released into the environment from energy production and use. Low-carbon manufacturing refers to manufacturing processes that minimize carbon emissions and energy consumption. Investments from this FOA are anticipated to include awards that build foundational knowledge underpinning the Energy Earthshots Initiative. A mandatory pre-application must be submitted by March 16.
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