Department of Energy Makes $20 Million Investment in Offshore Wind Technology Development

Last week, the Wind Energy Technologies Office (WETO) within the Department of Energy’s Office of Energy Efficiency and Renewable Energy (EERE) released a new Funding Opportunity Announcement (FOA) for offshore wind energy resource characterization and technology demonstrations. This opportunity is meant to catalyze technology and bring it more quickly into the commercial marketplace by offering funding, technical assistance, and government coordination to lower the risk for innovators and serve the mission of the Department of Energy (DOE). DOE will invest $20 million in offshore wind development technology that can improve energy production forecasting that has not yet been deployed at commercial scale.

Assistant Secretary Daniel Simmons believes that “this funding for offshore wind resource science will improve the weather models that wind plant developers and operators rely on to manage their fleet effectively and provide predictable, low-cost electricity. Additionally, funding offshore wind projects can increase confidence in pre-commercial technologies and methodologies, paving the way for the development of a world-class U.S. offshore wind industry of the future.”
Proposals can be made in two topic areas:

• Topic Area 1: The overall goal of this project is to improve wind resource characterization and modeling in offshore wind energy development areas, in order to more accurately predict the power output of future offshore wind projects and more seamlessly integrate this power into the grid. Building on previous DOE land-based wind resource characterization work in complex terrain and subsequent model development in collaboration with the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, this project will focus on improving wind resource model physics for foundational wind forecasts and other applications in offshore wind energy development areas.
• Topic Area 2: The overall goal of these projects is to enable the demonstration of a new technology and/or methodology that will advance the state of the art of offshore wind energy in the United States. The proposed project must either implement an innovative technology at engineering/pilot or full-scale, and/or employ a methodology that has yet to be used commercially in the United States for offshore wind, at an offshore wind project that is planned to be operational by 2025.

Concept papers are due April 30, 2020, and full applications are due on July 9, 2020. For more information and application requirements, please visit the EERE Exchange Website.