dept of energy

Last month, the Department of Energy (DOE) released its first United States Energy and Employment Report (USEER) in an effort to articulate in clearer terms the sector’s wide-ranging impact on the national economy. While this report covers the entirety of the energy spectrum, a related report released just weeks after, Clean Jobs America: A Comprehensive Analysis of Clean Jobs in America, looks only at those jobs related to the clean energy economy. Based on SSTI’s analysis, Clean Jobs America suggests that there are more than 2.5 million clean energy jobs in the United States, or 44 percent of the 5,729,882 energy jobs highlighted in the DOE report.

The Department of Energy’s (DOE) Office of Energy Efficiency and Renewable Energy (EERE) released a notice of intent to establish a Modular Chemical Process Intensification Institute for Clean Energy Manufacturing –the fourth National Manufacturing Innovation Institute sponsored by the Department of Energy.

The U.S. Department of Energy’s (DOE) Office of Technology Transitions (OTT) announced that it will commit up to $20 million for the first round of the DOE’s Technology Commercialization Fund (TCF) – a matching fund that helps bring promising energy technologies developed at DOE-funded national laboratories to market. In addition to helping advance promising energy related technologies with commercial potential, the TFC is intended to strengthen partnerships between the national labs and private-sector companies that can deploy energy technologies to the marketplace.

The Department of Energy (DOE) released the 2015 Quadrennial Technology Review (QTR), a more than 500-page report examining the status of foundational energy science and technology (S&T). The QTR also highlights the research, development, demonstration, and deployment (RDD&D) opportunities with a focus on technologies with commercialization potential in the mid-term and beyond.

The Department of Energy (DOE) announced that it is accepting applications for the first round of its Small Business Vouchers Pilot (SBV) program. Under the SBV program, the DOE will commit up to $20 million in technical and research assistance awards to help small businesses bring next-generation clean energy technologies. Companies may apply for and receive up to $300,000 in assistance from U.S. Department of Energy national laboratories nationwide.

The Department of Energy (DOE) announced it will commit up to $70 million in funding for the Manufacturing Innovation Institute for Smart Manufacturing to support R&D efforts to develop, demonstrate, and transition to industry advanced sensing, instrumentation, monitoring, control, and process optimization as well as modeling and simulation technologies for industrial automation. The Innovation Institute on Smart Manufacturing will be the third DOE-funded facility as part of President Obama’s National Network for Manufacturing Innovation (NNMI) institutes.

The U.S. Department of Energy (DOE) announced the launch of the Office of Technology Transitions (OTT) to serve as a DOE-wide functional unit that coordinates the commercial development of DOE’s research outputs and administer the Energy Technology Commercialization Fund – a nearly $20 million fund that will leverage the R&D funding in the applied energy programs to pursue high-impact commercialization activities.

The Department of Energy’s Office of Energy Efficiency and Renewable Energy (EERE) announced that it will combine three existing programs (Incubator, SolarMat, and SUNPATH) into the Sunshot Technology to Market Program – a new funding program to support startups and other for-profit organizations as they bring disruptive solar innovations to the market place. Historically, the three programs that comprise the new program were separated by stage of technology development.

Ernest Moniz, the U.S. Secretary of Energy, announced the creation of the Jobs Strategy Council (JSC), an initiative to develop a methodology for providing consistent, usable data measuring energy job growth and help align workforce development systems with the needs of the clean energy industries through partnerships with the private sector, community college systems, union apprenticeship programs, and other educational institutions.

The Department of Energy’s (DOE) Advanced Research Projects Agency-Energy (ARPA-E) announced that it will commit up to $125 million for its 2015 OPEN competition to Support R&D projects on potentially disruptive new energy technologies. Applications should be able to address how the proposed technology will be able to make a significant impact in one of the three mission areas of ARPA-E – to reduce imported energy, to reduce energy-related emissions, and to improve energy efficiency.