The U.S. Department of Energy (DOE) seeks submissions for the Powering the Blue Economy: Power at Sea Prize, which will award up to $1.7 million to competitors to advance technologies that use marine energy to power ocean-based activities.

Over two phases, the Power at Sea Prize will incentivize competitors to develop novel, marine energy-powered concepts by choosing at least one integration challenge specific to the blue economy:

• Access: How does the solution help to reduce the high cost or limited opportunities for service, maintenance, and/or intervention?
• Deployment duration: How does the solution improve the deployment duration at sea?
• Energy storage: How does the solution improve the capabilities currently limited by battery capacity?
• Environmental/ecological impact: How does the solution minimize the negative effects of interactions with local flora and fauna?
• Harsh operational conditions: How does the solution address operations in challenging conditions and unwanted growth of marine organisms?
• Hybridization with other renewable energy resources: How does the solution utilize marine energy to address power gaps caused by intermittency of other non-marine renewable energy resources?
• Suitability of power: How does the solution maximize efficiency?

The first phase, CONCEPT, will center on developing teams and sound concepts, awarding up to 20 winners from a cash prize pool of up to $200,000. Concepts in early stages of development are welcome—from a system, subsystem, or component that has not yet been developed to those that have had some previous work completed up to the prototype stage.

Deadline for submissions for the CONCEPT phase is July 26, 2024.

The second phase, DEVELOP, aims to better position competitors for continued technology development following the prize. Up to 20 DEVELOP phase winners will be selected and share a cash prize pool of up to $1.5 million.

Learn more here.