Galvanizing Advances in Market-Aligned Fusion for an Overabundance of Watts (GAMOW).

Agency Overview:
The Advanced Research Projects Agency – Energy (ARPA-E), an organization within the Department of Energy (DOE), is chartered by Congress in the America COMPETES Act of 2007 (P.L.

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110-69), as amended by the America COMPETES Reauthorization Act of 2010 (P.L.

111-358) to:
“(A) to enhance the economic and energy security of the United States through the development of energy technologies that result in— (i) reductions of imports of energy from foreign sources; (ii) reductions of energy-related emissions, including greenhouse gases; and (iii) improvement in the energy efficiency of all economic sectors; and (B) to ensure that the United States maintains a technological lead in developing and deploying advanced energy technologies.” ARPA-E issues this Funding Opportunity Announcement (FOA) under the programmatic authorizing statute codified at 42 U.S.C.

§ 1653 8.

The FOA and any awards made under this FOA are subject to 2 C.F.R.

Part 200 as amended by 2 C.F.R.

Part 91 0.

ARPA-E funds research on and the development of high-potential, high-impact energy technologies that are too early for private-sector investment.

The agency focuses on technologies that can be meaningfully advanced with a modest investment over a defined period of time in order to catalyze the translation from scientific discovery to early-stage technology.

For the latest news and information about ARPA-E, its programs and the research projects currently supported, see:
http://arpa-e.energy.gov/.

Program Overview and Objectives:
The ARPA-E / SC-FES joint program, GAMOW, supports innovative research and development (R&D) in a range of enabling technologies (beyond confinement plasma physics), defined further below and in Section I.D, required for commercially attractive fusion energy.

Key attributes for any commercially attractive energy include economics, safety,reliability/availability/maintainability/inspectability (RAMI), and environmental sustainability.

This program prioritizes R&D that will help establish both the technical and commercial viability of a range of fusion enabling technologies (depicted generically in Fig.

1), particularly in (i) all the required technologies and subsystems between the fusion plasma and the balance of plant, and (ii) cost-effective, high-efficiency, high-duty-cycle driver technologies.

Applicants should leverage and build on foundational research in fusion materials, fusion nuclear science (FNS), plasma-materials interactions (PMI), and other enabling technologies, and focus on potentially transformative fusion-energy R&D that is informed by market-aware techno-economic analysis (TEA).

The GAMOW program will support innovative R&D in a range of fusion enabling technologies toward meeting one or more of the following high-level program objectives:
• Substantial progress toward demonstrating technical feasibility and/or increases in performance in the technical categories of interest (Section I.D) compared to present state-of-the-art.

• Enabling significant device simplification or elimination of entire subsystems, in one or more commercially motivated fusion energy concepts.

• Reduction in fusion energy system cost (capital and/or operations/maintenance) and/or development time/cost, including those of critical materials and component testing/qualification facilities.

• Improvements in the RAMI, safety, and/or environmental sustainability of fusion energy systems.

Included within each specific technical category of interest are performance targets (metrics), as described in Section I.D, that are a distillation of the goals of the program.

This FOA seeks Applications that will work toward demonstrating significant technological improvements toward or exceeding one or more of the metrics mentioned, while articulating a plausible path toward technical feasibility with respect to a fully integrated fusion energy system.

To obtain a copy of the Funding Opportunity Announcement (FOA), please go the ARPA-E website at https://arpa-e-foa.energy.gov.