The Office of Clean Energy Demonstrations (OCED) intends to issue a Notice of Funding Opportunity (NOFO) entitled “Energy Storage Pilot Demonstrations”. The goal of this new investment area is to support pilot-scale demonstrations for non-lithium, long-duration energy storage solutions that advance technical maturity, reduce uncertainty in cost and performance characteristics, generate operational datasets, and increase investor and end-user confidence in technical and commercial maturation pathways and timelines.
Key Objectives
• Advance a diverse set of non-lithium long-duration energy storage technologies towards commercial viability and utility-scale deployment.
• Generate high-quality operational datasets and techno-economic models.
• Build investor, utility, and other end user confidence in the real performance and adoptability of the proposed solutions.
Requirements and Priorities
• OCED will define a minimum system capacity by technology area (i.e., electrochemical, thermal, and mechanical) and a minimum discharge duration.
• OCED will require teams to include a technology provider as a prime or subrecipient and encourages inclusion of utilities, facility owner/operators, developers, financiers and others that support a clear path to commercial adoption.
• OCED will expect projects to share operational datasets and techno-economic information with DOE and potentially National Laboratory programs to improve system performance modeling capabilities and validate performance. DOE will share information publicly only if it is possible to aggregate and anonymize the data.
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