The U.S. Department of Energy’s (DOE) Office of Electricity (OE) has selected nine projects to receive approximately $20 million through its Flexible Innovative Transformer Technologies (FITT) funding opportunity announcement (FOA) to advance key components helping modernize the grid.
OE also announced the eight winners of the Silicon Carbide (SiC) Packaging Prize Phase 1 who will receive $50,000 each in cash prizes (from a $400,000 total prize pool). The total $2.25 million prize, awarded in three phases, is part of the American-Made Challenges Program, which fosters collaboration between nation’s entrepreneurs and innovators, DOE’s National Labs, and the private sector. 20kv dry type distribution transformer
The selected projects will address the technical challenges of advancing transformers through research, development, and demonstration across a range of distribution to transmission scale applications. DOE’s Office of Electricity (OE) and the Office of Cybersecurity, Energy Security, and Emergency Response (CESER) are co-funding this FOA, contributing $18 million and $2 million, respectively.
Silicon carbide (SiC) is used as the raw material for semiconductors as it can survive high electricity voltage fluctuations and temperatures. The winners will design, build, and test SiC semiconductor packaging prototypes to enable these devices to work more effectively in high-voltage environments such as energy storage.
small transformer In Phase 2, winning teams from Phase 1 will develop a physical prototype of their SiC packaging solution meeting Phase 2 metrics. In this phase, teams are expected to send their prototypes to a national lab for testing to validate the metrics achieved. At the end of Phase 2, up to four winning teams will receive $250,000 each and become eligible to compete in Phase 3.