Connected Communities 2.0: Innovations to Manage Growing Transportation, Building, and Industrial Loads to the Grid | DE FOA 0003136

Opportunity Information: Apply for DE FOA 0003136

Connected Communities 2.0: Innovations to Manage Growing Transportation, Building, and Industrial Loads to the Grid (DE-FOA-0003136) is a U.S. Department of Energy funding opportunity from the Office of Energy Efficiency and Renewable Energy (EERE), administered through the Golden Field Office. The program is aimed at a very practical problem showing up across the country: electricity demand is rising quickly in new places and new ways because of electrification in transportation (especially EV charging), upgrades in buildings (like heat pumps and electric appliances), and expanding industrial activity, along with newer computing-related loads. The FOA is designed to fund real-world demonstrations and tools that help customers, utilities, and grid planners manage these growing loads without sacrificing reliability, resilience, or affordability.

The FOA is structured around two main topical areas. The first is "Connected Communities 2.0," which focuses on grid-edge technical measures in buildings, industry, and transportation. In plain terms, this is about using technologies and controls on the customer side of the meter (and at the distribution edge of the grid) to make load growth more manageable and to strengthen resilience for both customers and the grid. It emphasizes coordinated solutions that can reduce peak demand, shift load to better times, and provide services that support distribution system operation. The second topical area is "Smart Charge Management (SCM)," centered specifically on EV charging across different contexts, including urban, suburban, and rural use cases. The goal there is to build confidence that managed charging can reliably provide flexibility and value to the grid, rather than EVs simply acting as an unmanaged source of new peak load.

A core theme of the opportunity is that the funded projects are expected to produce learnings that can be used by the people who actually make grid investment and policy decisions. That includes electric system planners and operators, utility strategic planning teams, regulators such as Public Utility Commissions (PUCs), and other local or regional stakeholders. The FOA explicitly ties technical demonstrations to planning and regulatory confidence, with the idea that proven approaches can help "right size" distribution investments. Instead of defaulting to expensive infrastructure upgrades everywhere, the program is looking for evidence that grid-edge measures and smart charging can defer or reduce traditional capacity expansion while maintaining service quality and keeping costs down for customers and ratepayers.

The cohort of awarded projects is framed around three primary goals. First, projects should demonstrate how smart, coordinated management of EVs and other distributed energy resources (DERs) can provide measurable grid support and reduce system costs at a scale large enough to matter. The FOA highlights integrated packages rather than one-off gadgets: energy efficiency, smart electrical panels, solar, heat pumps, controls, EV charging, and energy storage are all named as components that can be orchestrated together. The underlying message is that coordinated demand flexibility and DER integration can improve both grid operations and the customer value proposition, making adoption more economically attractive.

Second, the FOA wants projects that directly address acceptance and trust among utilities, regulators, and communities. That means showing not only that smart charge management and grid-edge measures work technically, but that they can be planned for, verified, and relied on as legitimate alternatives or complements to conventional distribution upgrades. This goal points toward demonstrations that include clear measurement and verification, transparent operational strategies, and planning approaches utilities and commissions can incorporate into standard processes.

Third, the FOA emphasizes resilience under increasingly stressed conditions. Funded efforts are expected to demonstrate ways communities and end-use customers can maintain or recover critical services during extreme weather events, cyber threats, and other reliability challenges, especially as society becomes more dependent on electricity for transportation and heating. The resilience angle is not limited to backup power; it also includes how grid-edge capabilities, controls, and coordinated resources can help the broader system ride through disruptions or reduce outage impacts.

On funding and award structure, the opportunity uses cooperative agreements, meaning DOE typically expects substantial involvement during the project period (for example, through technical direction, milestone reviews, and active collaboration). The FOA states an estimated total program funding level of about $65 million, co-funded across multiple DOE offices, including BTO, VTO, SETO, IEDO, GTO, and OE, which signals a cross-cutting portfolio that spans buildings, vehicles, solar/DER, industrial energy, grid technology, and grid reliability concerns. The listed award ceiling is $6,000,000 per award. The Opportunity Category is discretionary, and the Funding Activity Category is energy, under CFDA 81.086. The eligible applicants field is shown as "Others," but the FOA directs applicants to review the full eligibility language in Section III.A of the official announcement.

For timing and submission, the original closing date is October 10, 2024. Applications must be submitted through the EERE eXCHANGE portal (https://eere-exchange.energy.gov). Applicants need to register and create an account in the system prior to submission, and DOE provides a user guide through the Exchange manuals page (https://eere-exchange.energy.gov/Manuals.aspx) after login. The FOA also notes that instructions for submitting questions, both about the FOA content and about the submission process, are provided in the full announcement posted on EERE eXCHANGE. For anything that determines whether an organization can apply, what cost share is required (if any), what constitutes a compliant application, and what criteria will be used to score proposals, the controlling source is the full FOA document on the Exchange site.

• The Golden Field Office in the energy sector is offering a public funding opportunity titled "Connected Communities 2.0: Innovations to Manage Growing Transportation, Building, and Industrial Loads to the Grid" and is now available to receive applicants.
• Interested and eligible applicants and submit their applications by referencing the CFDA number(s): 81.086.
• This funding opportunity was created on 2024-07-22.
• Applicants must submit their applications by 2024-10-10. (Agency may still review applications by suitable applicants for the remaining/unused allocated funding in 2026.)
• Each selected applicant is eligible to receive up to $6,000,000.00 in funding.
• Eligible applicants include: Others.

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