U.S. VTO Announces $3 Million in Funding to Deliver Clean Energy Solutions to Market – CleanTechnica

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The U.S. Department of Energy (DOE) Vehicle Technologies Office (VTO) announced over $3 million in federal funding, with an industry match of $1.9 million, for impactful projects across 3 National Laboratories to propel clean energy solutions. The funding is made available through the Fiscal Year (FY) 2024 Office of Technology Transitions (OTT) Technology Commercialization Fund (TCF) Base Annual Appropriations Core Laboratory Infrastructure for Market Readiness (CLIMR) Lab Call.

The FY24 CLIMR Lab Call provides the most funding to date and represents coordinated investments from the largest set of DOE program offices.

VTO’s three selected TCF projects are:

Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory

Advancing Detailed Jet Engine Simulation with Small, Accurate Kinetic Models and GPU Solvers: This project will push gas-turbine design forward, accelerating the design cycle for the creation of new reliable, efficient, and clean jet engines and reducing the climate impact of aviation. Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory will collaborate with GE Aerospace to reduce the computational cost of predictive gas-turbine combustor simulations through the generation of small, accurate chemical reaction models and efficient graphical processing unit chemistry solvers.

National Renewable Energy Laboratory

Energy-Transit Nexus Tools for Bus Fleet Electrification (NEXTBUS): This project aims to address this need through commercialization of NREL technology in ReVolt’s software platform to optimize battery electric transit bus fleets through detailed crew rostering, bus scheduling, and charge planning. NREL vehicle energy modeling and complex fleet optimization through tools such as FASTSim, RouteE, and ASPIRES are well-suited to this problem space.

Oak Ridge National Laboratory

Rapid High Temperature Carbonization (HTC) Through Metal Bath: A new high temperature carbonization technology for the manufacturing of carbon fiber (CF) will be developed that is projected to reduce the energy consumption of this stage by at least 40% while increasing throughput up to 6X. At the end of the project, the pilot line will be able to process 4x50k CF tows with properties acceptable to the car industry with a unit energy consumption of 2 kWh/lb. or less.

Announced in November 2023, the FY24 TCF Base CLIMR lab call invited proposals from National Laboratories to advance energy technologies and strengthen existing practices. The TCF was established by Congress through the Energy Policy Act of 2005 and reauthorized by the Energy Act of 2020 to promote promising energy technologies. The selected projects will simplify commercialization processes, accelerate the development of existing promising technologies, and kickstart the development of new energy solutions. Over 78 partner entities will join our National Laboratories in accomplishing CLIMR project goals. These partners plan to commit over $22M in cost share, totaling nearly $64 million in both federal and non-federal funding to National Labs.

The lab call offered six topics aiming to address commercialization challenges, accelerate the development of promising technologies, and streamline processes to efficiently deliver clean energy solutions to the market.

DOE’s Office of Technology Transitions (OTT) coordinates the TCF and strengthens DOE’s commercialization partnerships. OTT collaborated with the following DOE program offices for the FY 2024 CLIMR lab call: the Office of Fossil Energy and Carbon Management; Office of Nuclear Energy; Office of Electricity; Office of Cybersecurity, Energy Security, and Emergency Response; Office of Energy Efficiency and Renewable Energy’s Vehicle Technologies Office, Bioenergy Technologies Office, Solar Energy Technologies Office, Water Power Technologies Office, Building Technologies Office, Industrial Efficiency and Decarbonization Office, Advanced Materials and Manufacturing Technologies Office, Hydrogen and Fuel Cell Technologies Office, Wind Energy Technologies Office, and the Geothermal Technologies Office.

To view descriptions of the selected CLIMR projects, visit the projects webpage.

Email from Department of Energy, VTO