Grants / Department of Energy / Golden Field Office

DE-FOA-0003136: Connected Communities 2.0: Innovations to Manage Growing Transportation, Building, and Industrial Loads to the Grid

Closed Closed October 16, 2024 Opportunity DE-FOA-0003136 ☆ Save

This grant is closed. Who won this program's grants before is below, and similar open grants are at the end of the page. It is in our archive of Golden Field Office notices from 2024.

• Award ceiling$6.0 million
• Award floor$3.0 million
• Total funding$65.0 million
• Cost sharingRequired
• Funding typeCooperative Agreement

Key dates

Who can apply

This opportunity was open to the applicants described in the notice.

• Others (see text field entitled "Additional Information on Eligibility" for clarification)

Please see full eligibility requirements under the FOA posting at https://eere:exchange.energy.gov/. The Eligibility requirement are in Section III.A of a FOA document.

Is this a realistic fit?

• Past Conservation Research and Development awards averaged $2.5 million; this notice allows up to $6.0 million per award.
• Most of the program's money (31% over five years) went to colleges and universities.
• The notice requires cost sharing or matching funds, so you must contribute part of the project cost.

What the grant funds

This modification extends the Full Application deadline from October 10, 2024 to October 16, 2024 due to natural disaster, Hurricane Milton, impacting the ability of applicants to complete and submit an application by the deadline. The “Connected Communities 2.0: Innovations to Manage Growing Transportation, Building, and Industrial Loads to the Grid” Funding Opportunity (FOA) issued by the Office of Energy Efficiency and Renewable Energy is designed to address major new loads from transportation, industry, and buildings on the electric grid by providing new tools for users, planners, and operators of the electric grid. This FOA has two major topical areas: Connected Communities 2.0, focused on grid edge technical measures in buildings, industry, and transportation to prepare the electric grid for these new loads, and improve the resilience of customers and the grid; and Smart Charge Management (SCM), focused on various unique urban, suburban, and rural use cases to build confidence in SCM as an effective approach for electric vehicles (EVs) to provide flexibility and value to the electric grid. The learnings from these projects should enable electric system planners and operators, strategic planners, regulators such as Public Utility Commissions (PUCs), and other stakeholders to understand and plan for new load growth and peak loads driven by electrification, growth in manufacturing, and new computing developments; and to plan for physical and cyber threats to reliability and resilience, while keeping costs affordable for customers and ratepayers. To achieve this end, the cohort of awarded projects will pursue three primary goals. First, the cohort will demonstrate how smart and coordinated management of EVs and other distributed energy resources (DERs), including the integration of efficiency, smart electrical panels, solar, heat pumps, controls, EV charging, and storage can together provide grid support, reduce system costs, and improve the economics of customer technology adoption, at a scale sufficient to enable confidence in wide-scale adoption. The second goal is to demonstrate approaches that enable acceptance by utilities, PUCs, and communities of smart charge management, grid-edge technical measures and innovative planning strategies as valid methods towards right sizing investments in the distribution system.

Category: Energy.

Applying now

This notice no longer takes applications. Agencies often post the same opportunity again under a new number, so check the program's notices on Grants.gov and the similar open grants below.

The notice on Grants.gov keeps its full text and attachments, which is useful for planning a resubmission.