Dream.Org’s Climate Tech LaunchPad is helping Black and Brown innovators scale cutting-edge ideas that move the needle on climate equity. The cohort will focus on climate justice, prioritizing solutions including electric transportation, renewable energy, energy efficiency, and more. The cohort will also learn how to leverage Greenhouse Gas Reduction Fund dollars to fund these projects. Each entrepreneur will create their own milestone development plan towards investment readiness, growth and impact.

Through this R-STEP Opportunity, The Office of Energy Efficiency and Renewable Energy (EERE) is requesting applications from state-based collaboratives aiming to increase state and local capacity for large-scale renewable energy planning and siting. R-STEP will also serve as a platform for Collaboratives to share learnings and best practices with other stakeholders. A single application should be submitted by a team of organizations interested in working together to form a collaborative. DOE highly encourages state energy offices (or equivalent state agencies) and university extension offices to lead or participate in applications but recognizes that the organizations best suited to perform these activities will vary from state to state. Applicants are encouraged to team with other organizations including, but not limited to: Tribal governments, universities, non-governmental organizations, and community-based organizations. DOE also recommends that teams include organizations familiar with the needs of local communities in the state. They should have experience providing educational or technical assistance services to local communities and have technical expertise on renewable energy siting topics (e.g., environmental impacts, tax policies, land use, zoning ordinance development).

The Joint Office of Energy and Transportation (Joint Office), through the Department of Energy (DOE), has made available $54 million in new federal funding for projects that will expand community e-mobility access and provide clean reliable energy. The funding will drive innovation in equitable clean transportation and is aligned with strategies detailed in the U.S. National Blueprint for Transportation Decarbonization. This program will make strategic investments at the local level that address key barriers to expanding access to electrified mobility options for individuals without home charging; accelerate the transition to electrified fleets; and mature the implementation of managed charging systems to mitigate impacts and optimize usage of the grid.

This program aims to provide technical assistance (TA) to employers (which may include public sector entities) and labor unions in the United States and its territories to encourage employment of women in both apprenticeable occupations and nontraditional occupations (A/NTO), specifically in the following ways:

• Developing (establishing, expanding, and/or enhancing) pre-apprenticeship, youth apprenticeship, Registered Apprenticeship, or other nontraditional skills training programs designed to prepare women for careers in A/NTO;
• Providing ongoing orientations or other resources for employers, unions, and workers on creating a successful environment for women in A/NTO; and/or
• Setting up support groups, facilitating networks, and/or providing supportive services for women in A/NTO to improve their retention.

CalSEED supports early-stage entrepreneurs in delivering projects that respond to clean energy, efficiency, or storage needs while considering equity of access and benefit, ensuring these technologies are working to serve California’s most vulnerable populations. As the first step in California’s innovation pipeline, the program incubates energy concepts and readies them for investment and deployment by providing:

• Targeted professional development services including mentorship with seasoned professionals, legal counsel, expert guidance, and training to support technology refinements, market development, and commercialization.
• Direct, non-dilutive grant-based funding to advance clean energy innovations to commercialization ($150K for Concept Awards, and a $450K Prototype Award to winners of the annual Business Plan Competition).
• Access to key accelerator and incubator programs and test facilities.
• Enhanced access to private capital.

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.