BIRD Energy to Invest $9.75 Million in Cooperative U.S.-Israel Clean Energy Projects

WASHINGTON, D.C. —  The U.S. Department of Energy (DOE), Israel’s Ministry of Energy (MoE), and the Israel Innovation Authority held a board meeting on November 21, 2023, resulting in the approval of nine clean energy projects, with the total value of the approved projects to be $27 million, including $9.75 million in cost-share funding, under the Binational Industrial Research and Development (BIRD) Energy program. The projects will focus on various areas, agrivoltaics, battery technology, CO2 reduction, energy efficiency, solar energy, and energy storage. The selected projects are:

• Bar Ilan R&D Company (Ramat Gan, Israel), the technology transfer office for Bar Ilan University, and Forge Nano (Thornton, CO) to develop advanced flexible thin film coatings by Molecular Layer Deposition for improved high-capacity anodes.
• SolarPaint (Yokneam Illit, Israel) and Lippert Components (Elkhart, IN) to develop and produce a unique solar awning - a fully flexible and rollable solution suitable for RVs, residential balconies, marine vehicles, and more.
• Groundwork BioAg (Moshav Mazor, Israel) and Verdesian Life Sciences U.S. (Cary, NC) to collaborate on developing innovative solutions to enhance soil carbon sequestration and provide agricultural benefits by integrating mycorrhiza species, strains, and nitrogen-fixing bacteria targeting corn and soybean crops.
• CarbonBlue (Haifa, Israel) and Energy & Environmental Research Center (Grand Forks, ND) to scale up and commercialize ocean-based carbon dioxide removal technology for the desalination industry.
• Boson Energy Ltd. Israel (Modi'in, Israel) and Drexel University, Nyheim Plasma Institute (Camden, NJ) to develop a tar cracking system for gasification projects.
• PowerPlug (Tel Aviv, Israel) and Cirrus Nexus (New York, NY) to develop an AI-driven SaaS-based platform for monitoring, analyzing, and reducing the IT carbon footprint across the entire IT landscape: on-premise IT devices, on-premise data centers, and cloud resources.
• Air Vev (Pardes Hanna, Israel) and Nidec Motor Corporation (Elkhart, IN) to develop an electric motor tailored for smaller eVTOL aircraft. 
• Trigo Solar (Sde Hemed, Israel) and Texas A&M AgriLife Extension Sponsored Research Services (College Station, TX) to demonstrate a water-energy agri-voltaic mounting system able to collect, divert, and store rainwater and irrigate cultivated rows of rainfed row crops.
• Windstore (Tel Mond, Israel) and NPS Solutions (Darien, CT) to develop a compress ai energy storage solution incorporating win turbine towers.  

BIRD Energy was launched in 2009 under the Energy Independence and Security Act of 2007, to foster collaborative research and development projects between the United States and Israel. The program receives annual Congressional appropriations for implementation. BIRD Energy is dedicated to advancing sustainable energy technologies, aiming to enhance economic competitiveness, create jobs, and increase energy security. To date, BIRD Energy has funded over 60 cooperative U.S.-Israel collaborations for a total government investment of approximately $50 million and about $65 million in funds matched by the private sector.  Over the life of the program, these investments have leveraged roughly $927 million of private sector investment.

Projects that qualify for BIRD Energy funding must include one United States and one Israeli company or a company from either country paired with a university or research institution in the other country. Partners must present an energy project that is of mutual interest for both the United States and Israel. BIRD Energy then selects the most technologically innovative projects that are most likely to eventually be commercialized and generate a significant impact. The BIRD Energy program provides conditional grants of up to $1.5 million.  Proponents of selected projects must contribute at least 50% to the project’s total R&D cost and agree to repayment if it is commercially successful.

Over the last eight years, several BIRD Energy projects have reached the commercialization stage, including a nonintrusive, real-time energy monitoring platform designed to reduce energy use, manage sustainability initiatives and improve building operations, a new way to optimize the energy efficiency of the food and beverage industry’s compressed air generation and improve the reliability of these air systems, and a flywheel-based energy storage technology that can charge EVs in as little as 15 minutes with a much smaller carbon footprint. 

For more information about the program, see: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=di_14c-ef8

About BIRD Energy: https://www.birdf.com/what-is-bird-energy/