Notice of Intent to issue Funding Opportunity Announcement DE-FOA-0002632 “Community Geothermal Heating & Cooling Technical Assistance & Deployment” | DE FOA 0002661

Opportunity Information: Apply for DE FOA 0002661

This Notice of Intent signals that the U.S. Department of Energy (DOE), through the Office of Energy Efficiency and Renewable Energy (EERE) and its Geothermal Technologies Office (GTO), planned to release a formal Funding Opportunity Announcement (FOA) focused on helping communities design and deploy geothermal district heating and cooling systems. In practical terms, the upcoming FOA was framed around community-scale projects in clearly defined geographic areas, with an emphasis on moving geothermal heating and cooling from concept to real-world deployment while also building the knowledge base and local capacity needed for broader replication across the country. Because this is only a Notice of Intent, DOE stressed that details could change once the actual FOA is issued, and the agency would not answer questions until the FOA is formally released.

The core purpose of the opportunity is to accelerate the rollout of new or retrofitted geothermal, or geothermal-hybrid, district heating and cooling systems serving districts, neighborhoods, and entire communities. District systems are centralized or networked heating and cooling approaches that can connect multiple buildings to shared thermal infrastructure. By focusing on geothermal (and hybrid designs that may combine geothermal with other technologies), the program is aiming at long-lived, high-efficiency heating and cooling solutions that can reduce building emissions and improve energy resilience at the community level rather than just at the individual-building level.

A major stated objective is to address environmental justice-related conditions and challenges, specifically pointing to cumulative environmental pollution and other hazards that often fall disproportionately on underserved and disadvantaged communities. The notice highlights community vulnerability to climate impacts as part of the rationale, suggesting that proposed projects and technical assistance are expected to consider not only engineering performance, but also who benefits, how burdens are reduced, and how projects can be structured to meaningfully serve communities that have historically been left out of clean energy investment.

The opportunity also places strong emphasis on workforce and education outcomes. Beyond infrastructure, it is designed to help communities establish career and technical education pathways and support workforce transition initiatives so local workers can participate in designing, installing, inspecting, operating, and maintaining geothermal heating and cooling systems. This reflects an intent to pair deployment with capacity-building so that communities do not remain dependent on outside expertise for long-term operations, and so that clean energy jobs created by geothermal district systems are accessible to the people living in the areas where the projects are built.

Another central deliverable area is knowledge sharing and replication. The notice calls for developing case studies with technical and economic data to show how projects can be reproduced elsewhere in the United States. It also calls for publishing data and information about geothermal district heating and cooling deployment to demonstrate success across different environments and geographies. In other words, DOE is signaling that awardees would likely be expected to document performance, costs, design choices, implementation hurdles, and lessons learned in a way that helps other communities reduce uncertainty and move faster on similar projects.

From an administrative standpoint, the listing describes the funding as discretionary and indicates the anticipated award instrument as a cooperative agreement, which typically means substantial DOE involvement during the project (for example, active technical oversight, milestones, and collaboration rather than a hands-off grant). The activity category is energy, and the CFDA (assistance listing) number provided is 81.087. Eligibility is listed as unrestricted, meaning a wide range of entity types could potentially apply, subject to any clarifications that would appear in the final FOA.

The notice is associated with DOE’s Golden Field Office as the issuing agency office, with a creation date of May 3, 2022, and an original closing date shown as August 30, 2022, though as an NOI those dates can be more indicative of the anticipated FOA timeline than a firm application deadline. The listing also shows an award ceiling of 2 (as written in the source data) and expected awards of 0, which often reflects placeholder or incomplete fields commonly seen in pre-solicitation notices rather than final funding parameters. The key takeaway is that this was advance notice of an impending competitive FOA aimed at community geothermal district heating and cooling deployment, environmental justice-aligned solutions, workforce development, and publication of replicable project data once the formal announcement was released.

• The Department of Energy, Golden Field Office in the energy sector is offering a public funding opportunity titled "Notice of Intent to issue Funding Opportunity Announcement DE-FOA-0002632 “Community Geothermal Heating & Cooling Technical Assistance & Deployment”" and is now available to receive applicants.
• Interested and eligible applicants and submit their applications by referencing the CFDA number(s): 81.087.
• This funding opportunity was created on May 03, 2022.
• Applicants must submit their applications by Aug 30, 2022. (Agency may still review applications by suitable applicants for the remaining/unused allocated funding in 2026.)
• Each selected applicant is eligible to receive up to $2.00 in funding.
• Eligible applicants include: Unrestricted (i.e., open to any type of entity above), subject to any clarification in text field entitled Additional Information on Eligibility.

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