The American-Made Large Animal and Solar System Operations (LASSO) Prize offers $8+ million in cash prizes to multi-stakeholder teams that develop impactful projects to deepen our understanding of the co-location of solar photovoltaics (PV) and cattle grazing operations (cattle agrivoltaics). The LASSO Prize is designed to bring solar developers, farmers, ranchers, and other stakeholders together to form teams; build pilot sites; identify best practices, use cases, costs, applicable business models, and associated energy and agricultural outcomes; host field days; and more!

After a successful Round 1, the U.S. Department of Energy (DOE) Office of Electricity (OE) is excited to announce Round 2 of the Energy Storage Innovations Prize will open for submissions later this fall. This single-phase, $300,000 competition aims to gain insights on innovative, emerging, and next-generation energy storage solutions that address niche markets and inform the DOE’s strategy on transformative storage technologies to accelerate grid modernization for all consumers, while achieving needed reliability, affordability, and energy security.

The Beyond the Meter: Energy Storage Integration Prize, funded by U.S. Department of Energy (DOE) Office of Electricity (OE), is focused on the grid edge, or where buildings, industry, transportation, renewable energies, storage, and the electric grid come together. Grid edge is a leading area of the electricity evolution, where electricity changes from being a one-way grid to a two-way grid with homeowners and business owners storing and transmitting energy from behind-the-meter. To have a smooth energy transition, the many new and emerging components of the grid must work together. This prize will highlight grid-edge technology solutions around ESS that enable different technologies to integrate and operate together, contributing to a more resilient, efficient, and sustainable energy ecosystem.

JUMP (Join the discussion, Unveil innovation, Make connections, Promote tech-to-market) into STEM is a building science competition for undergraduate and graduate students at U.S. colleges and universities. JUMP into STEM aims to attract bright students from a variety of majors to building science. The JUMP into STEM program seeks to inspire the next generation of building scientists, focusing on creative ideation and diversity in the building science field. The diversity objective is inclusive of an interdisciplinary mix of majors and representation by students from backgrounds that are underrepresented in STEM. Challenge topics for this year are Building Affordability, Managing Peak Power Demand in Building, and Taking Comfort to the Extreme.

U.S. Department of Energy’s (DOE) Office of Fossil Energy and Carbon Management (FECM) announced it will make up to $54.4 million in additional funding available to advance diverse carbon management approaches that reduce carbon dioxide (CO₂) pollution. The funding will support the development of technologies that capture CO₂ from industrial and power generation sources or directly from the atmosphere and transport it either for permanent geologic storage or conversion into valuable products such as fuels and chemicals.

Urban Future Lab and SecondMuse are pioneering the GROW + TOGETHER Accelerator to merge the innovative forces of hardtech clean energy startups with the manufacturing industry in the Northeast US. Supported by an EPIC award funded by the Department of Energy’s Office of Technology Transitions, this model accelerates hardtech startup integration into existing supply chains, overcoming common barriers to market penetration faced by innovative products. To qualify, startups and manufacturers must first register their interest for a virtual Startup-Manufacturer Matchmaking event, which will offer facilitated conversations to clear initial hurdles in the manufacturing process. Additional funding will support a 9-month program that links hardtech clean energy startups and manufacturers with technical support and a tailored curriculum to assist with contracting, fundraising, pilot opportunities and more.

The NSF Trailblazer Engineering Impact Award (TRAILBLAZER) program supports individual investigators who propose novel research projects with the potential to innovatively and creatively address national needs and/or grand challenges, advance US leadership, and catalyze the convergence of engineering and science domains. TRAILBLAZER will support engineers and scientists who leverage their distinctive track record of innovation and creativity to pursue new research directions that are distinct from their previous or current research areas.

The NSF Directorate for Engineering (ENG) seeks to build engineering research capacity across the nation by investing in new academic investigators who have yet to receive sufficient research funding from Federal Agencies. The Engineering Research Initiation (ERI) program will support new investigators as they initiate their research programs and advance in their careers as researchers, educators, and innovators. This funding opportunity aims to broaden the base of investigators involved in engineering research and therefore is limited to investigators that are not affiliated with “very high research activity” R1 institutions.

Through the Geothermal Collegiate Competition, the U.S. Department of Energy Geothermal Technologies Office (GTO) encourages students to develop innovative solutions for geothermal energy application challenges and build career skills for the clean energy workforce. Teams must have at least three undergraduate and/or graduate members (can be from multiple schools) and students of any discipline can participate. Final competition deliverables will be due in December 2024.

For more than a decade, the BNEF Pioneers program has identified a group of game-changing technologies or innovations annually – each with the potential to accelerate global decarbonization and halt climate change. Applicants are shortlisted by the BNEF Pioneers team, and finalists are judged by a panel of BNEF experts. Winners must prove they offer a novel, substantial, scalable and competitive solution. In 2025, the program will focus on three global climate challenges and will award the Pioneers prize to innovators with scalable, impactful and equitable solutions to these challenges.

The program will bring together entrepreneurs from across Africa, empowering them to address climate resilience and food security. Founders will receive expert training, critical resources to accelerate their ventures, a one-week in-person residency in Washington, DC, and a one-week in-person residency in Nairobi, Kenya.

The program will bring together entrepreneurs from across DC, Maryland, and Virginia (DMV), empowering them to address climate mitigation, adaptation, and resilience. Founders will receive expert training, critical resources to accelerate their ventures, and two in-person residency weeks in the DMV. We’re looking for (for-profit) startups that are building scalable solutions that are tackling challenges related to climate mitigation, adaptation, and resilience across the DC, Maryland, and Virginia area.