The U.S. Department of Energy (DOE) has announced the third round of Small Business Voucher (SBV) funding. The SBV pilot opens up the DOE national labs to American small businesses, enabling them to tap into the intellectual and technical resources they need to overcome critical technology challenges and gain a global competitive advantage.
Two projects involve Idaho National Laboratory (INL) technology and one project involves an Idaho-based company.
Cogent: Idaho National Laboratory has been awarded $200,000 to work with Cogent towards improving its small-scale gasifier for distributed waste-to-energy applications and markets. The gasifier can be used to make many profitable end-use products such as electricity, liquid fuels, hydrogen and/or chemical precursors. This project seeks to partner with INL to properly homogenize and size the feedstock material so that it can be continuously fed into the gasifier and meet real-world feedstock processing requirements.
U.S. Geothermal, Inc.: The National Renewable Energy Laboratory and Idaho National Laboratory have been awarded $150,000 to work with U.S. Geothermal Inc. (U.S. Geo) towards developing and deploying an integrated solar topping cycle for U.S. Geo’s existing Raft River Geothermal Power Plant, creating a profitable Geothermal-Solar Hybrid Cycle. A new, thermodynamically efficient approach would integrate concentrated solar power and binary geothermal energy to provide a lower levelized cost of electricity.
Sentient Science Corp (based in Idaho Falls): Sandia National Laboratories has been awarded $354,000 to work with Sentient Science Corp on development of a prognostic solution to predict and extend wind turbine blade life. A single defective turbine blade, if not identified early, could cost wind operators up to $300,000. The low costs of predictive health monitoring solutions for wind turbine blades could lead to millions of dollars of savings, reducing the cost of wind energy.
Read the full DOE announcement at https://energy.gov/articles/energy-department-announces-new-national-laboratory-collaborations-38-small-businesses.
A list of all winning projects is available at https://www.sbv.org/pdfs/round-3-sbv-awardees.pdf.