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June 27, 2021 | Tom Ballard

Five projects tied to ORNL among 68 awarded funding under DOE’s “Technology Commercialization Fund”

The U.S. Department of Energy (DOE) announced last Thursday that it had awarded more than $30 million in federal funding, matched by more than $35 million in private sector funds, for 68 projects that will accelerate the commercialization of promising energy technologies – ranging from clean energy and advanced manufacturing to building efficiency and next-generation materials.

About 17 percent of the federal dollars involve five projects connected to Oak Ridge National Laboratory. They are:

  • SPARKZ, a new Knoxville-based start-up we spotlighted in this recent teknovation.biz article, received $1.2 million in federal funding for a project titled “Continuous Stirred Tank Reactors for The Scale Up of High Energy Density Cobalt-Free Cathodes for Advanced Lithium ion Batteries.”
  • DigiCollect LLC of New York received $1 million for a project titled “Development of a Low-cost and Hardware Friendly Instantaneous Waveform Measurement Technology for Distribution System.”
  • HEVO Inc. of Brooklyn was awarded $750,000 for a project titled “High-Power Oak Ridge Converter for Extreme Fast Charging Applications.”
  • Carl ZEISS Industry Metrology of Maple Grove, MN received $756,689 for a project titled “Leveraging Artificial Intelligence to Enable Reliable Non-Destructive Characterization of Additively Manufactured Parts using X-ray CT.”
  • Electric Power Research Institute, better known as EPRI, was awarded $920,000 for a project titled “Used (Spent) Nuclear Fuel Management and Analysis Tool.”

The awards are facilitated by the DOE Office of Technology Transitions (OTT) “Technology Commercialization Fund” (TCF) that was created by the Energy Policy Act of 2005 to help catalyze the agency’s research, development, demonstration, and deployment efforts into affordable, market-ready energy solutions, by strengthening partnerships between DOE’s National Labs and American entrepreneurs.

To date, the TCF has funded more than 380 projects by unlocking more than $170 million in funding from more than 300 private sector partners, including automotive manufacturers, energy storage companies, utilities, bioenergy companies, solar providers, and aerospace companies. To receive a TCF award, National Lab teams must receive a commitment from private sector partners to match at least 50 percent of the anticipated federal funding.


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