NSF Engines Development Award: Advancing energy and decarbonization technologies in the Inland Northwest (WA, ID)

该区域创新引擎发展奖旨在为横跨华盛顿州和爱达荷州的内陆西北地区建立一个绿色和公平的电网。它将在土地授予研究型大学、投资者所有的公用事业、国家实验室、地区劳动力委员会、能源股权领域的非营利机构、公立和私立大学、公用事业区、天使投资集团、知识产权专家、州级实体和几家行业领先的营利性公司之间建立跨部门合作。这项合作将在之前的清洁能源项目的基础上推进可持续能源的研究创新，通过支持初创企业和对该地区电网实施公平和可持续的改进，加速研究成果转化为影响，并增加区域劳动力以支持创新生态系统。该项目侧重于寻找建设无碳电网的公平解决方案，并强调社区参与该基金支持的规划活动。该区域创新引擎发展奖的重点是通过建立跨部门公私合作的INTENT，加速西北内陆地区电网和能源系统的公平脱碳。INTENT旨在解决电网的社会、经济和环境影响，并引领向清洁能源的过渡。INTENT的影响将通过经济增长、可持续性、资源管理、环境公平、持续的劳动力机会以及扩展到其他地区的能力来衡量。通过激励和培养人才，连接实验室资产，复制可持续性战略，可以实现可衡量的改善成果，从而利用跨部门合作来维持该地区并解决全球清洁能源技术挑战。长期以来，该地区在清洁能源和资源管理方面一直处于全国领先地位，包括水电、原子能、电网规模的风能、太阳能和储能。同样，该地区拥有一批行业领导者、国家实验室和大学，拥有一流的电力系统工程和创新，从基础研究到商业翻译和创新就业计划。INTENT的工作围绕四个工作组组织：1)使用启发研究：通过实验室网络从想法到演示再到大规模生产，推进行业知情的基础和应用研究；2)劳动力：通过从幼儿园开始并扩展到现有劳动力再培训的重新构想的劳动力培训合作，评估维持区域创新引擎愿景（在所有规模的社区中）所需的劳动力技能和属性；3)工业：通过定义满足现有脱碳目标的要求，为研究、劳动力和投资提供信息和激励；4)投资：增强将创意规模化的能力；更有效地孵化和衍生；分析融资机制，增加对pre-seed，种子期，pre-revenue，天使和A轮融资的投资信心。制定投资策略以支持INTENT长期可持续发展计划。NSF区域创新引擎发展奖促进了研发、劳动力、工业和创新领域的区域合作伙伴的下一个层次的协调。该奖项还有助于制定、跟踪和维持对该区域社区健康有影响的绩效措施。该奖项反映了美国国家科学基金会的法定使命，并通过使用基金会的知识价值和更广泛的影响审查标准进行评估，被认为值得支持。

This Regional Innovation Engine Development Award aims to create a green and equitable power grid for the Inland Northwest region across Washington and Idaho. It will establish a cross-sector collaboration among land grant research universities, an investor-owned utility, national labs, a regional workforce council, a non-profit leading in energy equity, public and private universities, public utility districts, angel investment groups, IP experts, state-level entities, and several sector-leading for-profit companies. This collaboration will build off prior clean energy projects to advance research innovations in sustainable energy, accelerate the translation of research to impact through support of start-ups and implementing equitable and sustainable improvements to the region's power grid, and grow a regional workforce to support the innovation ecosystem. The project focuses on finding equitable solutions to building a carbon-free power grid and emphasizes community engagement in the planning activities supported by this funding. This Regional Innovation Engines Development Award is focused on accelerating the equitable decarbonization of the power grid and energy systems in the Inland Northwest region by establishing INTENT, a cross-sector public-private collaboration. INTENT aims to address the power grid's social, economic, and environmental impacts and lead the transition to clean energy. INTENT's impact will be measured through economic growth, sustainability, resource stewardship, environmental equity, sustained workforce opportunity, and the ability to scale to other regions. Cross-sector collaborations that have sustained the region and solved clean energy technology challenges globally will be leveraged by inspiring and growing talent, linking laboratory assets, and replicating sustainability strategies to achieve measurably improved outcomes. The region has long led the nation in clean energy and resource stewardship, including hydroelectricity, atomic energy, grid-scale wind, solar, and storage. Likewise, the region boasts a cluster of industry leaders, national labs, and universities with premier power systems engineering and innovation from fundamental research to commercial translation and innovative jobs programs. INTENT's work is organized around four working groups: 1) Use-inspired Research: to advance industry-informed fundamental and applied research through a network of laboratories from idea to demonstration to production at scale; 2) Workforce: to assess workforce skillsets and attributes required to sustain the regional innovation engine vision (in all sizes of the community) through a reimagined workforce training collaboration that begins in kindergarten and extends to retraining the existing workforce; 3) Industry: to inform and inspire research, workforce, and investment by defining requirements to meet existential decarbonization goals; and 4) Investment: to enhance the ability to take an idea to scale; incubate and spin-out more effectively; analyze funding mechanisms to increase investment confidence for pre-seed, seed, pre-revenue, angel, and series A fundraising. Develop investment strategies to support the INTENT long-term sustainability plan. The NSF Regional Innovation Engines Development Award catalyzes next-level alignment for the regional partners across R&D, Workforce, Industry, and Innovation. The award further enables the development, tracking, and maintenance of impactful performance measures for the health of the region's communities.This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.