The American-Made Community Power Accelerator Prize is designed to fast-track the efforts of new, emerging, and expanding solar developers and co-developers to learn, participate, and grow their operations to support multiple successful community solar projects.  The goal of this prize is to grow a robust ecosystem of community solar project developers that incorporate meaningful benefits into projects across the United States.

This prize has three phases: Ready! Set! and Grow! By the end of the prize, competitors will be ready to engage with the Community Power Accelerator online platform, which provides a place for competitors to shop their credit-ready projects around to verified project developers, investors, and philanthropic organizations.

The Community Power Accelerator Prize is open to U.S. community solar developers, including new developers, co-developers (organizations who are partnering with a project developer), or developers who are expanding their community solar operations.

The American-Made High Temperature Geothermal Geophone Prize is designed to catalyze the development of high temperature, downhole capable seismic monitoring for enhanced geothermal systems (EGS) in the American instrumentation community. This is accomplished through a series of prize competitions and the development of a diverse and powerful support network that leverages national laboratories, energy incubators, and other resources from across the United States.  The contests provide a total of $3.65 million in incentives—$2.55 million in cash prizes, $1.1 million in vouchers. Winning Phase 2: Design! is required to compete in Phase 3: Build!; however, new teams may join during Phase 2: Design! without competing in  Phase 1: Concept!.

The Direct Air Capture (DAC) Commercial Prize awards cash prizes to teams that already have a technology that can capture CO2 and scale it up to achieve a removal target. Teams will win increasingly larger prizes as they successfully scale up their DAC technologies over the course of four phases. Each phase requires compounding progress of the team’s DAC technology development.

The Direct Air Capture (DAC) Pre-Commercial Technology Prize awards cash prizes to teams that identify a critical need in the DAC industry, develop a solution to address this gap, and test the idea to a degree of scale. It aims to focus on the steps of ideation and entrepreneurship needed to prepare a technology and business for commercialization. Teams will win increasingly larger prizes as they successfully meet technology milestones over the course of three phases: Dream, Design, and Develop. Each phase requires compounding progress of the team’s DAC technology development.

The Direct Air Capture (DAC) Pre-Commercial Energy Program for Innovation Clusters (EPIC) Prize awards cash prizes to regional incubator teams that submit creative and impactful plans to support entrepreneurs and innovators in the DAC space and create meaningful community engagement. It aims to support both emerging and established direct air capture incubators and accelerators in implementing those plans to develop strong clusters, resources, and connections for energy startups and entrepreneurs.

The Conductivity-enhanced materials for Affordable, Breakthrough Leapfrog Electric and thermal applications (CABLE) Conductor Manufacturing Prize aims to help supercharge our U.S. energy and manufacturing industries. Competitors must demonstrate significant enhancements in conductivity and affordability that enable U.S. manufacturers to leapfrog to next-generation materials. Competitors will provide a sample of their material for electrical conductivity testing and preliminary plans to scale-up and manufacture the material according to prize requirements. Any eligible entity can compete in Stage 2 regardless of whether they were a competitor in Stage 1.

The U.S. Small Business Administration (SBA) is offering $50,000 to $200,000 in prize awards for impactful and inclusive approaches to foster a thriving, collaborative national innovation support ecosystem to advance research and development (R&D) from ideas to impact. By fostering connections between entrepreneurs, advisors, mentors, partners, philanthropies, corporations, investors, and other shared resources, the 2023 Growth Accelerator Fund Competition (GAFC) will catalyze strategic ecosystem partnerships to build community and organizational capacity for the successful launch, growth, and scale of STEM (Science, Technology, Engineering, and Mathematics)-based entrepreneurs and startups.

The Destination Decarbonization Challenge is a case study competition open to undergraduate students who want to get involved in the energy industry, solve challenges surrounding carbon emissions in their local region, and win some prize money along the way!

The Transit Tech Lab provides a pathway for growth-stage companies to efficiently solve public transportation challenges. Successful companies have an opportunity to pilot their technology with participating transit systems in the New York region.

Applications will be accepted for the Human Capital Challenge and the Operational Efficiency Challenge.

The Equitable and Affordable Solutions to Electrification (EAS-E) Home Electrification Prize provides up to $2.4 million in prizes for innovative solutions that advance electrification retrofits of residential homes across all building types and geographies. The goal of the EAS-E Prize is to support a suite of design solutions, tools, and/or technology innovations that make electrification more affordable and accessible in existing U.S. homes. Through this prize, the Building Technologies Office aims to create more opportunities and successes for electrification of the U.S. housing stock with a focus on equitable solutions for all homeowners—not only through affordability, but also by enabling solutions specific to dwellings more common in low-income and under-resourced communities.

‍The Edge Prize is your opportunity to share what works, big or small, and find the others who want to join you, fund you, learn from you, or replicate your efforts locally. This is not a business plan competition. This is not a “pitch” competition. It’s not really a contest at all! This is about sharing what you’re already doing, why it’s working, and why it gives you hope.

We want to hear from anyone in Salmon Nation (California, Oregon, Washington, British Columbia, Yukon, or Alaska) working on something that has a positive impact in your community. With additional resources and a supportive network, you know this solution could benefit more communities all over the bioregion and beyond.

The American-Made Program facilitates prizes that help to create partnerships that connect entrepreneurs to the private sector and the DOE national labs. The AMC program currently represents more than 16 offices within the DOE, 300+organizations, and more than $100M in cash prizes and support. This program supports 30+ unique prize challenges consisting of prizes that advance numerous energy technologies including solar, water, geothermal, hydrogen, buildings, transportation, wind, and more. These prizes also advance community development, clean energy capacity, new business creation, technology commercialization, and energy justice initiatives.

NREL is seeking sponsors to engage with American-Made and DOE in several specific ways:

• Work with us in developing a co-sponsored prize challenge
• Work with us on a new Lab MATCH prize that is focused on lab IP commercialization
• Work with us on bringing a new American-Made Learning Platform to life