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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

The Office of Science (SC) of the Department of Energy (DOE) hereby announces its continuing interest in receiving grant applications for support of work in the following program areas: Advanced Scientific Computing Research, Basic Energy Sciences, Biological and Environmental Research, Fusion Energy Sciences, High Energy Physics, Nuclear Physics, Isotope R&D and Production, and Accelerator R&D and Production. This FOA is our annual, broad, open solicitation that covers all research areas in SC and is open throughout the Fiscal Year. Any research within SC’s Congressionally-authorized mission may be proposed under this FOA.

Together with Clean Energy Trust, Nicor Gas is proud to support the launch of the Nicor Gas Multicultural Innovator Award – a $25,000 equity and inclusion grant to support the development of a clean energy technology startup with a minority founder or CEO. In addition to the grant, recipients of the inaugural award – part of Clean Energy Trust’s Diversity Equity and Inclusion initiative – will receive 12 months of business mentorship and heightened exposure to investors and customers. Entrepreneurs and businesses making a positive environmental impact throughout the state will be considered.

Small Illinois businesses, or those with a substantial presence in the state, with a focus on renewable energy, energy efficiency, smart buildings and cities, energy storage, water, ag-tech, digital solutions for operational efficiencies, reduced maintenance costs, customer engagement and/or worker training and management may be eligible to apply for the award. Other company criteria include:

• Founder or CEO who identifies as Black, Indigenous and/or person of color
• 2-12 full-time employees
• No more than $3 million in funding raised; must be able to demonstrate at least three to six months of funding runway
• Can be product or service-based; does not need to be market-ready, but is preferred