The FLIPspace: Advanced Mobility Northwest Arkansas pilot program is a seven-month initiative that focuses specifically on addressing the transportation challenges of the region, offering participants the opportunity to develop and commercialize new mobility technologies that will shape the future of transportation. Throughout the experience, teams will gain a deep understanding of tech transfer, with support from the FLC FLEX Program, to refine their market research skills and evaluate federal technologies in a competitive business landscape. Participants will collaborate with industry leaders and expert mentors to shape their ideas into market-ready solutions that address real-world challenges in transportation and mobility.

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 Beyond the Meter: Energy Storage Integration Prize, funded by U.S. Department of Energy (DOE) Office of Electricity (OE), is focused on the grid edge, or where buildings, industry, transportation, renewable energies, storage, and the electric grid come together. Grid edge is a leading area of the electricity evolution, where electricity changes from being a one-way grid to a two-way grid with homeowners and business owners storing and transmitting energy from behind-the-meter. To have a smooth energy transition, the many new and emerging components of the grid must work together. This prize will highlight grid-edge technology solutions around ESS that enable different technologies to integrate and operate together, contributing to a more resilient, efficient, and sustainable energy ecosystem.

The Department of Energy’s (DOE) Office of Clean Energy Demonstrations (OCED) is issuing this Notice of Funding Opportunity (NOFO) to support technology demonstrations for energy storage solutions at the pilot-scale. The program will focus on non-lithium technologies, long-duration (10+ hour discharge) systems, and stationary storage applications.

U.S. Department of Energy’s (DOE) Office of Fossil Energy and Carbon Management (FECM) announced it will make up to $54.4 million in additional funding available to advance diverse carbon management approaches that reduce carbon dioxide (CO₂) pollution. The funding will support the development of technologies that capture CO₂ from industrial and power generation sources or directly from the atmosphere and transport it either for permanent geologic storage or conversion into valuable products such as fuels and chemicals.

The American-Made Commercial Direct Air Capture Pilot Prize (DAC Pilot Prize) offers up to $52.5 million in cash awards to technology developers that design, build, commission, and operate innovative and novel DAC pilot facilities capable of capturing at least 500 tonnes of atmospheric carbon dioxide per year. The DAC Pilot Prize aims to provide support for first-of-a-kind DAC pilots that meet the technology standards to progress towards commercialization.

The program will bring together entrepreneurs from across DC, Maryland, and Virginia (DMV), empowering them to address climate mitigation, adaptation, and resilience. Founders will receive expert training, critical resources to accelerate their ventures, and two in-person residency weeks in the DMV. We’re looking for (for-profit) startups that are building scalable solutions that are tackling challenges related to climate mitigation, adaptation, and resilience across the DC, Maryland, and Virginia area.

NSF-supported science and engineering research increasingly relies on cutting-edge infrastructure. With its Major Research Instrumentation (MRI) program and Major Multi-user Facilities (“Major Facilities”) projects, NSF supports infrastructure projects at the lower and higher range of infrastructure project costs, Foundation-wide, across science and engineering research disciplines. The Foundation-wide Mid-scale Research Infrastructure opportunity is intended to provide NSF with an agile, Foundation-wide process to fund experimental research capabilities in the mid-scale range between MRI and Major Multi-user Facilities.

This solicitation will fund up to $10.6 million of projects that address several major areas of need for floating offshore wind, including innovation in ports and vessels, transmission technology, and uncrewed underwater vehicles for environmental monitoring. NOWRDC intends to support projects in partnership with the best research and innovation organizations to achieve maximum impact. Proposals are welcomed from all geographic locations within the United States, with additional eligibility parameters outlined in the Request for Proposals (RFP).

The U.S. Department of Energy (DOE) Interconnection Innovation e-Xchange (i2X) program and Joint Office of Energy and Transportation, through a Partnership Intermediary Agreement with ENERGYWERX, announced the Innovative Queue Management Solutions (iQMS) for Clean Energy Interconnection and Energization program. This program will award $11.2 million to no more than 25 distribution utilities to pilot innovative solutions for managing renewable energy and electric vehicle (EV) charging interconnection and energization queues. The iQMS program will fund pilot projects to demonstrate new interconnection queue management solutions on actual interconnection, service load request, and energization queues. These tests will help utilities and public utility commissions understand the real-world capabilities of new software and workflow automation solutions and accelerate their adoption to enable rapid deployment of more solar energy, wind energy, energy storage, EV charging infrastructure, and other clean energy assets to the grid. Participating utilities will document and share lessons learned and best practices from their pilot projects to help other utilities manage similar interconnection and energization requests.

The Science and Technology Centers (STC): Integrative Partnerships program supports exceptionally innovative, complex research and education projects that require large-scale, long-term awards. STCs focus on creating new scientific paradigms, establishing entirely new scientific disciplines, and developing transformative technologies which have the potential for broad scientific or societal impact. STCs conduct world-class research through partnerships among institutions of higher education, national laboratories, industrial organizations, other public or private entities, and via international collaborations, as appropriate. They provide a means to undertake potentially groundbreaking investigations at the interfaces of disciplines and/or highly innovative approaches within disciplines. STCs may involve any area of science and engineering that NSF supports. STC investments support the NSF vision of creating and exploiting new concepts in science and engineering and providing global leadership in research and education. Centers provide a rich environment for encouraging scientists, engineers, and educators to take risks in pursuing discoveries and new knowledge.