Small Business Grant Program Helps Entrepreneurs Advance Water Power Initiatives

UPDATED January 22, 2024: The Small Business Innovation Research and Small Business Technology Transfer programs funding opportunity opened on January 18, 2024. Letters of intent are due on February 2. (See all deadlines related to the funding opportunity.)

The Small Business Innovation Research (SBIR) program was founded in 1982 in recognition of the fact that small, young businesses are engines of technological innovation in the United States. The program provides financial support to these firms and entrepreneurs to move advancements in research to the market. The SBIR and associated Small Business Technology Transfer (STTR) programs are the largest sources of public funding for small business research in the United States and span 12 federal agencies, including the U.S. Department of Energy (DOE). 

As part of DOE’s SBIR/STTR programs, the Water Power Technologies Office (WPTO) funds projects in a range of topics and subtopics in hydropower and marine energy. Through a competitive review process, WPTO awards funds to small businesses to implement their proposed research and development projects toward eventual commercialization.  

“Through the SBIR program, we are able to fund innovative, commercially relevant research projects in the private sector with zero cost share,” said Rukmani Vijayaraghavan, WPTO’s innovation and market transformation lead. “We enable startups and small companies to take risks and transition their ideas to the market.”   

WPTO has solicited proposals in relatively open topics like the co-development of marine energy systems and accelerating pumped storage hydropower deployment, as well as in specialized topics addressing near-term research priorities like mitigating hydropower cybersecurity threats and shoring up the marine energy supply chain. These topics are aligned with WPTO’s broader goals of advancing marine energy and hydropower technologies. 

Recipients of SBIR awards are funded with up to $200,000 in Phase I of the program and up to $1.1 million in Phase II to carry out their R&D activities. Phase II awards are made based on awardees’ progress during Phase I. In recent years, between 40% and 50% of WPTO’s Phase I awardees have won Phase II awards. Below is a deeper dive into the work of some recent awardees and how they are making progress on their innovations.  

EOM Offshore, out of Pocasset, Massachusetts, set out to develop a low-cost, low-maintenance wave energy converter (WEC) as part of the “Co-Development of Marine Energy Technologies with End-User Partners” subtopic in 2021. With its funding, the company has been fine tuning its WEC design to provide energy for ocean observation, buoys, autonomous vehicles, and other applications in the blue economy.   

“We’ve proven that it would work in principle, and now we’re doing a lot of modeling to try to understand how to optimize the system so that when we get to a Phase II program, we'll be able to build a more optimized version of the wave energy converter that we have in mind,” said David Aubrey, CEO of EOM. 

As part of the “Innovations Accelerating Pumped Storage Hydropower Deployment” subtopic in 2022, RCAM Technologies of Los Angeles, California, won funding for a marine pumped hydroelectric energy storage technology, which cycles water through large spheres on the seafloor to release and store energy. (The company was recently selected to receive funding from WPTO through a different funding opportunity.) 

“Our technology can help the United States and the renewable energy industry integrate various renewable energy resources into the grid,” said Jason Cotrell, founder and CEO of RCAM. “The nation and industry will be deploying a lot of renewables—wind, solar, wave—and if we're going to integrate those, we’re going to need long duration energy storage.”  

Triton Systems, Inc., from Chelmsford, Massachusetts, earned awards in 2022 for two different projects. The company’s projects are designed to use wave energy to power either ocean buoys or light detection and ranging (LiDAR) buoys, which obtain atmospheric and oceanographic measurements of wind speeds and heights—and come with substantial power requirements. As of summer 2023, the Triton team had deployed one buoy off the coast of Cape Cod and performed wave tank testing of another device at the University of Maine.  

“To me, success looks like development and deployment of our wave energy converter prototypes in real-world environments and also interfacing with stakeholders in the industry to develop our designs to fit their needs,” said Tyler Robertson, project mechanical engineer and principal investigator for Triton. “My preferred outcome would be to have a commercially successful product that’s gone through the phases of the DOE SBIR program.” 

Learn more about how SBIR awards have helped these businesses achieve their goals and the other unique projects awarded earlier in 2023. 

The Next Round of Awards  

DOE recently released Phase I topics for Fiscal Year 2024, which include several topics from WPTO:  

• Co-Development of Marine Energy Technologies  
• Community-Centric Hydropower Technologies Development and Partnerships* 
• Coastal Structure Integrated Wave Energy Converters (CSI-WEC)* 
• Development of Marine Energy Components/Subsystems 
• Development of Marine Energy Systems in Open-Water Conditions (WEC/TEC Testing)* 
• Emerging Sensors, Sensing Networks, and Other Monitoring Technologies 
• Innovations in Data Analytics, Models, and Tools 
• Micro-Hydropower Development 
• Pumped Storage Hydropower Innovative Concepts

*Bipartisan Infrastructure Law-funded, fast-track topics. (Fast-track topics combine SBIR Phase I and Phase II proposals, and potential applicants are encouraged to review full details in the funding opportunity when it is released.) 

Businesses interested in applying for funding through one of these topic areas are encouraged to register for an informational webinar on December 5 at 1 p.m. ET. WPTO will discuss the specific water power subtopics. The funding opportunity is expected to open on December 11, and letters of intent are due on January 3, 2024. (See all deadlines related to the application process.)   

Learn more about the SBIR/STTR programs and watch the recording of a recent webinar that breaks down these programs and how they can help bring concepts to market.  

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