SETO National Lab Call-27

SETO National Lab Call FY2025-27 is the office's national-laboratory R&D solicitation, giving DOE labs a single channel to work across all six SETO research areas under the Solar Energy Technologies Office. The FY2025-27 round totals $217 million and sits inside the office's broader solar portfolio. The instrument is a cooperative agreement, and the prime applicants are US national laboratories such as NREL, Sandia, and Argonne rather than private companies or universities. The solicitation is triennial, with the current cycle built around a concept-paper stage and a full application path for the labs. The eligibility frame also centers on early-stage to mid-stage research, with TRL 1 through 6 work fitting the call. For most private-sector teams, the practical role of the program is indirect: companies can appear as subcontractors to the labs, but they cannot apply as primes. That makes the call a useful signal for where SETO expects lab-scale work on photovoltaics, concentrating solar-thermal power, systems integration, soft costs, manufacturing and competitiveness, and workforce development.

No upcoming rounds verified. Cadence: Triennial.