The Energy CLASS Prize is designed to provide training and cash prizes to school district administration and facilities staff to make energy management a sustainable feature of their communities while positioning them to make meaningful infrastructure improvements that will reduce utility costs, improve indoor air quality, and improve learning environments long-term. A total of $4.5 million in awards is available, including $3.75 million in cash prizes for selected LEAs to fund energy management professionals-in-training and an additional $750,000 in technical assistance from Energy CLASS Training Network partners. The Energy CLASS Training Network includes professional training organizations and energy efficiency experts who will provide training and support to Energy CLASS participants.

Collegiate students will be tasked with proposing a regional carbon transport network, defining its business model, and optimizing the transport network across several parameters and with consideration to regional stakeholders, challenges, and cost variability. Enter starting on January 2, 2023 and submission are due on April 14.

This $5.75 million prize was launched by the Department of Energy’s Wind Energy Technologies Office (WETO) to pave the way for the cost-effective domestic manufacturing and deployment of commercial utility-scale floating offshore wind energy turbines in U.S. waters. Up to eight winning teams will receive $100,000 each in cash and $75,000 each in vouchers for technical support provided by DOE national laboratories. The winning Phase 1 submissions will be those teams that have:

• • Determined critical hurdles to the commercialization of their floating platform technology.
  • Demonstrated they can make significant progress toward identifying and developing a supply chain within the US to produce the technology.

Green Proving Ground, in collaboration with DOE, has released a request for information (RFI) about technologies that will help achieve net-zero carbon buildings. This year’s RFI is focused on emerging technologies that:

• Improve Operating Efficiency and Promote Healthy Workplaces
• Enable Whole Building Electrification
• Facilitate GHG and Carbon Reduction
• Provide On-site Energy Generation and Storage Systems
• Deliver Electric Fleet and Load Management Solutions

Technologies selected for participation in the GPG program will be piloted in one or more federal buildings for measurement and verification by third-party evaluators.

The U.S. Department of Energy’s Office of Electricity launched the $1.1-million Digitizing Utilities Prize to connect utilities with interdisciplinary teams of software developers and data experts to transform digital systems in the energy sector through data analytics, processing, quality assurance, storage, and deletion. The prize supports competitors as they work directly with utility partners to develop software solutions to improve how the energy industry manages, stores, and processes these large data sets.

This prize aims to gain insight on innovative, emerging, and next-generation energy storage technologies to inform DOE’s strategy on transformative storage technologies to accelerate grid modernization and decarbonization. Competitors will propose their grid-scale, long duration-capable energy storage technology innovation with a written summary and accompanying 90-second video. Submissions will be judged on the innovation’s quality including a pathway to the Energy Storage Grand Challenge (ESGC)’s levelized cost of storage (LCOS) 2030 goals, strength of plan, and other unique benefits (supply chain considerations, equity, etc.).

It is vital to note that this competition is focusing only on emerging energy storage technologies. Established technologies that are being considered as part of the SI Framework effort are ineligible to participate in this prize.

Small businesses, currently located in Michigan, can apply for loans for qualified energy efficiency upgrades and renewable energy projects.

Projects must be: Ready-To-Go no later than 30 calendar days of the loan agreement effective date; Reduce energy consumption by at least 20% (building retrofits);  Equipment purchases for general- and advanced-manufacturing of commercially available products (retooling); and Contribute to a reduction in greenhouse gas emissions.

One million five hundred dollars (1.5M) in loan funds are available for eligible projects. Loan requests should be between $50,000-350,000, and limited to supplies, materials and equipment costs only. This solicitation is open until all available funds are exhausted.

The Business Accelerator Fund (BAF) is available to participating business accelerators in Michigan’s statewide SmartZone network. These funds are used toward the delivery of specialized services that are not otherwise available from these business accelerators to assist advanced technology companies regardless of the company’s geography. A participating business accelerator will engage a third-party specialist to help advance the client’s path to commercialization, company success, and economic impact for the state of Michigan.

BAF requests are reviewed and awarded through a competitive process. A company may not receive more than $50,000 in BAF services, though most engagements are in the $7,000 to $15,000 range.

This FOA focuses on innovation of wave energy converters (WECs) for nearshore environments across diverse coastal conditions through long duration at-sea testing and operations (i.e., two weeks to six months) and component/sub-system technology development and testing. It will additionally support commercialization opportunities for novel technologies and a feasibility assessment of an ocean current test facility off the coast of the United States.

WPTO encourages underserved communities and underrepresented groups to participate in this funding opportunity. Applicants are highly encouraged to include individuals from groups historically underrepresented in science, technology, engineering, and math on their project teams. Further, minority-serving institutions, minority business enterprises, minority-owned businesses, woman-owned businesses, veteran-owned businesses, or entities located in an underserved community that meet the eligibility requirements described in the funding opportunity are encouraged to apply as the prime applicant or participate on an application as a proposed partner to the prime applicant.

WPTO estimates making up to 14 awards under the Marine Energy Systems Innovation at Sea funding opportunity, ranging between $300,000 and $2,125,000.

Note that a concept paper is due November 4, 2022.

The funding will advance the priorities of DOE’s Office of Science and its major programs, including Advanced Scientific Computing Research, Basic Energy Sciences, Biological and Environmental Research, Fusion Energy Sciences, High Energy Physics, Nuclear Physics, Isotope R&D and Production, and Accelerator R&D and Production. It provides a vehicle for the Office of Science to solicit applications for research support in areas not covered by more specific, topical FOAs that are issued by the office in FY 2023.

Projects funded under the COOLERCHIPS program will develop novel high performance, high reliability cooling systems for compute electronics. These cooling systems will enable a new class of power-dense computational systems, data centers, and modular EDGE systems that will be cooled using 5% or less of the IT load at any location in the United States at any time of the year. The COOLERCHIPS program will support the leveraging of recent nascent advances in thermal management, coolant flow technology, materials, manufacturing, design, controls, and reliability engineering. Illustrative example areas of interest include, but are not limited to:

• New materials, surface treatments, thermal interface solutions, manufacturing methods and conduction methods for improving heat transfer from chipsets;
• Advances in heat transfer to create and control 3D fluid structures with minimal thermal boundary layers;
• Innovations in cooling system engineering for reliability that address severity, occurrence and detectability of potential component failures and novel ideas that include system level risk mitigation, health monitoring and controls; and
• Novel modular data center or EDGE compute system designs that can operate high density compute systems at any time in any US location with highly efficient cooling systems.

DOE has defined a four-phase structure for the H2Hubs. Phase 1 will encompass initial planning and analysis activities to ensure that the overall H2Hub concept is technologically and financially viable, with input from relevant local stakeholders. Phase 2 will finalize engineering designs and business development, site access, labor agreements, permitting, offtake agreements, and community engagement activities necessary to begin installation, integration, and construction activities in Phase 3. Phase 4 will ramp-up the H2Hub to full operations including data collection to analyze the H2Hub’s operations, performance, and financial viability. This FOA will solicit plans for all four phases of proposed H2Hub activities; however, DOE will only initially authorize funding for Phase I. DOE’s review and evaluation of deliverables reflecting activities in each phase will inform Go/No-Go decisions that occur between or within Phases. For this initial FOA launch, DOE envisions selecting six (6) to ten (10) H2Hubs for a combined total of up to $6-7 billion in federal funding.