The Good Jobs in Clean Energy Prize is designed to encourage coalition-building in communities across the country that focus on creating quality jobs and fostering an equitable and inclusive workforce in clean energy sectors.  Each coalition is required to include, at a minimum, one coalition representative from each of the five key stakeholder groups below:

1. Labor organizations
2. Clean energy employers
3. Community-based organizations
4. Public agencies
5. Education and workforce providers

These competing coalitions will develop and implement Coalition Action Plans that improve the quality of and expand access to good jobs in clean energy.

Through the Geothermal Collegiate Competition, the U.S. Department of Energy Geothermal Technologies Office (GTO) encourages students to develop innovative solutions for geothermal energy application challenges and build career skills for the clean energy workforce. Teams must have at least three undergraduate and/or graduate members (can be from multiple schools) and students of any discipline can participate. Final competition deliverables will be due in December 2024.

For more than a decade, the BNEF Pioneers program has identified a group of game-changing technologies or innovations annually – each with the potential to accelerate global decarbonization and halt climate change. Applicants are shortlisted by the BNEF Pioneers team, and finalists are judged by a panel of BNEF experts. Winners must prove they offer a novel, substantial, scalable and competitive solution. In 2025, the program will focus on three global climate challenges and will award the Pioneers prize to innovators with scalable, impactful and equitable solutions to these challenges.

The Ocean Exchange Collegiate Award, and the Guy Harvey Foundation Collegiate Award 2024, of $10,000 USD each, are given to the solutions that advance our understanding of the ocean and help minimize our impact on these resources, even while using them for human benefit, resulting in more resilient bodies of water including healthy marine life and coastlines.

Are you an entrepreneur scaling technology to enhance the climate-resilience of frontline communities? Are you a nonprofit innovator using technology to combat the adverse effects of climate change on your community’s health and well-being? The Twilio.org Climate Tech Prize is investing $1 million from the Twilio.org Impact Fund in actionable technology solutions, addressing both immediate and enduring challenges faced by communities susceptible to climate-induced migration and displacement.

The Design Challenge is an annual collegiate competition where interdisciplinary teams create sustainable, high-performance building designs that address real-world issues such as existing building retrofits, community impacts, affordability, and resilience. Teams collaborate on a residential or commercial design project for one or two academic semesters, with the competition culminating each April at the Solar Decathlon Competition Event.

NYSERDA is issuing Round 2 of funding for two Challenge Areas:

1. Innovations in Green Cooling: Research, development, and demonstration of tools, technologies and strategies that increase adoption, performance, and benefits of nature-based approaches to passive cooling, resilience, and reliability in extreme heat.
2. Carbon Negative Buildings: Demonstration, introduction and scale up of carbon negative products in New York State that support building energy efficiency.

The American-Made Upskill Prize for the Solar Manufacturing Workforce (Upskill Prize) is a $5 million prize designed to accelerate the expansion of the U.S. solar manufacturing workforce and equip workers with the skills necessary to revitalize the domestic solar manufacturing supply chain. This prize targets various facets of the U.S. solar photovoltaics (PV) module supply chain, addressing critical workforce needs.  Competing teams propose comprehensive workforce training plans that are composed of either (or both) new worker training or incumbent worker training.

The AI for Climate and Nature Grand Challenge is a global $100 million initiative from the Bezos Earth Fund. The Grand Challenge is exploring new ideas for multiplying the impact of climate and nature efforts using modern AI. The first round of awards will focus on sustainable proteins, power grid optimization, and biodiversity conservation, in addition to embracing visionary wildcard solutions for climate and nature. The Bezos Earth Fund will determine the final slate of Seed Grantees who will be invited to participate in Phase 2.

With the Lithium-Ion Battery Recycling Prize, teams of creative individuals, entrepreneurs, and businesses will advance conceptual solutions to prototypes and finally to pilot validations to address challenges with the lithium-ion battery recycling supply chain. This new public contest aims to incentivize new submissions from battery industry entrepreneurs that demonstrate innovative solutions that work toward or deliver on the goal of the prize, while continuing to support the further development of Phase III winning solutions. This phase consists of two simultaneous competition tracks:

• Track 1: New Competitors —Legal business entities based in the United States with single process ideas, partial solutions or full concept solutions that enable or meet the prize goal. Track 1 is open to new participants and previous competitors of the Lithium-Ion Battery Recycling Prize. A single business entity may participate as a new competitor, or teams may be comprised of multiple businesses.
• Track 2: Verified Competitors — Phase III winners are invited to further develop their concept solutions with the added support of a $100,000 noncash voucher to be spent at a Voucher Service Provider within the American-Made Network. Voucher work must support the continued validation and demonstration of their Phase III pilot-scale solutions.

The three-phase $2.25 million Silicon Carbide (SiC) Packaging Prize—launched by the U.S. Department of Energy’s (DOE’s) Office of Electricity—invites competitors to propose, design, build, and test state-of-the-art SiC packaging prototypes that move the industry beyond its current state. Competitors will describe their team, their plan to make progress toward SiC packaging, showcase their current prototypes, and provide evidence of their current metrics that are in alignment with the goals of the prize. The goal of this phase is to develop a set of design documents for a Phase 2 prototype which adheres to the requirements set.

The MSI Contract Readiness Prize is a one-phase capacity building prize that aims to boost equity across the U.S. Department of Energy (DOE) contracting for small, medium, and large Historically Black Colleges (HBCUs), Tribal Colleges and Universities (TCUs), and other Minority Serving Institutions (MSIs), including Asian American, Native American, Pacific Islander Serving Institutions (AANAPISIs), Hispanic Serving Institutions (HSIs), and Predominantly Black Institutions (PBIs). This prize builds on the successes of the Biden Administration’s Justice40 Initiative that is working toward environmental justice for all Americans by involving MSIs as key strategic partners.