The U.S. Department of Energy (DOE) seeks to fund revolutionary applied scientific research that develops highly disruptive Concentrating Solar Power (CSP) technologies that will meet 6¢/kWh cost target by the end of the decade. This Funding Opportunity Announcement (FOA) for “SunShot Concentrating Solar Power Research and Development” intends to support research into technologies that have the potential for much higher efficiency, lower cost, and/or more reliable performance than existing commercial and near-commercial CSP systems and their expected incremental progress in future years. As part of the SunShot Initiative, this applied research program is intended to demonstrate and prove new concepts in the collector, receiver, and power cycle subsystems, including associated hardware. These developments should lead to subsequent system integration, engineering scale-up, and eventual commercial production for electricity generation applications. The SunShot CSP program is designed to look beyond incremental near-term innovation and explore transformative concepts with the potential to break through performance barriers as known today, such as efficiency and temperature limitations. These goals support the mission of the DOE SunShot Initiative.
There are four topics to which an application may be submitted under this FOA:
- Topic 1: Advanced Collectors
- Topic 2: Advanced Receivers
- Topic 3: Advanced Power Cycles
- Topic 4: Seedling CSP Concepts