If you’re working on an outside-the-box technology that’s a little hard to explain, there may be hope of getting government research funding after all. ARPA-E has issued a $125-million open Funding Opportunity Announcement (FOA) to support “disruptive new technologies in all areas of energy research and development.”

Unlike most of the agency’s FOAs, OPEN 2015 is an “open funding solicitation,” which is designed to “ensure that ARPA-E does not miss opportunities to support potentially transformational projects outside the scope of existing ARPA-E programs.”

The agency’s description of what it’s looking for reads more like something we’d expect to come out of Google than the straitjacketed prose typically used by a government agency: “Because of the enormous breadth of energy technologies solicited under an OPEN FOA, it is impossible to provide the well‐defined technical targets contained in an ARPA‐E FOA for a focused technology program. The critical question for applicants to consider is: ‘If it works, will it matter?’”

Mission Areas relating to transportation include:

• Electric Motors
• Fuel Cells
• Power Electronics
• Batteries
• Advanced Vehicle Designs and Materials, e.g. ultra-lightweight vehicles, advanced components, new vehicle designs and architectures
• Transportation Management, e.g. traffic management, transportation behavior, self‐driving cars
• Non‐Battery Storage, e.g. thermal storage or supercapacitors

Individual awards may range from $1 million to $10 million. The deadline to submit a Notice of Intent is February 20, 2015.

Source: Green Car Congress