The DOE Office of Technology Transitions has awarded $7.4 million to develop seven projects at Sandia aimed at advancing clean energy technologies.
Vanessa Chan, the Chief Commercialization Officer and Director of the DOE Office of Technology Transitions, announced the funding at an event in Albuquerque on June 17.
“The work you do here just blows my mind,” Chan said. “Other institutions have nothing compared to what you have here. So, we are here to help bring funding and unlock the potential of the Labs. It’s one of the best tools for harnessing our lab intellect and opportunities.”
Each year, Sandia submits multiple projects for consideration for funding by the Office of Technology Transitions. This year, Sandia submitted 13 projects this year worth $16.9 million. The $7.4 million award represents a significant success for Sandia in its efforts to transfer technology out of the Labs.
In total, the Office of Technology Transitions announced $41.4 million in federal funding for 50 projects at 17 national laboratories to propel clean energy solutions. In the commercialization enabling and tech transfer projects category, Sandia was awarded more projects in fiscal year 2024 than any other national lab.
Economic impact and more
“These projects allow Sandia to have more of an impact on the local, regional and national economies,” said Mary Monson, Sandia’s senior manager for Technology Partnerships and Business Development. “The funding fosters close partnerships with industry and academia to implement innovative approaches and overcomes barriers for commercializing lab-developed technologies.”
The seven Office of Technology Transitions-funded are as follows.
RAIICE
Rapid Artificial Intelligence Innovation Cycles for Energy aims to reduce the barriers to commercialization of lab-developed artificial intelligence and machine learning technologies within the clean energy sector. RAIICE will position the DOE enterprise as an accelerator of AI and machine learning innovation for clean energy advances and drive new technologies.
Achieving Net Zero Through Innovative Technology Commercialization will help support the nation’s goal to reduce carbon dioxide emissions to net zero. ACTION will build a sustainable, replicable model for commercializing DOE-developed technology by using DOE NetZero sites as proving grounds for innovative commercial technologies and deploying clean energy technologies to the market and tribal lands.
Boost 2.0 brings national labs, startups, academia and DOE-developed technologies together to find solutions to community-based energy challenges. The Boost 2.0 platform will continue to provide a crucial service to DOE labs with the goal of commercializing 20-plus technologies, establishing more than 10 Cooperative Research and Development Agreement partners and over 15 demonstrations.
The following four funded projects focus on technical work through mechanisms such as Cooperative Research and Development Agreements.
Many coastal communities in Alaska have untapped tidal or river energy and, in the offseason, many vessels sit idle. This corresponds to a period of high electrical demand, and for communities powered by traditional hydropower, low electrical power availability. During these times, these vessels can be used as floating energy-making platforms by installing temporary, deployable tidal or river current energy-capturing systems. Through partnerships with Sitkana and Hydrodynamic Power Systems, Sandia will assist with the design, operation and testing of these systems.
Wind turbine original equipment manufacturers rely on aeroelastic models of their turbines to design new products with both high performance and reliability. Recent fleetwide failures of turbine reliability at several large equipment manufacturers have exposed flaws in the modeling process and the corresponding model validation process. Sandians have developed a measurement capability that could improve the equipment manufacturers’ model validation process.
The project aims to pilot Sandia’s fast fault detection and location prototype using traveling waves for power distribution systems. That includes tackling the most pressing challenges for this technology’s viability and eventual commercialization. With this funding, the project team will be able to address these risks on the path to market and identify future partnership and commercialization opportunities.
This project will help address a significant and emerging gap in power systems cybersecurity. A proactive intrusion detection and mitigation system, named SolarSnitch, was developed by Sandia to secure grid-edge photovoltaic communications in distributed energy resource systems. Both cyber and physical data are automatically processed using custom machine-learning algorithms to detect abnormal events and to correlate cyber-physical events. This project will help to further mature SolarSnitch and prepare it for commercialization. Part of that process includes testing in realistic environments with project utility partners.
