Three weeks after a list showing hundreds of energy grants the Department of Energy was considering cancelling surfaced among lobbyists, dozens of research projects still don’t know if their funding will survive.
Among the projects currently in federal funding limbo are two studies designed to make it easier and faster to build clean energy infrastructure — efforts that, if stalled, researchers say could slow the very processes needed to bring new power online amid aging infrastructure and rapidly rising demand.
During the Biden administration, the Solar and Storage Industries Institute, which is the research arm of the Solar Energy Industries Association, won two research grants to research barriers to siting and permitting for clean energy projects and improve how developers work with local communities and governments. Those grants, managed by the Office of Energy Efficiency and Renewable Energy, were relatively small, together totaling $5.3 million.
The first grant, worth $2.3 million, is funding efforts to test and compare different community engagement strategies employed by solar developers to build public support for large-scale solar projects. The second, $3 million grant is for an initiative known as “the Solar Uncommon Dialogue,” a working group established in 2022 that brings together industry and community stakeholders to design best-practices for development. That award was finalized on January 15 of this year.
It’s research that has never been undertaken before, said David Gahl, SI2’s executive director, but its potential impact is increasingly critical. There’s no clear industry standard on how to navigate community opposition, which is the leading cause of cancelled clean energy projects in the United States today. But developers tend to spend a legible amount of money on community engagement; it is often less than 0.1% of a project’s capital expenditures, according to data from Berkeley National Lab.
“There’s a real hole in the understanding of what works in community engagement,” Gahl explained. But the future of both research projects is now uncertain.
Award impacts
Gahl said he found out about the potential threat to the Institute’s awards not through DOE, but in media coverage of the proposed cancellation list in early October. To date, they have not received official grant termination letters for either project, he added, but concerns were deepened this week by DOE’s confirmation that at least five of the awards on that list have now been terminated.
Meanwhile, most of the more than 300 awards officially canceled so far have come from EERE, which manages SI2’s awards.
SI2’s research is largely focused on solar, but has wide-reaching applications for other types of energy projects, and ultimately on speed to power for data centers, Gahl said. “The projects we’re doing on siting and permitting maybe at first glance don’t feel like they have an immediate impact on providing more electricity to meet demand,” he explained. “But if you’re improving those processes and making permitting work better, you’re actually speeding up the timelines that help bring more generation online.”
If funding is cut off, particularly during the early stages of research, he added, those projects may never reach their conclusion — for solar or anything else.
SI2’s first project, researching community engagement strategies, has been underway for 10 months, and is still in its data collection phase. Funding is slated to be disbursed over the course of three years, as the project hits various targets.
If the award is canceled, Gahl explained, the best case scenario is a delay. But it’s more likely that the project would be significantly scaled back; the funding would likely only cover the field survey stage, and later stages of the project, including “field testing” different approaches, would be cut. “It would leave a gaping hole in our research plan,” Gahl said.
SI2 is still working with its DOE project officers to ensure the project is meeting its deliverables and milestones to stay eligible for disbursements, he added. But the institute is also working frantically behind the scenes to “plug the gaps” in funding. Philanthropic sources, Gahl said, are the likeliest lifeline.
Solar Uncommon Dialogue’s fate
When it comes to the Solar Uncommon Dialogue, an initiative developed in coordination with Stanford’s Woods Institute for the Environment, only $104,689 has been disbursed, according to federal records. Losing the rest of that funding would stall the group’s momentum, in part because DOE’s endorsement of the effort was key to engaging certain stakeholders, Gahl said.
That funding was also being used to hire technical consultants to help with some of the resource creation, which includes land-use related data and information tools, data collection tools, and risk-assessment frameworks.
The idea behind the Solar Uncommon Dialogue, Gahl said, is that by bringing together energy developers, land conservation and environmental groups, Tribal nation representatives, agricultural interests, community advocates, and investors, “we can avoid litigation that can tie up electricity projects for years and years.”
That initiative is further along than SI2’s community engagement research, with more than 50 organizations now involved, and six working groups focused on topics including siting, Tribal nations, information tools, and policy. But while Gahl is “confident” that participants will continue meeting if DOE funding is pulled, the reality is that many of those organizations are already under-resourced, and are donating their staff’s time to the effort.
“If they do pull this funding, and some stakeholders aren’t able to participate anymore, that could have a real detrimental effect on the project,” Gahl said.
More broadly, for the world of clean energy research, it’s not entirely clear whether any other sector could fill the funding gap left by the federal government. And that leaves researchers in limbo.
“The scope and scale of the work that the federal government has funded across nonprofits and research universities is enormous, and so philanthropy can’t plug all those gaps,” Gahl explained. In that sense, he said, there’s still a key role for federal agencies to play in supporting this kind of research.
At the same time, he added, “canceling the first round of contracts, and then the potential to cancel this round, really sends a chilling signal through the nonprofit and research communities…It’s very difficult to do business with an entity that changes its mind halfway through making an investment.”
