The Department of Energy’s (DOE) Office of Electricity (OE) has announced several developments including funding opportunities for energy storage innovations and an upcoming energy storage research and testing facility at its 4th Annual Energy Storage Grand Challenge Summit.
The Critical Facility Energy Resilience (CiFER) Funding Opportunity Announcement (FOA) supports large-scale demonstration and deployment of storage technologies to provide resiliency to critical facilities and infrastructure. Projects will show the ability of energy storage technologies to provide dependable supply of energy as back up generation during a grid outage or other emergency event.
This FOA is in coordination with DOE’s Office of Clean Energy Demonstrations (OCED)’s Notice of Intent to fund $100 million for LDES pilot projects, focusing on non-lithium technologies, 10+ hour discharge energy systems, and stationary storage applications. The opportunities complement DOE’s Industrial Efficiency and Decarbonization Office (IEDO), which plans to announce a prize to accelerate market adoption for cost-effective thermal energy storage concepts and technologies for industrial applications and data centers.
OE has announced a Notice of Intent (NOI) for $8 million in funding for up to four projects to address manufacturability challenges faced by energy storage technology developers while making design decisions, thus impacting production of the technology, including scaling. The goal is to help improve manufacturability through design improvements, resulting in reduced overall technology production costs and increased diversity of technology options.
Identifying and implementing design innovations will align pre-production storage system design to set the stage for manufacturing scale up and improved production of cost-effective, safe, and reliable short, medium-, and long-duration storage technologies.
OE today released a report Achieving the Promise of Low Cost LDES, which is an example of its RD&D work to advance the next generation of energy storage technologies. OE partnered with energy storage industry members, national laboratories, and higher education institutions to analyze emergent energy storage technologies.
In August 2024, OE will introduce its Grid Storage Launchpad (GSL), a $75 million facility hosted at DOE’s Pacific Northwest National Laboratory (PNNL). The GSL is an energy storage research and testing facility to accelerate development of next-generation grid energy storage technologies, which are safer, more cost effective and more durable.
