NOI: Distribution Communication and Control Technologies Research, Development, and Demonstration
Funding Agency:
- Department of Energy
This is a Notice of Intent to Issue
Funding Opportunity Announcement No. DE‐FOA‐0003198
“Distribution Communication and Control Technologies
Research, Development, and Demonstration”
Around the January 2024 timeframe, the United States (U.S.) Department of Energy (DOE)
intends to issue a Funding Opportunity Announcement (FOA) seeking applications for financial
assistance awards that would support the Office of Electricity (OE). This FOA would support
the OE priorities of enabling a reliable, resilient, secure, and affordable electricity grid. Secure
communications are essential for reliable operation, response to and recovery from
disruptions, and protection from effects of natural disasters or malicious actors on grid
operations.
OVERALL BACKGROUND AND TECHNICAL OBJECTIVES
The objective of this FOA is to develop and evaluate the effectiveness of new communications
solutions on utility infrastructure and demonstrate how legacy grid communications
infrastructure and operating paradigms can be updated to support coordination of DERs on
the distribution system.
This FOA’s single area of interest will be focused on secure communications technologies at
the edge‐distribution system interface. Total federal funding of up to $4.8M will be available
to develop and demonstrate technologies, tools, or systems that enable relevant state data
and control and coordination messaging to be securely communicated between grid edge
infrastructure and distribution system operators.
The project(s) funded by this opportunity will support OE’s efforts to advance information
security on the electric grid and will be required to issue a publicly available final report
summarizing the project activities and detailing the results.
The FOA is anticipated to focus on a single Topic Area, Secure communications at the edgedistribution
system interface, as described below:
Distributed energy resources, such as inverter‐based generation, storage, and controllable loads, are
proliferating at the grid edge. The operation of this future, bidirectional electricity system will rely on
the ability to coordinate these disparate resources at scale, and research is underway to create advanced distribution management systems (ADMS) capable of managing this complexity. These
systems will be critical to grid reliability, and they will depend on accurate, timely, and complete data
feeds for both situational awareness of grid state and transmission of control and coordination
messages to this fleet of devices.
TBA
TBA
This is NOI.
If the FOA is released, it will be posted at Grants.gov (http://www.grants.gov) and at
FedConnect (http://www.fedconnect.net).