OCED Funding Opportunity Announcements

ATTENTION (1/5/2024): Expected Date for OCED Selection Notifications: February

ATTENTION (11/6/2023): Expected Date for OCED Selection Notifications: December/January

ATTENTION (6/2/2023): This Funding Opportunity Announcement has been modified and the Submission Deadline for Full Applications has been extended to 5:00 pm EST on 8/2/2023. The page limits for the Community Benefits Plan have also been updated. Please see the full Funding Opportunity Announcement - Mod 000001 in the Announcement Documents section for full details.

Background & Goals

The Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act (IIJA), commonly referred to as the Bipartisan Infrastructure Law (BIL), authorizes DOE to invest $1 billion in energy improvements in rural or remote areas. DOE’s Energy Improvements in Rural or Remote Areas (ERA) Program will provide financial investment, technical assistance, and other resources to advance clean energy demonstrations and energy solutions that are replicable and scalable. ERA aims to fund clean energy projects with three specific goals:

The ERA Program is managed by the Office of Clean Energy Demonstrations (OCED), whose mission is to deliver clean energy technology demonstration projects at scale to accelerate deployment, market adoption, and the equitable transition to a decarbonized energy system.

OCED seeks to provide equal opportunity to qualified applicants from rural and remote areas of the United States, which for the purposes of this statutory section means areas of less than 10,000 people. OCED recognizes that potential applicants will come to this program with widely varying energy and resilience needs. To address this reality that one size does not fit all, OCED has organized this $300 million Funding Opportunity Announcement (FOA) into nine geographic regions, each with its own set of broad energy challenges that provide applicants the opportunity to propose creative solutions at a variety of sizes and scales to address those challenges. Depending on response, OCED may open up additional Funding Opportunity Announcements in the future.

The ERA Program intends to improve the cost, reliability, environmental impact, and climate and economic resilience of energy systems in rural or remote communities by funding clean energy projects with commercially viable or near-commercially viable technologies. Projects funded through this FOA will de-risk investment in the energy infrastructure of rural or remote communities. Funded projects will provide insights for future investments, such as deployment of similar technologies, use of similar business models, or adoption of similar community engagement best practices and clarify pathways to future good paying union jobs.

Ensuring Direct Benefit to Rural or Remote Areas

This FOA is designed to enable citizens in rural or remote communities to realize material benefits as the result of investment in their energy infrastructure. These benefits can include, but are not limited to: lower energy costs, improved energy access, economic resilience, and environmental protection from adverse impacts of historic energy generation. Selected projects will implement cost-effective clean energy technologies that promote the overall resilience of the local energy system against climate impacts, and support more diversified rural economies better able to weather economic shocks.

To ensure that these benefits are spread equitably across affected communities applicants are required to submit a Community Benefits Plan (CBP). This plan outlines how the project will support community and labor engagement, invest in the American workforce, contribute to the President’s goal that 40% of the overall benefits of certain federal investments flow to disadvantaged communities (the Justice40 Initiative), and promote diversity, equity, inclusion, and accessibility (DEIA). DOE recognizes that applicants have different levels of capacity and experience related to this kind of community-focused planning, and will support FOA awardees to develop and implement robust, locally tailored, and measurable plans.

Consistent with the objectives of this program, OCED expects projects to utilize local staff and local resources to the maximum extent possible. If external resources are necessary, projects funded under this FOA and any related activities will seek to encourage meaningful engagement and participation of local business organizations, labor unions, underserved communities and underrepresented groups, federally recognized Tribes and tribal and indigenous communities and native entities.

Promoting Community Energy Solutions for Regional Climate Challenges

Selected projects will promote community energy solutions to improve the cost, reliability, environmental impacts, and climate and economic resilience of energy generation in rural or remote communities. Applicants are required to identify at least one applicable region for the project, along with any regional climate risk(s) the project is proposing to help mitigate. OCED seeks applications that leverage a region’s natural resources, local industry, stakeholders, climate and/or economic risks, or other factors, as such factors may be critical towards the ultimate replicability of the project in other rural or remote areas within the region. OCED encourages applicants to identify regional challenges and opportunities as they see fit based on their own assessment of their community’s energy challenges, needs and opportunities.

Ensuring Project Replicability

Replicability is key to market adoption of technologies to benefit rural or remote areas beyond those participating in the ERA Program. The program seeks to build confidence of decision makers to invest in clean energy in rural and remote areas, including financiers, utilities, and Tribal, State, and local governments, who can enable replication.

Proposed projects can demonstrate established, commercial technologies for the first time in a new setting or place, or at a larger scale; an innovative approach to improve siting and permitting timelines; enabling energy access for homes/communities that do not have access to electricity; self-reliance, or reduction in environmental harm from generation; economic development and local job creation leading to more overall economic resilience, and/or an innovative technology application in a rural or remote area.

Technical Assistance

Technical assistance from DOE’s national laboratories is available for eligible applicants. Technical assistance is available for application preparation through office hours and limited individual sessions. Information on technical assistance, including eligibility and how to apply for it, is available here.

ATTENTION (1/5/2024): Expected Date for OCED Selection Notifications: February

ATTENTION (11/6/2023): Expected Date for OCED Selection Notifications: December/January

ATTENTION (6/2/2023): This Funding Opportunity Announcement has been modified and the Submission Deadline for Full Applications has been extended to 5:00 pm EST on 8/2/2023. The page limits for the Community Benefits Plan have also been updated. Please see the full Funding Opportunity Announcement - Mod 000001 in the Announcement Documents section for full details.

DE-FOA-0003045

Any individual or organization that would like to be included on this list should submit the following required information (unless noted as optional): Organization’s Name (if an organization), Organization Type (if an organization), Organization or Individual’s Webpage (required to provide if one exists), Contact Name, Contact Address (include country; street number and name, and unit or suite number are optional), Contact Email, Contact Phone (include country and area code), Area(s) of Technical Expertise, Brief Description of Capability(ies), Description of Need in a Partner(s).

ATTENTION (9/1/2023): This Funding Opportunity Announcement has been modified and the Submission Deadline for Full Applications has been extended to 5:00 pm EST on 10/26/2023. Please see the full Funding Opportunity Announcement - Mod 000001 in the Announcement Documents section for full details.

The Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act (IIJA), commonly referred to as the Bipartisan Infrastructure Law (BIL) authorizes DOE to invest $1 billion in energy improvements in rural or remote areas. DOE’s Energy Improvements in Rural or Remote Areas (ERA) Program is managed by the Office of Clean Energy Demonstrations (OCED). OCED will provide financial investment, technical assistance, and other resources to advance clean energy demonstrations and energy solutions that benefit rural and remote communities. ERA aims to fund clean energy projects with three specific goals:

1. Deliver measurable benefits to energy customers in rural or remote areas by funding replicable energy projects that lower energy costs, improve energy access and resilience, and/or reduce environmental harm;

2. Support new rural or remote energy system models using climate-resilient technologies, business structures that promote economic resilience, new financing mechanisms, and/or new community engagement practices; and

3. Build clean energy knowledge, capacity, and self-reliance in rural America.

This FOA provides $50 million in Federal funding and is designed to support small community-driven clean energy projects requiring $500,000 to $5 million in Federal funding. Other ERA funding opportunities include DE-FOA-0002970, titled "Bipartisan Infrastructure Law: Energy Improvement in Rural or Remote Areas," which provides $5 million to $100 million in Federal funding to community- and large-scale demonstration projects that address region-specific energy challenges, and a $15 million Energizing Rural Communities Prize, which provides up to $300,000 cash prizes to assist development of partnerships and financing models to advance clean energy projects. This FOA utilizes a simplified application process and will award fixed-amount grants. This grant mechanism significantly reduces financial reporting requirements associated with larger DOE awards. Recipients are responsible for accomplishing their proposed work.

Technical Assistance

Technical assistance from DOE’s national laboratories is available for eligible applicants. Technical assistance is available for pre-application preparation through office hours and limited individual sessions. Information on technical assistance, including eligibility and how to apply for it, is available here.

NOTE: Applicants must submit a Pre-Application by 5:00 pm ET on the due date. Only successful pre-applicants will be invited to complete a more detailed full application.

Please refer to FOA Section 4.0 which outlines the required form and content of all application submissions. Word counts and individual page limits provided in the template are approximations; however, the entire Pre-Application must not exceed 10 pages. DOE will review only the information provided to support the questions in the Pre-Application template. Additional information will not be considered. Note that responses provided in the Pre-Application must be verified and/or substantiated in the full application. A template is provided to assist the applicant, but use of the template is not required, and use of the template (or not) has no bearing on how the submission will be reviewed. ERA has updated this template to a word document based on feedback and accessibility; however applicants are free to use the prior PDF template version if they prefer.