Grant Opportunities in Cleantech

There are a number of grant opportunities in the renewable energy sector. While we typically do not develop our own technologies and products (our core focus is engineering design services for clients in the cleantech sector), we do work on grants in partnership with other companies, typically as a subcontractor.

Often, a small company will have a technology or product idea they want to develop, and we can strengthen the application by providing our company resume (covering engineering in areas such as solar, wind, batteries, and biofuels) as a source of engineering experience, prototyping facilities, and a path to scale-up.

Here’s a list of the grant programs we keep an eye on (primarily focused on US grant opportunities)— we hope some of you find this useful!

International Grants:

Two grant agencies of interest are:

USTDA (US Trade and Development Agency): The USTDA’s mission is to promote economic growth in developing and middle income countries, while simultaneously helping American businesses export their products and services. It funds a number of projects in renewable energy. GreenMountain is the current recipient of a grant (as a subcontractor to Aviastructure) to design renewable energy systems for Colombia’s civil aviation. Our role involves technical site resource assessment (which has involved our engineers traveling to remote jungle sites all over Colombia) as well as system design and modeling for combinations of solar, wind, battery, and backup diesel systems using tools including HOMER.

World Bank: The World Bank organizes a number of grant and funding activities. The Lighting Africa project is an example of where GreenMountain took on the product engineering and design responsibilities as a subcontractor for a product sales partner. We were selected as one of the winners for our solar lighting design, though our partner decided not to further pursue the project for business reasons.

Note that members of the GreenMountain team also have significant international renewable energy experience through involvement in Engineers Without Borders (including former presidency of the San Francisco Professionals chapter), solar and water project development work in Tanzania and Haiti, founding members of the Appropriate Technology Design Team, and significant early design involvement in the Darfur Stoves project.

National Grants:

Grants.gov: The central resource for federal grants. It allows searches by keyword, agency, and so on. More specifically, the DOE: Energy Efficiency and Renewable Energy (EERE): is a central location for announcements of most DOE Funding Opportunities.

ARRA Funding by the DOE: Funding opportunities authorized through the Recovery Act.

DOE: Advanced Research Projects Agency Energy (ARPA E): Inspired by the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA), ARPA-E was created to support high risk, high reward energy research for climate change and energy security in areas that industry is not likely to undertake independently because of high technical or financial risk.

DOE Loan Guarantee Program: This program provides large-scale loan guarantees (up to hundreds of millions of dollars) for renewable energy generation and scale-up projects such as wind, solar, biomass, geothermal and hydropower. GreenMountain can contribute to a client’s Phase II engineering assessment requirements, per section C.9 of the Renewable Energy / Efficiency Solicitation.

DOE: Small Business Innovation Research (SBIR): Small Business Innovation Research (SBIR) and Small Business Technology Transfer (STTR) are U.S. Government programs in which federal agencies with large R&D budgets set aside a small fraction of their funding for competitions among small businesses only. Small businesses that win awards in these programs keep the rights to any technology developed and are encouraged to commercialize the technology. There are regular solicitations on a variety of topics.

DOE: Solar Energy Technologies Program: SETP funding opportunities encourage collaborative partnerships among industry, universities, national laboratories, federal, state, and local governments and non-government agencies and advocacy groups. You can also look at past winners of the SETP PV Pre-Incubator and of the SETP PV Supply chain and Cross-Cutting Program to get a feeling for what types of applications have been successful.

DOE: Biomass Program Solicitations: The Department of Energy is a major provider of funding for basic and applied research for converting biomass resources to biofuels. Many financial assistance opportunities are available for small to large scale research activities

DOE: Wind and Hydropower Technologies Program: The program sponsors research and development activities to enable greater use of two abundant domestic resources for electric power generation that will help stabilize energy costs, enhance energy security, and improve our environment.

DOE: Hydrogen, Fuel Cells, and Infrastructure Technologies: The mission of the DOE HFCIT Program is to research, develop, and validate hydrogen production, delivery, storage, and fuel cell technologies.

DOE: Vehicle Technologies Program: The DOE Office of Energy Efficiency and Renewable Energy (EERE) provides funding opportunities for advanced vehicle technology projects that are aimed at removing technical and cost barriers.

DOE Office of Science Financial Assistance Grant Program: Grant applications submitted to the Office of Science must fit within their list of program areas. You are encouraged to call the program area contact, to discuss your research project before you submit your application.

NSF: Energy for Sustainability: The Energy for Sustainability program supports fundamental research and education in energy production, conversion, and storage.Note that NSF does not normally support pilot plant efforts, the development of products for commercial marketing, or a variety of other areas. You can also view abstracts of recent awards.

NREL: Business Opportunity Solicitations: Opportunities to work with NREL.

ORNL: Opportunities: Opportunities to work with Oak Ridge National Lab. They jointly apply for a number of SBIR grants. They don't give out their own money, but put out requests for proposals to collaborate in specific areas.

Biomass Research & Development Initiative (BRDI): The Biomass Research and Development Initiative (BRDI) is the multi-agency effort to coordinate and accelerate all Federal bio-based products and bioenergy research and development.

DOE: Inventions and Innovation: This program appears to be inactive in the past few years.

Regional Grants:

This list is by no means comprehensive, but a few notable grant programs at the state level in California and Massachusetts are:

Energy Innovations Small Grant (EISG): This California Energy Commission program is designed to fill a fairly narrow research niche that focuses on early "proof of concept" research of new innovative energy ideas to determine if they are technologically and economically feasible. The subject area must target one a few specific areas listed on the web site, and grants are in the range of $50k-$100k.

PIER: California Energy Commission: The Energy Commission's Research Development and Demonstration (RD&D) Division supports public interest energy research, development, and demonstration. RD&D activities include providing contracts and grants for research and development of energy technologies and related scientific activities. See also: http://www.energy.ca.gov/contracts/renewables.html

Massachusetts Clean Energy Center (CEC): Prior to 2008, the Massachusetts Technology Collaborative (MTC) awarded grants in the renewable energy sector, but this responsibility has been transferred to the CEC. GreenMountain has worked for the MTC/CEC over the past three years, performing technical assessment and due diligence on relevant applications in a broad range of technology areas (solar, wind, algae oil and other biodiesel, Stirling engines, and so on).

Good luck!