Vehicle to grid

DOE’s Vehicle Technologies Office commits $3M to commercialize three clean energy solutions

DOE’s Vehicle Technologies Office commits $3M to commercialize three clean energy solutions
(U.S. Department of Energy headquarters in Washington, D.C. Credit: DOE)

The U.S. Department of Energy (DOE) Vehicle Technologies Office (VTO) has announced more than $3 million in federal funding, with an industry match of $1.9 million, for impactful projects across three national laboratories to advance 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. I guess that would be the FYOTTTCFCLIMRL call, if you prefer leaning on some keys instead of writing words.

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 aim to push gas-turbine design forward by 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 the 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 selected projects will aim to simplify commercialization processes, accelerate the development of existing promising technologies, and kickstart the development of new energy solutions.

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.  

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