The fund will provide grants to support two-to-three national clean financing institutions, enabling them to partner with the private sector to provide accessible, affordable financing for tens of thousands of clean technology projects nationwide. These national nonprofits will enable individuals, families, nonprofits, governments, small businesses, and others to access the capital they need to deploy a diverse suite of clean technology projects in their homes, businesses, and communities, which will reduce pollution while creating jobs, accelerating progress toward energy security, and lowering energy costs. By mobilizing significant amounts of private capital, these national nonprofits will ensure that every dollar of public funds generates several times more in private investment. At least 40% of the funds from the National Clean Investment Fund will be dedicated to low-income and disadvantaged communities, including those that are rural communities, Tribal communities, communities with environmental justice concerns, energy communities, and persistent poverty counties.

The Clean Communities Investment Accelerator will provide grants to support two-to-seven hub nonprofit organizations, enabling them to provide funding and technical assistance such as such as providing training, market analysis, technical support, and structuring expertise as well as financial market-building act to public, quasi-public, not-for-profit, and non-profit community lenders working in low-income and disadvantaged communities—supporting the goal that every community in the country has access to the capital they need to deploy clean technology projects. These hub nonprofits will enable hundreds of community lenders to finance clean technology projects in low-income and disadvantaged communities while also mobilizing private capital and building the enduring capacity of community lenders to finance these projects for years to come.

EPA is seeking applications from eligible entities to establish and operate an Environmental Justice Thriving Communities Technical Assistance Center (EJ TCTAC) for EPA Region 8. The Region 8 EJ TCTAC will provide technical assistance, training, and other eligible forms of assistance, resources, and support to program participants throughout EPA Region 8 (Colorado, Montana, North Dakota, South Dakota, Utah, and Wyoming). To community groups, nonprofits, local governments and others to build capacity for navigating federal, state and private grant application systems, writing strong grant proposals, and effectively managing grant funding.

In addition, these EJ TCTACs will provide guidance on engagement with governmental processes, community outreach, meeting facilitation, and translation and interpretation services for limited English-speaking participants, removing barriers and improving accessibility for communities with environmental justice concerns. Each of the technical assistance centers will also create and manage communication channels to ensure the communities they serve have direct access to resources and information.

ARPA-E seeks proposals for novel scalable superconducting manufacturing methods that can increase the production rate and significantly reduce the cost of high-quality superconducting tapes or wires with uniform performance parameters. Projects as part of this Exploratory Topic will work to develop novel fabrication methods for HTS tape or wire that can concurrently increase continuous tape length, reduce electrical variation along the tape, increase overall production rate while also, significantly reducing the production costs and maintaining a high level of tape performance.

The goal of the prize is to develop robust, domestic recycling options for fiber-reinforced composites and rare earth elements can lessen the United States’ need to extract and process raw materials, which can, in turn, reduce damage to the environment. Additionally, recycling rare earth elements would safeguard domestic manufacturing by improving resilience to price volatility and supply chain disruption.

During the first phase, Initiate!, competitors will prepare a submission package that highlights a concept for wind material recycling focused on economic and environmental sustainability. Up to 20 winners will be selected to receive $75,000 in cash each and an invitation to compete in the second phase of the competition.

USACE/ERDC has been working on developing methods and tools for resilience quantification in complex systems, including watershed resilience. Recent framework for resilience implementation needs to be adjusted to communities in the Southeast Region who experience emergencies from flooding and coastal storm damage.

The objective of this program is to review resilience quantification methodology and processes of community engagement. Reconciling community needs and methodological gaps should result in methodological advancement.  Extension from individual projects acting on specific communities to watershed and regional approaches is required. This work would focus on amplification from specific threat scenarios acting on individual vulnerabilities of specific communities toward multiple compounding threats acting at watershed-wide scale.

The program will form partnerships with and fund eligible U.S.-based organizations to develop business accelerators to identify and support small businesses across ocean-based climate resilience theme areas to attract capital, mature their technologies, and scale their business models for climate impact and economic prosperity. Those theme areas are ocean-based renewable energy, coastal and ocean carbon sequestration monitoring and accounting, hazard mitigation and coastal resilience, ecosystems services, including change detection, change analysis and change adaptation and mitigation and other ocean, coastal and Great Lakes-based climate resilience theme areas as determined by the applicant.

CPO is seeking applications for two individual competitions in FY24. These 2 competitions are to expand creation and implementation of actionable, place-based climate information for community heat resilience.

Competitions 1 (NIHHIS Center of Excellence – Center for Community Climate & Health Observations, Monitoring & Evaluation) and 2 (NIHHIS Center of Excellence – Center for Climate and Health Assessments, Policy, and Practice) will support the new NIHHIS Centers of Excellence. The first center will provide technical and other assistance in developing community science observations to inform equitable heat resilience action while the second center will focus on technical and other assistance in planning, taking action on, and evaluating equitable heat resilience informed by prior observations and monitoring.

The Reconnecting Communities Pilot Program was established in the Bipartisan Infrastructure Law to help fund community-led projects that mitigate physical barriers to mobility and access, such as train tracks or highways. The Inflation Reduction Act established the Neighborhood Access and Equity Program that similarly funds projects that remove physical barriers as well as projects to improve walkability, safety, and affordable transportation access, particularly in low-income and disadvantaged communities. The Office of the Secretary of Transportation (OST) has released a joint Notice of Funding Opportunity (NOFO), which will combine the two major discretionary grants into one NOFO.

Under the B2S program, EDA awards and manages a portfolio of grants designed to increase regional capacity to strengthen ecosystems that equitably and inclusively support diverse technology innovators, entrepreneurs, and startups. These regions are growing technology-driven businesses, creating high-skill, high-wage jobs, and building the industries of the future.

• The Venture Challenge funds organizations that enable startups to become the next generation of globally competitive, industry-leading companies and supports regions in overcoming barriers that prevent would-be innovators from accessing these opportunities.
• Capital Challenge awards provide programmatic and operational support for the formation, launch, or scale of investment funds that seek to provide access to the kinds of capital that enable technology companies to start and scale.

The Procurement Forecast tool is a list of anticipated USDA solicitations that small businesses, small disadvantaged businesses, women-owned small businesses, HUBZone small businesses, and service-disabled veteran-owned small businesses may be able to perform under direct contracts with USDA, or through subcontracting opportunities.

The Tech Hubs Program is an economic development initiative designed to drive regional technology- and innovation-centric growth by strengthening a region’s capacity to manufacture, commercialize, and deploy critical technologies. This program will invest directly in regions with the assets, resources, capacity, and potential to transform into globally competitive innovation centers in approximately 10 years while catalyzing the creation of good jobs for American workers at all skill levels, both equitably and inclusively. EDA will designate at least 20 Tech Hubs across the country and will separately award approximately $15 million in strategy development grants to accelerate the development of future Tech Hubs. The Tech Hubs designation will be a widely recognized indicator of a region’s potential for rapid technology-led economic growth.