Slots: 1
Deadlines
Internal Deadline: Friday, February 14th, 2025, 5pm PT
LOI: March 31, 2025
External Deadline: July 18, 2025
Award Information
Award Type: Cooperative Agreement
Estimated Number of Awards: 1
Anticipated Award Amount: $7.5 – $12.5 million
Link to Award: https://eere-exchange.energy.gov/#FoaId9de97930-da87-413e-a8c3-1747f3708bf4
Process for Limited Submissions
PIs must submit their application as a Limited Submission through the Research Initiatives and Infrastructure (RII) Application Portal: https://rii.usc.edu/oor-portal/. Use the template provided here: RII Limited Submission Applicant Template
Materials to submit include:
- (1) Two-Page Proposal Summary (1” margins; single-spaced; standard font type, e.g. Arial, Helvetica, Times New Roman, or Georgia typeface; font size: 11 pt). Page limit includes references and illustrations. Pages that exceed the 2-page limit will be excluded from review. You must use the template linked above.
- (2) CV – (5 pages maximum)
Note: The portal requires information about the PIs in addition to department and contact information, including the 10-digit USC ID#. Please have this material prepared before beginning this application.
Purpose
The Advanced Materials and Manufacturing Technologies Office (AMMTO) supports the development of a globally competitive U.S. energy industrial base that drives supply chain resiliency and energy security through materials and manufacturing innovation. Recently, AMMTO led the development and
publication of an EERE-wide report entitled Circularity for Secure and Sustainable Products and Materials: A Draft Strategic Framework, along with a request for information (RFI).7 This document describes EERE’s goals and efforts in circularity across the product and material segments that are most important to clean energy technologies. It also identifies challenges and opportunities to leverage circularity for driving industrial competitiveness, securing supply chains, reducing environmental impacts, benefiting communities, and creating jobs. The draft strategic framework highlights the importance of the market landscape in determining the ease and likelihood of success of technology adoption for circular supply chains, and how such factors can be unique to each product and material segment. In particular, non-technical market factors (i.e., market conditions, supply chain dynamics, policy and regulatory landscape, workforce readiness, infrastructure capabilities) must be understood as these may result in either barriers or pathways to adoption for specific emerging technologies. Analysis is needed to identify future research opportunities in the context of these non-technical market factors, and an array of stakeholders with synergistic technology needs and capabilities must be connected to carry it out.
A centralized effort to assess the full landscape of circular supply chain technologies and its intersection with these factors has not yet been undertaken. Such assessments would support EERE’s ongoing and past portfolio of investments in innovations for circular supply chains by identifying promising avenues for adoption and enabling targeted investments with high likelihood of industrial impact. This NOFO establishes a program whose purpose is to address this need and develop: (1) a comprehensive understanding of the landscape of technical and the non-technical factors that could impact the adoption of emerging technologies and (2) strong connections across the circularity field to accelerate innovations from R&D-scale to commercial practice. We are in a unique moment where the growing awareness of and investment in circular supply chains are driving technological advancements. This is an important opportunity for the United States to benefit from the building momentum and take ambitious actions that will advance development and adoption of circular supply chains.
Visit our Institutionally Limited Submission webpage for more updates and other announcements.