The Rural Utilities Service (RUS), an agency of the United States Department of Agriculture (USDA) announces a notice of funding opportunity, subject to appropriation, of up to $10 million in competitive grants to assist communities with extremely high energy costs. The grant funds may be used to acquire, construct, or improve energy generation, transmission, or distribution facilities serving communities where the average annual residential expenditure for home energy exceeds 275% of the national average. Eligible projects also include on-grid and off-grid renewable energy projects and the implementation of energy efficiency and energy conservation projects for eligible communities.

Awarded funding will support product development and field demonstration of PTHP products that can be installed using existing through-wall openings without requiring building electrical infrastructure upgrades. Heat pumps developed with support from the Program will provide high-efficiency heating and cooling performance at New York’s hottest and coldest temperatures and offer advanced features to improve indoor air quality and tenant comfort.

Available Funding
Up to $1,250,000 per product is available for product development and field demonstration support:

• Product development grant of up to $250,000 per product, per manufacturer, to support development of new, or modification of existing packaged terminal heat pump equipment.
• Up to $1,000,000 per product, per manufacturer, to fund field demonstration of the new PTHP products in NYS buildings qualified as eligible demonstration sites.

Blue-Sky Training Program for Grid Scale Energy Storage Systems aims to enhance community safety for utilities with Energy Storage Systems. As storage technologies continue to be deployed, it is critical that communities are storage ready and that necessary stakeholders are brought to the table to ensure a new or existing Energy Storage Systems will operate safely and reliably.

A new project, funded by the U.S. Department of Energy’s (DOE’s) Geothermal Technologies Office and administered by the National Renewable Energy Laboratory (NREL), will sponsor a cultural exchange program for Native Hawaiians and New Zealand Māori to connect around energy resources, including geothermal energy.

The 2025 Indigenous Geothermal Cultural Exchange (the Exchange) seeks to support Native Hawaiians by providing decision makers from respective people groups with the tools and knowledge necessary to understand the policy, regulatory, and developmental landscape for
geothermal energy in the context of their culture. The goal of this effort is to provide a forum of understanding and respect for Native Hawaiians to connect with Māori, who have successfully developed geothermal energy to benefit their people.

The purpose of the Community Wildfire Defense Grant is to assist at-risk local communities and Indian Tribes with planning and mitigating against the risk created by wildfire.

The Act prioritizes at-risk communities in an area identified as having high or very high wildfire hazard potential, are low-income, and/or have been impacted by a severe disaster. More details on these three priorities can be found in the Notices of Funding Opportunity (NOFOs).

The CWDG helps communities in the wildland urban interface (WUI) implement the three goals of the National Cohesive Wildland Fire Management Strategy (Cohesive Strategy):

• Restore and Maintain Landscapes: Landscapes, regardless of jurisdictional boundaries, are resilient to fire, insect, disease, invasive species, and climate change disturbances, in accordance with management objectives.
• Create Fire Adapted Communities: Human populations and infrastructure are as prepared as possible to receive, respond to, and recover from wildland fire.
• Improve Wildfire Response: All jurisdictions participate in making and implementing safe, effective, efficient risk-based wildfire management decisions.

The purpose of this solicitation is to award grants to fund projects focused on geothermal energy and lithium recovery from geothermal brine that support local jurisdictions and private entities to advance the geothermal sector and related activities per Public Resource Code (PRC) Sections 3800-3827 and California Code of Regulations (CCR) Sections 1660-1665. Under no circumstances will loans be issued under this solicitation.

TRIBAL CLEAN ENERGY PLANNING AND DEVELOPMENT – 2025 Under this Funding Opportunity Announcement (FOA), the DOE Office of Indian Energy is soliciting applications from Indian Tribes, which include Alaska Native Regional Corporations and Village Corporations, Intertribal Organizations, and Tribal Energy Development Organizations to: (1) Conduct clean energy planning (Topic Area 1); (2) Comprehensively assess the feasibility and viability of deploying clean energy technology (Topic Area 2); or, (3) Conduct clean energy design and development activities (Topic Area 3). Unless DOE approves a requested cost share reduction from 10% to 0%, all Applicants are required to provide non-federal cost share of at least 10% of the total allowable costs of the project (i.e., the sum of the federal share and the non-federal Recipient cost share of allowable costs equals the total allowable cost of the project). If requested by the Applicant as part of its application, a cost share reduction from 10% to 0% may be considered based on financial need, specifically (1) poverty rate, or (2) median household income of the tribal community as a percentage of statewide median household income. (see Section III.B.2. of the FOA and ‘Application Forms and Templates’ for this FOA on IE-Exchange). DOE expects to make approximately $25 million of federal funding available for new awards under this FOA. The actual level of funding, if any, depends on Congressional appropriations. DOE anticipates making approximately 20 to 40 awards under this FOA. DOE may issue awards in one, multiple, or none of the Topic Areas. See the FOA document in IE-Exchange for a full description.

The Secretary of the Interior (“Secretary”), through the Division of Energy and Mineral Development (DEMD), Office of Trust Services, Bureau of Indian Affairs (BIA), is soliciting grant proposals from Federally recognized tribal entities to build Tribal capacity for energy resource regulation and management. The Tribal Energy Development Capacity (TEDC) grant program seeks to develop the Tribal management, organizational and technical capacity needed to maximize the economic impact of energy resource development on Federally recognized tribal land. TEDC grants equip Federally recognized tribal entities to regulate and manage their energy resources through development of organizational and business structures and legal and regulatory infrastructure. Examples of projects TEDC grants may fund include establishment of Tribal business charters under Federal, state, or Tribal law with a focus on energy resource development; adoption and/or implementation of a secured transactions code; feasibility studies on forming a Tribal utility authority; and development of Tribal energy regulations.

The objective of this NOFO is to enhance grid reliability and resilience in the face of growing uncertainties and in the age of digital information systems and networks. It is critical to quantify and clearly communicate risk and uncertainties to decision-makers and human operators. This NOFO would seek applications to conduct Research and Development and Demonstration (RD&D) activities that advance the state of the art for power system uncertainty and risk metrics to help human operators receive actionable information to better understand, predict, prevent, and mitigate cascading failures in power grids. This is a newly developing field for the power sector with few, if any, commercial tools. It is therefore assumed this topic area will require an academic or research institution to be heavily involved in the project to achieve program objectives. Therefore, DOE is restricting eligibility to universities, colleges, DOE FFRDCs and non-profit research institutions or think-tanks to serve as the prime applicant. Prime applicants are encouraged to apply in partnerships with electric sector partners and technology providers to ensure the research remains relevant to industry.

This NOFO serves as the next action in a series of actions taken by DOE to expand deployment of HVDC transmission technology in the U.S., by investing in standards development and innovative solutions to reduce cost and footprint of HV DCCB technology for widespread use in the U.S. Topic Area 1 aims to expand on the standards development being conducted through DOE FOA 2828‘s Topic Area 1 by developing technical specifications and operational requirements for HVDC power circuit breakers to the suite of available standards. Topic Area 2 aims to explore potential innovative concepts and designs that can reduce the cost to produce, install, and operate HV DCCB, as well as reduce the footprint of the equipment and improve performance, given that power plant and/or platform space is at a premium, especially for offshore wind applications. The goal is to build off the work conducted, and lessons learned under the DOE ARPA-E BREAKERS program focused on the development of novel technologies for medium voltage direct current power circuit breakers.

The DOE SC programs in Nuclear Physics (NP) and Fusion Energy Sciences (FES) hereby announce their interest in receiving applications to the Nuclear Data InterAgency Working Group Research Program for research projects intended to answer nuclear data questions of interest to the research communities supported by those programs. This topic focuses on acquiring and refining nuclear data essential for fusion applications, particularly neutron interaction cross-sections, decay pathways, and activation products. It emphasizes the need for comprehensive sensitivity studies to prioritize nuclear data gaps that significantly impact reactor design, economics, and safety. Additionally, improving nuclear analysis and radiation transport models to optimize material selection and reduce waste is
crucial. Research should aim to improve predictive models for material activation and provide detailed uncertainty quantification to support better design choices and waste management strategies in fusion energy systems.

The Wind Turbine Technology Recycling NOFO is a $20M program intended to address various barriers to widespread adoption of recycling for two major materials found in wind energy systems, fiber reinforced composites and rare earth elements. The overall goals are as follows:

• Accelerate development of designs that are more easily recyclable and reusable
• Accelerate development of end-of-life processing technologies to cost effectively, sustainably, and efficiently recycle and recover materials from wind turbines, including manufacturing waste
• Address technological and supply chain challenges limiting recycling of fiber reinforced composites and rare earth element magnets in wind turbines