The Bioenergy Technologies Office of the US Department of Energy has begun to provide R&D funding
to the wood heater manufacturing community. To date, it has had two rounds of funding, with $10 million available. The DOE provides R&D funding to many different renewable energy technologies to "enable sustainable ... energy security, reliability and resilience while creating economic opportunities across the country." The Bioenergy Technologies Office "selects research and development projects through open and competitive procurements called Funding Opportunity Announcements (FOA) and encourages collaborative partnerships among:- Industry
- Universities
- National laboratories
- Federal, state, and local governments, and
- Non-government agencies.
Now, the DOE is asking for input from the extended wood heater community about what the community needs to build cleaner and more efficient stoves. This likely indicates that they may change the focus of their funding next year. In the past, they provided funding for
- Novel and innovative residential wood heater designs to improve combustion chamber geometry, combustion air flow distribution, mixing of combustion air with gasification products, stove baffling designs, etc.
- Improvements in automation of stoves to optimize combustion control.
- Wood heater power generation via thermoelectric module integration
- Improvements in catalyst technologies for emissions reduction
Input should be sent to FY21MultiTopic@ee.doe.gov and is due by 5:00 PM September 21, 2020. We have reproduced the details of the Request for Information below (except we omitted language about a parallel ROI on biofuels). For the full text, click here.
FY 2021 Bioenergy Technologies Office Multi-Topic RFI (DE-FOA-0002386)
DATE:
August 20, 2020
SUBJECT: Request for Information (RFI)
Description
The
U.S. Department of Energy (DOE) Office of Energy Efficiency and Renewable Energy
(EERE) Bioenergy Technologies Office (BETO) is requesting information on
research opportunities related to residential wood heater technology advancement
Purpose
The purpose of this RFI
is to solicit feedback from industry, academia, research laboratories,
government agencies, and other stakeholders on issues related to overcoming the
technical barriers and challenges in the design of clean, efficient residential
scale wood heaters. EERE is specifically interested in information on
identifying the critical technology gaps and resources required to significantly
reduce emissions and improve efficiency of residential wood heaters. Gaps of
interest include but are not limited to the stove design, automation, catalyst
development, retrofit technologies for older wood heaters, sensor technology,
and stove performance testing methods.
This is solely a
request for information and not a Funding Opportunity Announcement (FOA). EERE
is not accepting applications.
Category 1: Residential Wood Heater Technology
Advancement
Technological Barriers
1. What are the critical technical hurdles
for improving performance of stoves for new installations (e.g. combustion
chamber design, combustion air management, controls, mixing, sensors, etc.)?
2.
What are the critical technical hurdles for improving performance of stoves
already installed in homes (e.g. combustion chamber design, combustion air
management, controls, mixing, sensors, etc.)?
3. What practical and new
techniques are used to significantly reduce transient emissions (startup,
shutdown, load changes)?
4. What practical and new techniques are used to
measure transient emissions that could be implemented in laboratory or field
testing?
5. How can new exhaust emission control technologies be developed and
practically deployed?
6. How could integrated hybrid systems, in which biomass
heaters are combined with other technologies such as heat pumps, solar, and high
efficiency gas and liquid-fired appliances, be a route to reduced emissions?
What are the technology barriers to this approach?
7. How could field
measurement methods be improved to ensure that biomass-appliances do not create
local air quality issues in long-term use?
8. What stove features commonly
encourage end-users to purchase new or replace a wood heater? Or, what stove
features are commonly attractive to the end-user?
9. What advantages or
disadvantages would continuous field performance data provide for advancing
stove designs?
Tools and Capabilities
1. How are trial-and-error test methods used to improved stove
performance and advance stove design (i.e. development by implementation of
incremental change and testing)?
2. Is access to performance testing facilities
a barrier to development?
3. What in-house test methods are relied upon to
validate and facilitate wood heater development?
4. How much could rapid
performance measurement methods shorten R&D test cycles?
5. What specific
test methods would be of interest to your enterprise?
6. How are modeling and
simulation tools being applied to improve wood heater designs?
7. How could
modeling and simulation tools be improved to meet your needs?
8. What are the
fundamental modeling gaps to enable broader use of modeling and simulation such
as Computational Fluid Dynamics (CFD) to improve wood heater design?
9. How are
current measurement methods meeting your needs for evaluating performance and
emissions from wood heaters? What could be done better?
10. What
performance/emissions measurements are most challenging to obtain? What makes
obtaining these measurements challenging?
11. What are three primary challenges
your enterprise faces for advancing stove designs?
Request for Information
Response Guidelines
Responses to this RFI must be submitted electronically to
FY21MultiTopic@ee.doe.gov no later than 5:00pm (ET) on September 21, 2020.
Responses must be provided as attachments to an email. It is recommended that
attachments with file sizes exceeding 25MB be compressed (i.e., zipped) to
ensure message delivery. Responses must be provided as a Microsoft Word (.docx)
attachment to the email, and no more than 6 pages in length, 12 point font, 1
inch margins. Only electronic responses will be accepted.
EERE will not respond to individual submissions or publish publicly a compendium of responses. A response to this RFI will not be viewed as a binding commitment to develop or pursue the project or ideas discussed.
Please identify your
answers by responding to a specific question or topic if applicable. Respondents
may answer as many or as few questions as they wish.
Respondents are requested
to provide the following information at the start of their response to this RFI:
• Company / institution name;
• Company / institution contact;
• Contact's
address, phone number, and e-mail address.
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