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

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.