The U.S. Department of Energy’s (DOE) Office of Energy Efficiency and Renewable Energy (EERE) issued a $23 million funding opportunity announcement (FOA) that will drive innovation to decarbonize the entire life cycle of Water Resource Recovery Facilities (WRRFs). These facilities, which treat wastewater from public water systems, are among the country’s largest industrial electricity users with full lifecycle greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions on par with direct emissions from the food and beverage industry— one of the largest GHG-emitting industries in the United States. This FOA will accelerate research, development, and demonstration (RD&D) of technologies to lower GHG emissions from WRRFs to help decarbonize our nation’s water treatment sector and move the U.S. closer to a net-zero economy by 2050.

The DOE SC program in Fusion Energy Sciences (FES) hereby announces its interest in receiving new and renewal applications in Quantum Information Science (QIS). Responsive applications will propose research that could have a transformative impact on FES mission areas—including Fusion Science and Technology and Plasma Science and Technology—and / or advance QIS development enabled by FES-supported science. While fully recognizing the interdisciplinary and crosscutting nature of QIS, responsive applications will focus on areas consistent with the unique role of FES in this rapidly developing field.

The U.S. Department of Transportation has published a Notice of Funding Opportunity (NOFO) for $1.5 billion in grant funding through the Rebuilding American Infrastructure with Sustainability and Equity (RAISE) discretionary grant program for 2023. The popular program helps communities around the country carry out projects with significant local or regional impact. RAISE discretionary grants help project sponsors at the State and local levels, including municipalities, Tribal governments, counties, and others complete critical freight and passenger transportation infrastructure projects.

ASCR is interested in receiving proposals focusing on basic research in computer science that explores innovative approaches to creating distributed resilient systems for science. Such systems might be national or global in scale, linking geographically-distributed computing systems and scientific instruments, and might involve a large number of edge devices or sensors, but regardless, must manage computation and data in scalable and fault-tolerant manner. Important research challenges involve techniques for advanced middleware and operating and runtime systems, with this FOA targeting two research areas: 1) scalable system modeling, and 2) adaptive management and partitioning of resources. Advances in these areas will contribute to scaling-up our increasingly complex and interconnected scientific enterprise.

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 2022/2023 BENEFIT FOA will invest up to $15.35M – $45.2M across 5 topic areas to allow all interested parties to research and develop high-impact, cost-effective technologies and practices that will reduce carbon emissions, improve flexibility and resilience, as well as lower energy costs.

Topic 1: Heating, Ventilation, and Air Conditioning and Water Heating: Technologies with improved materials, components, equipment design and engineering, lower cost manufacturing processes, and easier installation.

Topic 2: Thermal Energy Storage (TES): Development and validation of next generation plug-and-play TES products with improved cost and performance and ease of installation to accelerate adoption of TES in HVAC applications.

Topic 3: Battery Energy Storage Systems (BESS): Development, validation, and demonstration of product innovations that reduce the cost of BESS integration, improve the coordination between distributed BESS and the electrical grid, as well as help meet building decarbonization targets.

Topic 4: Plug Loads/Lighting: Integration of plug load controls with connected lighting systems in commercial buildings with minimal cost and complexity to support building electrification.

Topic 5: Opaque Building Envelope: Development, validation, and demonstration of high-impact, affordable. opaque building envelope retrofit and diagnostic technologies.

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

The U.S. Department of Energy (DOE) Office of Technology Transitions (OTT) is seeking white papers from prospective Partnership Intermediaries for the Partnership Intermediary Pilot. Through this Pilot, DOE is seeking to broaden the Department’s engagement with new organizations, increase cooperative or joint activities between DOE and small business firms, institutions of higher education, educational institutions, and non-traditional contractors and rapidly develop, scale, commercialize, and deploy technologies relevant to DOE’s mission.

A partnership intermediary (PI) is a state or local government or a nonprofit entity that is owned, funded, chartered, or operated in whole or in part by a state or local government.

Potential PI activities include facilitating and/or managing innovation hubs and/or public-private partnerships; performing technology and market research and scouting; acting as an independent facilitator between DOE programs and projects, DOE National Labs, and external solution providers; and facilitating rapid prototyping, demonstration, deployment, and/or manufacturing, in furtherance of DOE’s mission.

White papers are due January 3, 2023.

Fall 2022 solicitation will focus on topic areas associated with the HPC4Manufacturing (HPC4Mfg) and HPC4Materials (HPC4Mtls) Programs. The program seeks industry partners interested in leveraging HPC resources to make advancements in the following areas:

HPC4Mfg

• Improvements in manufacturing processes which result in significant national carbon emissions reduction and energy savings.
• Improvements in semiconductor technologies that will result in operational energy efficiency improvements.
• Carbon emissions reduction and efficiency improvements in energy conversion and storage technologies.
• Reductions in CO₂ or CO₂-equivalent emissions.

HPC4Mtls

• Advanced Materials for Carbon Conversion Applications
• Advanced Structural Materials for Hydrogen Applications
• Advanced Functional Materials for Hydrogen Applications

The Dept of Energy, in partnership with the Clean Energy Smart Manufacturing Innovation Institute (CESMII), is announcing $2 million in funding to help manufacturers adopt smart manufacturing technologies and processes that will increase productivity, save energy, and boost competitiveness across energy-intensive industries. Accelerating smart manufacturing technologies – including artificial intelligence, machine learning, and robotics – increases integration and automation, helping manufacturers monitor, evaluate, and improve their operations.

EWD project proposals are requested for projects that align with the EWD Roadmap and are seeking to develop short courses that can be used to educate, train, and develop the incumbent workforce for careers in the circular economy.

PROPOSAL SUBMISSION TOPICS:

• Advanced Materials Separation Technologies

• Design for Remanufacturing, Recycling, and/or Reuse

• Condition Assessment for Remanufacturing

• Reverse Logistics for Remanufacturing

• Simulation Techniques to Optimize Material Use in Manufacturing and Recycling