WASHINGTON — The U.S. Department of Energy (DOE) recently announced 43 small businesses will participate in the second round of the Small Business Vouchers (SBV) pilot. With vouchers in hand, these businesses can better leverage the world-class capabilities of the department’s national laboratories and bring their next-generation clean-energy technologies to the marketplace faster.
“We need to accelerate the pace of clean energy innovation to build a stronger economy and a brighter, cleaner future for our nation,” said David Friedman, acting assistant secretary for the Office of Energy Efficiency and Renewable Energy (EERE). “The Small Business Vouchers pilot breaks down barriers for some of our greatest entrepreneurial minds, which allows them to work with our national laboratories across sectors and industries to accelerate a clean-energy revolution that’s been underway since 2008.”
The DOE opened the first round of SBV, a Technology-to-Market Lab Impact pilot, last fall. In SBV’s first round, 33 small businesses were selected to receive vouchers totaling $6.7 million. These 43 awards total more than $8 million. To date, the DOE’s SBV pilot has connected 76 small businesses with the labs, totaling $15 million worth of vouchers.
The small businesses recently selected will have the ability to work with 12 different national laboratories. The SBV pilot makes it possible to direct the power of the national laboratories toward specific problems identified by small businesses by pairing these companies with a national laboratory uniquely qualified to solve their challenges.
The collaborations focus on advanced manufacturing, bioenergy, buildings, fuel cells, geothermal, solar, vehicles, water, and wind. To learn more about the pilot, visit www.sbv.org.
Publication date: 10/10/2016
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