CalSEED supports early-stage entrepreneurs in delivering projects that respond to clean energy, efficiency, or storage needs while considering equity of access and benefit, ensuring these technologies are working to serve California’s most vulnerable populations. As the first step in California’s innovation pipeline, the program incubates energy concepts and readies them for investment and deployment by providing:

• Targeted professional development services including mentorship with seasoned professionals, legal counsel, expert guidance, and training to support technology refinements, market development, and commercialization.
• Direct, non-dilutive grant-based funding to advance clean energy innovations to commercialization ($150K for Concept Awards, and a $450K Prototype Award to winners of the annual Business Plan Competition).
• Access to key accelerator and incubator programs and test facilities.
• Enhanced access to private capital.

FAIR is focused on building research capacity at academic institutions that have been historically underrepresented in the SC portfolio. Capacity building is interpreted broadly to include both personnel expertise and infrastructure and is expected to be durable, contributing over time toward sustained research strength at the lead institution. Because collaboration is critical to SC research, relationship building through the partnership is considered a key component of the FAIR program. All applications must be submitted on behalf of a lead institution and include a single partnering team member. The lead institution must be a non-R1 MSI or a non-R1 ERI and the partner must be either a DOE National Laboratory (https://www.energy.gov/national-laboratories), an SC Scientific User Facility (https://science.osti.gov/User-Facilities), or an R1 MSI/ERI.

Have momentum and early adopters? We can accelerate that. Here you’ll build traction through consistency in one channel, and get your ducks in a row for your seed round.

The Department of Energy announced $45.8 million in new funding for projects that will advance research, development, demonstration, and deployment (RDD&D) critical to achieving net-zero greenhouse gas emissions in the transportation sector. Topic areas in the Vehicle Technologies Office (VTO) Fiscal Year (FY) 2024 R&D funding opportunity include:

• Next-generation phosphate-based cathodes.
• Advancing the state of the art for sodium-ion batteries.
• Developing concepts for decreasing greenhouse gas emissions from off-road vehicles such as construction, agriculture, mining, and forestry vehicles.
• Developing and deploying vehicle-to-everything technologies that can lead to meaningful savings at the vehicle and transportation system level.
• Developing high-performance, domestically produced electrical steels (E-steels) for use in electrified powertrains.
• Addressing critical cybersecurity needs for smart and secure electric vehicle charging.

The FOA will award up to $18.8 million to address research and development (R&D) challenges in converting algae, such as seaweeds and other wet waste feedstocks, to biofuels and bioproducts that can decarbonize domestic transportation, industry, and communities.

• Topic Area 1: Conversion of Seaweeds to Low Carbon Fuels and Bioproducts  – This Topic Area, funded by BETO, will focus on laboratory scale R&D on conversion of seaweeds and seaweed blends with other wet wastes to renewable fuels and bioproducts to enable these readily available feedstocks to access new markets.
• Topic Area 2: Conversion of Algal Biomass for Low Carbon Agricultural Bioproducts – This Topic Area, funded by FECM, will support the use of anthropogenic CO₂ streams from industrial sources or utilities to grow micro- and macroalgae for low-carbon bioproducts.

From 2024 through 2027, the Commercial Building Heat Pump Accelerator will work with stakeholders, from commercial building owners and operators to manufacturers, to accelerate the development and adoption of heat pump packaged RTUs to achieve integrated energy efficiency and electrification of buildings. The Accelerator is working to accelerate the production and deployment of heat pump RTUs. Organizations looking to partner with the Accelerator can join the Challenge or the Campaign.

We are excited to announce the third iteration of our InNYC cohort. We provide three months of McKinsey team support for seed to series C startups with underrepresented founders* in the New York area who we believe will change the future.

The Concentrating Solar Flux to Heat and Power funding opportunity will award up to $30 million for research, development, and demonstration projects that accelerate the large-scale development of CSP technology. The three topic areas are:

• Scalable Concentrating Solar Collectors – This topic seeks innovations to lower costs and demonstrate reliability of solar collectors.
• Scalable Supercritical Carbon Dioxide (sCO₂) Turbomachinery – This topic seeks proposals for scaled-up, advanced power cycles based on supercritical carbon dioxide that are more efficient than existing steam-based cycles.
• Scalable Concentrating Solar-thermal Receivers and Reactors – This topic seeks proposals for novel solar receivers and solar reactors that convert concentrated sunlight into usable thermal energy at high temperatures.

The goal of the prize is to encourage citizens and organizations from all over the world for their great contribution to solving important humanitarian problems. One of the Focus Areas is:

• Ecology and Sustainable Development
  • Рrojects in the field of environmental protection, environmental education, environmental consumption, green economy and technology.

This Funding Opportunity Announcement (FOA) is jointly issued by the U.S. Department of Energy Solar Energy Technologies Office (SETO) and Wind Energy Technologies Office (WETO) as part of their Interconnection Innovation Exchange (i2X) program1 to support innovative work to enable simpler, faster, and fairer interconnection of clean energy resources while enhancing the reliability, resiliency, and security of our electrical grid.

The two FOA topic areas are as follows: Topic Area 1: Improved Efficiency of EMT Simulations for Interconnection Studies of IBRs Projects in this topic area will seek to improve the efficiency of the interconnection study process for new IBRs, such as solar and wind plants and battery energy storage systems, by improving software tools to study plant dynamics to increase long-term plant reliability. Projects will achieve this both by improving the speed of advanced, high-fidelity EMT modeling and simulation tools used in power systems interconnection studies and by developing a better understanding of when such high-fidelity simulations are necessary in the interconnection process. Topic Area 2: Dynamic Stability-Enhanced Network Assessment Tools Projects in this topic area will develop tools to provide stakeholders with data on transmission system characteristics related to stability, voltage, and grid strength while securing confidential and critical energy infrastructure information. Projects will establish the type of information required by stakeholders, develop a tool or tools, and test and evaluate those tools on at least one real transmission system.

The Southern California Energy Innovation Network (SCEIN) is a free program for startups that are developing solutions to help California meet its energy goals. The program provides access to the resources and facilities of a number of regional partner organizations (listed below) and connections with industry in order to accelerate the commercialization of emerging energy technologies.