The US Department of Energy (DOE) has announced more than $35m for 42 projects through DOE’s Technology Commercialisation Fund (TCF) to help move emerging energy technologies related to grid security, artificial intelligence, nuclear energy, and advanced manufacturing from DOE National Laboratories, plants, and sites to market. The selected projects will leverage over $21m in cost share from private and public partners, bringing total funding to more than $57.5m.
The TCF programme, managed through the Office of Technology Commercialisation’s Core Laboratory Infrastructure for Market Readiness (CLIMR) Lab Call, supports public-private partnerships that maximize taxpayer investments, advance American innovation, and ensure the US stays ahead in global competitiveness.
“The Energy Department’s National Labs play an important role in ensuring the United States leads the world in innovation,” said Secretary Wright. “These projects have the potential to accelerate technological breakthroughs that will define the future of science and help secure America’s energy future.”
This year’s selections include 19 DOE National Labs, plants, and sites. Highlights include:
- Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory will launch America’s Cradle to Commerce (AC2C), building on the Cradle to Commerce (C2C) programme, providing wraparound support for lab-to-market innovation. In just 18 months, C2C seen more than $15m raised by participating startups and five commercial pilots launched.
- Bold Energy Breakthroughs: From the Research Cradle to Commercial Impact. Cradle to Commerce oversees the most compelling energy innovations from four national labs. It connects inventors and entrepreneurs with these energy technologies and critical resources such as state-of-the-art test beds, prototyping facilities, and scientific resources for technology advancement. This provides entrepreneurship training and access to early commercialisation partners, mentors, and investors.
- Pacific Northwest National Laboratory (PNNL) will strengthen and expand the free-to-use Visual Intellectual Property Search (VIPS) tool through a VIPS 2.0 project. The updated platform will provide seamless search capabilities across a comprehensive list of National Lab innovations available for licensing or open-source use. DOE has made substantial investments in software and technology that can be leveraged to propel growth. The VIPS database is an easy-to-use platform makes it possible to search for technologies, discover their potential, and connect with licensing teams across the national labs. VIPS is a collaboration between the DOE-Office of Technology Transitions (DOE-OTT) and PNNL.
- Argonne National Laboratory will advance commercialisation of the OpenMC Monte Carlo particle transport code through the Exascale Computing Project (ECP), supporting nuclear safety and analysis code, addressing remaining barriers to market readiness and helping accelerate design and licensing timelines for US nuclear reactor projects.
The ECP ran from 2016-2024 and was the largest software research, development, and deployment project managed to date by DOE. The $1.8bn project, a joint effort by the DOE Office of Science and the National Nuclear Security Administration, funded nearly 2,800 multidisciplinary individuals. The outcome was the delivery of an exascale computing ecosystem to provide breakthrough solutions that address future challenges in energy assurance, economic competitiveness, healthcare, and scientific discovery, as well as growing security threats. The ECP exascale ecosystem includes DOE mission-critical application codes, the underlying supporting software technologies, and mechanisms for their deployment and integration. ECP was a grand convergence of advances in modelling and simulation, software tools and libraries, data analytics, machine learning, and artificial intelligence in support of delivering the world’s first capable exascale ecosystem.
