The Energy and Food Sovereignty Nexus Prize encourages Tribal Colleges and Universities (TCUs) to develop student-led demonstration projects that increase their knowledge on clean energy and food sovereignty on TCU campuses. Projects may include but are not limited to:

• Greenhouses heated or cooled by geothermal (ground-source) energy
• Greenhouses powered by wind or solar
• Solar arrays that provide shade for crops to grow or livestock to graze.

TCUs are encouraged to incorporate local traditional crops and/or livestock into their designs, as well as relevant clean energy systems to ensure food is sustainably grown for their environments. Students’ valuable exposure and hands-on experience in energy and food sovereignty can then be shared to benefit Tribes.

Sponsored by the Office of Technology Transitions (OTT) at the U.S. Department of Energy (DOE), the American-Made EnergyTech University Prize (EnergyTech UP) challenges student teams to compete for cash prizes for successfully identifying a promising energy technology, assessing its market potential, and creating a business plan for commercialization. Faculty are challenged to create innovative implementation plans that expand energy technology commercialization.

Students: Develop and present a business plan that leverages National Laboratory-developed or other emerging energy technologies developed by students, faculty, or industry. Throughout the competition, they receive mentorship and materials to help them succeed, all while competing for more than $400,000 in cash prizes.

Faculty: Develop and implement educational activities to engage more students in energy technology commercialization and entrepreneurship topics at their institution. While faculty have always been, and remain, welcome and encouraged to mentor a team competing in EnergyTech UP, this new track is designed to incentivize and support faculty directly, with more than $100,000 in cash prizes available.

The American-Made Community Power Accelerator Prize is a $10 million prize competition designed to fast-track the efforts of new, emerging, and expanding solar developers and codevelopers to grow multiple successful community-benefiting distributed solar projects. Round 3 of the prize seeks organizations that have the desire and ambition to develop and finance a portfolio of two or more projects that, in aggregate, total at least 1 MW AC of distributed solar generation. To be eligible, no single portfolio project may exceed 5 MW AC. Distributed solar projects may include but are not limited to:

• Community solar
• Behind-the-meter virtual power plants (VPPs)
• Distributed energy resource (DER) aggregations
• Microgrids
• Commercial and industrial (C&I) solar
• Multifamily projects.

Each year, Design Challenge teams create high-performance, low-carbon building designs that address real-world issues such as community impacts, affordability, and resilience. Finalist teams are invited to the competition event at the National Renewable Energy Laboratory in Golden, Colorado, in April 2025 to compete against U.S. and international teams.

The American-Made Large Animal and Solar System Operations (LASSO) Prize offers $8+ million in cash prizes to multi-stakeholder teams that develop impactful projects to deepen our understanding of the co-location of solar photovoltaics (PV) and cattle grazing operations (cattle agrivoltaics). The LASSO Prize is designed to bring solar developers, farmers, ranchers, and other stakeholders together to form teams; build pilot sites; identify best practices, use cases, costs, applicable business models, and associated energy and agricultural outcomes; host field days; and more!

After a successful Round 1, the U.S. Department of Energy (DOE) Office of Electricity (OE) is excited to announce Round 2 of the Energy Storage Innovations Prize will open for submissions later this fall. This single-phase, $300,000 competition aims to gain insights on innovative, emerging, and next-generation energy storage solutions that address niche markets and inform the DOE’s strategy on transformative storage technologies to accelerate grid modernization for all consumers, while achieving needed reliability, affordability, and energy security.

The Beyond the Meter: Energy Storage Integration Prize, funded by U.S. Department of Energy (DOE) Office of Electricity (OE), is focused on the grid edge, or where buildings, industry, transportation, renewable energies, storage, and the electric grid come together. Grid edge is a leading area of the electricity evolution, where electricity changes from being a one-way grid to a two-way grid with homeowners and business owners storing and transmitting energy from behind-the-meter. To have a smooth energy transition, the many new and emerging components of the grid must work together. This prize will highlight grid-edge technology solutions around ESS that enable different technologies to integrate and operate together, contributing to a more resilient, efficient, and sustainable energy ecosystem.

JUMP (Join the discussion, Unveil innovation, Make connections, Promote tech-to-market) into STEM is a building science competition for undergraduate and graduate students at U.S. colleges and universities. JUMP into STEM aims to attract bright students from a variety of majors to building science. The JUMP into STEM program seeks to inspire the next generation of building scientists, focusing on creative ideation and diversity in the building science field. The diversity objective is inclusive of an interdisciplinary mix of majors and representation by students from backgrounds that are underrepresented in STEM. Challenge topics for this year are Building Affordability, Managing Peak Power Demand in Building, and Taking Comfort to the Extreme.

The American-Made Commercial Direct Air Capture Pilot Prize (DAC Pilot Prize) offers up to $52.5 million in cash awards to technology developers that design, build, commission, and operate innovative and novel DAC pilot facilities capable of capturing at least 500 tonnes of atmospheric carbon dioxide per year.  Over the course of four phases, teams will win awards commensurate to the progress they make towards operating their first-of-a-kind DAC pilots. Each phase requires compounding progress in the Concept to Operate timeline.

The Good Jobs in Clean Energy Prize is designed to encourage coalition-building in communities across the country that focus on creating quality jobs and fostering an equitable and inclusive workforce in clean energy sectors.  Each coalition is required to include, at a minimum, one coalition representative from each of the five key stakeholder groups below:

1. Labor organizations
2. Clean energy employers
3. Community-based organizations
4. Public agencies
5. Education and workforce providers

These competing coalitions will develop and implement Coalition Action Plans that improve the quality of and expand access to good jobs in clean energy.

Through the Geothermal Collegiate Competition, the U.S. Department of Energy Geothermal Technologies Office (GTO) encourages students to develop innovative solutions for geothermal energy application challenges and build career skills for the clean energy workforce. Teams must have at least three undergraduate and/or graduate members (can be from multiple schools) and students of any discipline can participate. Final competition deliverables will be due in December 2024.

For more than a decade, the BNEF Pioneers program has identified a group of game-changing technologies or innovations annually – each with the potential to accelerate global decarbonization and halt climate change. Applicants are shortlisted by the BNEF Pioneers team, and finalists are judged by a panel of BNEF experts. Winners must prove they offer a novel, substantial, scalable and competitive solution. In 2025, the program will focus on three global climate challenges and will award the Pioneers prize to innovators with scalable, impactful and equitable solutions to these challenges.