WPTO, Sandia, and NREL partner for marine technologies prize

The U.S. Department of Energy’s Water Power Technologies Office recently launched the Innovating Distributed Embedded Energy Prize (InDEEP) in partnership with the National Renewable Energy Laboratory and Sandia National Laboratories. The prize aims to forge a path for early-stage marine energy technologies to one day help power the nation’s grid and coastal cities. This prize will award up to $2.3 million to competitors investigating distributed embedded energy converter technologies (DEEC-Tec).

DEEC-Tec combines many small energy converters, often less than a few centimeters in size, into a single, larger structure that converts the movement of ocean waves into energy. This larger system could convert energy from a wide range of ocean locations and wave types. InDEEP aims to support early-stage DEEC-Tec research that lays the foundation for the eventual deployment of these technologies at all scales, including at the utility-grid scale.

Phase I will center on team building and concept creation, and award up to 20 teams $15,000 each.

The first phase is now open for submissions and will close on Aug. 25, 2023.

Read the complete NREL news release.

Learn more about Sandia’s Water Power program.