Coming Soon: DOE WPTO Strategies to Increase Hydropower Flexibility Funding Opportunity

Opportunity Title:

Strategies to Increase Hydropower Flexibility

Funder/Agency:

U.S. Department of Energy’s (DOE) Water Power Technologies Office (WPTO)

Opportunity Number:

DE-FOA-0003189

Description:

The Office of Energy Efficiency and Renewable Energy (EERE) intends to issue, on behalf of the Water Power Technologies Office (WPTO), a Funding Opportunity Announcement (FOA) entitled "Strategies to Increase Hydropower Flexibility."

The FOA supports complementary strategies for increasing and improving the flexibility of hydropower at multiple scales. WPTO’s HydroWIRES Initiative seeks to understand, enable, and improve the contribution of hydropower, including pumped storage hydropower (PSH) to reliability, resilience, and integration in the rapidly evolving U.S. electricity system. Hydropower’s flexibility is central to enhancing all these contributions.

The proposed opportunity is expected to fund projects in three topic areas focused on:

1. Hybridized Hydropower Demonstration: This topic area seeks to demonstrate hydropower hybrid configurations, such as a hydropower facility paired with another type of generation or with an energy storage resource. These configurations can result in benefits such as enhanced services to the electricity grid, less equipment wear-and-tear, and reduced environmental impacts from changing water flows.

2. Technologies to Increase Flexibility: This topic area seeks technology innovations to improve the flexible capabilities of the U.S. hydropower fleet. Solutions could include innovations in turbines and other hardware.

3. Operational Flexibility: This topic area seeks to quantify the flexible capabilities of hydropower and advance operational strategies to increase such flexibility to better serve an evolving electricity grid.

Award Details:

Total Amount Available:

$9,500,000

Expected to open November 2023

Opportunity Link

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