The Department of Energy Office of Technology Transitions (OTT) team partnered with the Office of Cybersecurity, Energy Security, and Emergency Response (CESER) and the National Renewable Energy Laboratory (NREL) to offer commercialization training to seven awardees of a recent CESER lab call.
Office of Technology Transitions
April 3, 2024
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The Department of Energy Office of Technology Transitions (OTT) team partnered with the Office of Cybersecurity, Energy Security, and Emergency Response (CESER) and the National Renewable Energy Laboratory (NREL) to offer commercialization training to seven awardees of a recent CESER lab call. Inspired by the DOE Energy I-Corps program and funded by the Bipartisan Infrastructure Law Technology Commercialization Fund, this effort will bolster the awardees’ knowledge and understanding of commercialization concepts and tools to ultimately prepare their technologies for market success.
The research teams will attend weekly meetings and participate in commercialization-focused activities from March through November 2024. The activities will be directly applicable to their research projects and informed by relevant market needs. By the end of the educational program, participants will be better prepared to develop business models, identify customer perspectives, assess competitors, refine solutions, and create foundational relationships with stakeholders.
“It's never been more important to get next generation cyber security tools out of the lab and into the hands of the private sector,” said DOE Chief Commercialization Officer and Director of the Office of Technology Transitions Dr. Vanessa Z. Chan. “OTT is delighted to partner with CESER and NREL to provide training to boost the success and market uptake of protective and impactful cybersecurity solutions.”
“It is critical to get impactful research into the hands of energy sector owner and operators so that they can better defend their systems from cyber adversaries,” said Director of CESER, Puesh M. Kumar. “The partnership with DOE’s Office of Technology Transitions enables the tremendous research and development underway to move from concept to implementation, moving us closer to a more secure energy sector.”
The aim of the CESER lab call is to advance the cybersecurity of distributed energy resources (DER). DER systems include utility-scale solar, wind, storage and other clean technologies; behind-the-meter renewables and storage systems; electric vehicle chargers; and other customer-owned devices. The awardees are researching innovative tools and technologies that will enhance the security of DER systems. For example, one project at Sandia National Laboratory is inspecting encrypted DER traffic at the cloud/utility firewall and will act as a template for all DER vendors, operators, aggregators, and utilities. A team at Brookhaven National Laboratory is working with a cloud service provider and utilities to develop generic security solutions for the public and hybrid clouds.
Research teams from the following National Labs are participating in the commercialization training:
- Argonne National Laboratory
- Brookhaven National Laboratory
- National Renewable Energy Laboratory
- Oak Ridge National Laboratory
- Pacific Northwest National Laboratory
- Sandia National Laboratory
“Energy I-Corps challenged me to think about the problems facing end users first, then design research efforts in response, rather than the inverse. This has been invaluable to my career in the National Labs and my effectiveness at identifying the highest priority problems to solve,” said Energy I-Corps graduate Dan Oryshchyn from the National Energy Technology Laboratory.
The commercialization training kicked off last week, and DOE is excited for the growth to come.