Revolving Loan Funds (RLF) are used to provide no-interest or low-interest loans for eligible brownfield cleanups, subgrants for cleanups, and other eligible programmatic costs necessary to manage the RLF. Applications will be evaluated based on the extent to which the applicant demonstrates:

• a vision for the cleanup, reuse and redevelopment of brownfield sites and a strategy for leveraging resources to help accomplish the vision;
• the environmental, social, health and economic needs and benefits of the target area(s);
• strong community engagement;
• reasonable costs, eligible tasks, and appropriate use of grant funding;
• the capacity for managing and successfully implementing the cooperative agreement;
• and other factors.

The EPA’s Brownfields Program provides funds to empower states, Tribal Nations, communities, and nonprofit organizations to prevent, inventory, assess, clean up, and reuse brownfield sites. This funding opportunity will award assessment grants to develop inventories of brownfield sites, prioritize sites, conduct community involvement activities, conduct planning, conduct site assessments, develop site-specific cleanup plans, and develop reuse plans related to brownfield sites. A portion of the Assessment Grant funding must be used to conduct site assessments.

This funding opportunity provides funding for States and Tribes to develop inventories of brownfield sites, prioritize sites, conduct community involvement activities, conduct planning, conduct site assessments, develop site-specific cleanup plans, and develop reuse plans related to brownfield sites. Applicants may request funding up to $2,000,000 to address sites contaminated by hazardous substances (i.e., sites with potential contamination of hazardous substances, pollutants, or contaminants) and/or petroleum (i.e., sites with potential petroleum contamination) throughout their jurisdiction. Recipients will be required to assess sites (a minimum of 10) throughout their geographic boundary(ies). All sites selected during the period of performance (i.e., sites that were not identified in the original workplan) must be located in an underserved and/or disadvantaged community.

Community-wide Assessment Grants are for communities that are beginning to address their brownfield challenges, as well as for communities that have ongoing efforts to bring sites into productive reuse. This funding opportunity will provide funding for developing inventories of brownfield sites, prioritizing sites, conducting community involvement activities, conducting planning, conducting site assessments, developing site-specific cleanup plans, and developing reuse plans related to brownfield sites. A portion of the assessment grant funding must be used to conduct site assessments.

The purpose of the LCTM Program is to reimburse the incrementally higher costs of using or provide an incentive amount to eligible recipients for the use, in projects, of construction materials and products that have substantially lower levels of embodied GHG emissions, as described by the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA), associated with all relevant stages of production, use, and disposal as compared to estimated industry averages of similar materials or products, hereafter referred to as low carbon transportation materials.

The program will also serve to help eligible transportation agencies update or develop specification language and conduct identification activities needed to demonstrate materials are appropriate for use on Federal-aid construction projects.

Funds made available for the LCTM Program will be awarded for the use of substantially lower carbon materials and products on construction projects funded under title 23 U.S.C. and necessary work to identify appropriateness for use of these materials on eligible projects.

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 Advancing Informal STEM Learning (AISL) Program is committed to funding research and practice, with continued focus on investigating a range of informal STEM learning (ISL) experiences and environments that make lifelong learning a reality. This program seeks proposals that center engagement, broadening participation, and belonging, and further the well-being of individuals and communities who have been and continue to be excluded, underserved, or underrepresented in STEM along several dimensions. The current solicitation encourages proposals from institutions and organizations that serve public audiences, and specifically focus on public engagement with and understanding of STEM, including community STEM; public participation in scientific research (PPSR); science communication; intergenerational STEM engagement; and STEM media.

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.

The U.S. Department of Energy’s (DOE) Office of Fossil Energy and Carbon Management (FECM) announced up to $127.5 million in federal funding to support the development of carbon dioxide (CO₂) capture, removal, and conversion test centers for cement manufacturing facilities and power plants.  This effort supports the establishment of test centers to cost-effectively research and evaluate carbon capture, removal, and conversion technologies in an industrial/utility environment.

NSF-supported science and engineering research increasingly relies on cutting-edge infrastructure. With its Major Research Instrumentation (MRI) program and Major Multi-user Facilities (“Major Facilities”) projects, NSF supports infrastructure projects at the lower and higher range of infrastructure project costs, Foundation-wide, across science and engineering research disciplines. The Foundation-wide Mid-scale Research Infrastructure opportunity is intended to provide NSF with an agile, Foundation-wide process to fund experimental research capabilities in the mid-scale range between MRI and Major Multi-user Facilities.

The U.S. Department of Energy (DOE) Interconnection Innovation e-Xchange (i2X) program and Joint Office of Energy and Transportation, through a Partnership Intermediary Agreement with ENERGYWERX, announced the Innovative Queue Management Solutions (iQMS) for Clean Energy Interconnection and Energization program. This program will award $11.2 million to no more than 25 distribution utilities to pilot innovative solutions for managing renewable energy and electric vehicle (EV) charging interconnection and energization queues. The iQMS program will fund pilot projects to demonstrate new interconnection queue management solutions on actual interconnection, service load request, and energization queues. These tests will help utilities and public utility commissions understand the real-world capabilities of new software and workflow automation solutions and accelerate their adoption to enable rapid deployment of more solar energy, wind energy, energy storage, EV charging infrastructure, and other clean energy assets to the grid. Participating utilities will document and share lessons learned and best practices from their pilot projects to help other utilities manage similar interconnection and energization requests.