Reaching a New Energy Sciences Workforce (RENEW) aims to build foundations for Office of Science (SC) research through traineeships at academic institutions that have been historically underrepresented in the SC portfolio. RENEW leverages SC’s unique national laboratories, user facilities, and other research infrastructure to provide training opportunities for students and postdoctoral researchers from these institutions. The hands-on experiences gained through RENEW will open new career avenues for trainees, forming a nucleus for a future pool of talented young scientists, engineers, and technicians with the critical skills and expertise needed for the full breadth of SC research activities.

FAIR is focused on building research capacity at academic institutions that have been historically underrepresented in the SC portfolio. Capacity building is interpreted broadly to include both personnel expertise and infrastructure and is expected to be durable, contributing over time toward sustained research strength at the lead institution. Because collaboration is critical to SC research, relationship building through the partnership is considered a key component of the FAIR program. All applications must be submitted on behalf of a lead institution and include a single partnering team member. The lead institution must be a non-R1 MSI or a non-R1 ERI and the partner must be either a DOE National Laboratory (https://www.energy.gov/national-laboratories), an SC Scientific User Facility (https://science.osti.gov/User-Facilities), or an R1 MSI/ERI.

The Department of Energy announced $45.8 million in new funding for projects that will advance research, development, demonstration, and deployment (RDD&D) critical to achieving net-zero greenhouse gas emissions in the transportation sector. Topic areas in the Vehicle Technologies Office (VTO) Fiscal Year (FY) 2024 R&D funding opportunity include:

• Next-generation phosphate-based cathodes.
• Advancing the state of the art for sodium-ion batteries.
• Developing concepts for decreasing greenhouse gas emissions from off-road vehicles such as construction, agriculture, mining, and forestry vehicles.
• Developing and deploying vehicle-to-everything technologies that can lead to meaningful savings at the vehicle and transportation system level.
• Developing high-performance, domestically produced electrical steels (E-steels) for use in electrified powertrains.
• Addressing critical cybersecurity needs for smart and secure electric vehicle charging.

The FOA will award up to $18.8 million to address research and development (R&D) challenges in converting algae, such as seaweeds and other wet waste feedstocks, to biofuels and bioproducts that can decarbonize domestic transportation, industry, and communities.

• Topic Area 1: Conversion of Seaweeds to Low Carbon Fuels and Bioproducts  – This Topic Area, funded by BETO, will focus on laboratory scale R&D on conversion of seaweeds and seaweed blends with other wet wastes to renewable fuels and bioproducts to enable these readily available feedstocks to access new markets.
• Topic Area 2: Conversion of Algal Biomass for Low Carbon Agricultural Bioproducts – This Topic Area, funded by FECM, will support the use of anthropogenic CO₂ streams from industrial sources or utilities to grow micro- and macroalgae for low-carbon bioproducts.

The Concentrating Solar Flux to Heat and Power funding opportunity will award up to $30 million for research, development, and demonstration projects that accelerate the large-scale development of CSP technology. The three topic areas are:

• Scalable Concentrating Solar Collectors – This topic seeks innovations to lower costs and demonstrate reliability of solar collectors.
• Scalable Supercritical Carbon Dioxide (sCO₂) Turbomachinery – This topic seeks proposals for scaled-up, advanced power cycles based on supercritical carbon dioxide that are more efficient than existing steam-based cycles.
• Scalable Concentrating Solar-thermal Receivers and Reactors – This topic seeks proposals for novel solar receivers and solar reactors that convert concentrated sunlight into usable thermal energy at high temperatures.

NOAA Ocean Exploration is soliciting proposals for ocean exploration-related projects under two themes: Ocean Exploration and Maritime Heritage. By supporting exploration (i.e., examining unknown or poorly understood areas of the seafloor, sub-bottom, or water column through initial assessments of the physical, chemical, geological, biological, archaeological, or other characteristics), NOAA Ocean Exploration seeks to advance our basic understanding of the unknown ocean.

The EPA Exchange Network Grant Program is soliciting project applications to support the Environmental Information Exchange Network (EN) to:

• Facilitate sharing of environmental data, especially through shared and reusable services.
• Reduce burden and avoid costs for co-regulators and the regulated community.
• Streamline data collection and exchanges to improve its timeliness for decision making.
• Increase the quality and access to environmental data through discovery, publishing, outbound and analytical services so it is more useful to environmental managers.
• Increase data and IT management capabilities needed to fully participate in the EN.

The National Sea Grant College Program was enacted to support leveraged federal and state partnerships that harness the intellectual capacity of the nation’s universities and research institutions to solve problems and generate opportunities in coastal communities. Applicants are encouraged to pursue diverse partnerships, including with state agencies and academic institutions, to develop projects that research and monitor Contaminants of Emerging Concern (CECs) that may cause ecological or human health impacts, including PFAS, in coastal and estuarine waters. If the region has received funding from the past CEC competitions, applicants are encouraged to demonstrate how this proposal will build off of those prior collaborative efforts and selected CEC projects.

• Focus on species of ecological importance, particularly those with strong socio-economic and/or human health dimensions (e.g., subsistence, recreational, or commercial shellfish and/or finfish);
• Focus on the prevalence, transportation, and biogeochemical transformations of CECs across a watershed or ecosystem, especially those with pathways that involve drinking water and/or wastewater;
• Consider the in-situ multi-stressor and/or interactive effects of CECs that organisms likely experience in their natural environments; and/or
• Perform short-term monitoring assessments to help steer more focused, long-term monitoring initiatives.

Focus On Recruiting Emerging Climate and Adaptation Scientists and Transformers (FORECAST) seeks to facilitate the transition from status quo graduate career preparation to a student-centered model with a particular emphasis on building entrepreneurial and innovation capacity at emerging research institutions (ERIs). Transformers are scientists ready to tackle the challenges the nation and world are facing due to climate change. This opportunity will adopt the spirit of multiple directives for the research community; for example, the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine (NASEM) report on Earth System Scienceand the Advisory Committee for Environmental Research and Education report on Engaged Research. These directives call on the research enterprise to support the building of a robust scientific workforce ready to work with communities in addressing societal challenges. Through convergence research approaches to address societal challenges, the transdisciplinary researchers engaged in FORECAST will foster community resilience and the translation of research outcomes for societal benefits. A new generation of scientists trained in “engaged research” will be expected to have a national impact in communities that may be disproportionately affected by climate change impacts.

This Funding Opportunity Announcement (FOA) is jointly issued by the U.S. Department of Energy Solar Energy Technologies Office (SETO) and Wind Energy Technologies Office (WETO) as part of their Interconnection Innovation Exchange (i2X) program1 to support innovative work to enable simpler, faster, and fairer interconnection of clean energy resources while enhancing the reliability, resiliency, and security of our electrical grid.

The two FOA topic areas are as follows: Topic Area 1: Improved Efficiency of EMT Simulations for Interconnection Studies of IBRs Projects in this topic area will seek to improve the efficiency of the interconnection study process for new IBRs, such as solar and wind plants and battery energy storage systems, by improving software tools to study plant dynamics to increase long-term plant reliability. Projects will achieve this both by improving the speed of advanced, high-fidelity EMT modeling and simulation tools used in power systems interconnection studies and by developing a better understanding of when such high-fidelity simulations are necessary in the interconnection process. Topic Area 2: Dynamic Stability-Enhanced Network Assessment Tools Projects in this topic area will develop tools to provide stakeholders with data on transmission system characteristics related to stability, voltage, and grid strength while securing confidential and critical energy infrastructure information. Projects will establish the type of information required by stakeholders, develop a tool or tools, and test and evaluate those tools on at least one real transmission system.

Environmental assessments on offshore renewable energy development require accurate modeling and effective monitoring. Traditional sound propagation modeling for noise effect analysis often uses historical environmental variables that may not reflect oceanographic regime shifts due to climate change. Existing acoustic monitoring only evaluates species calls and signal/noise characteristics collected at the recording sites without incorporating oceanographic variables, and is thus unable to address broader issues such as ecological dynamics and oceanographic processes related to offshore wind development. The proposed study will deploy acoustic sensors in the vicinity of the National Science Foundation’s (NSF’s) Pioneer Array ocean observation platform to collect active and passive acoustic datasets and to conduct sound propagation measurements.

The mini-grants are available to students looking for financial support for their personal education, school and community projects, internships, networking events, etc. connected to addressing the plastic crisis. Applicants must between the ages of 11-25 on the application deadline.

Example areas of focus include, but are not limited to:

• Zero Waste
• Social Justice
• Environmental Justice
• Philosophy
• Social Science
• Marketing
• Business Communications
• Policy
• Chemistry
• Science