PERFORMANCE-BASED ENERGY RESOURCE FEEDBACK, OPTIMIZATION, AND RISK MANAGEMENT (PERFORM) | DE FOA 0002171

Opportunity Information: Apply for DE FOA 0002171

The Department of Energy's Advanced Research Projects Agency-Energy (ARPA-E) funding opportunity titled Performance-Based Energy Resource Feedback, Optimization, and Risk Management (PERFORM), Funding Opportunity Number DE-FOA-0002171, is a discretionary research and development program aimed at changing how risk is measured and managed on the electric power grid. ARPA-E, created under the America COMPETES Act and its reauthorization, exists to push high-potential energy technologies that are still too early for typical private investment, with the broader national goals of strengthening energy and economic security, reducing emissions, cutting reliance on foreign energy sources, and improving efficiency across the economy. Awards under this opportunity are issued as cooperative agreements, meaning ARPA-E expects to stay meaningfully engaged with the technical progress of funded projects, and the awards operate under federal assistance rules in 2 C.F.R. Part 200 (and DOE's related amendments in 2 C.F.R. Part 910).

PERFORM focuses on a specific and increasingly urgent problem: modern power systems have growing uncertainty and complexity due to changing generation mixes, weather-driven resources, distributed energy assets, and new operational constraints, and yet many planning and market practices still struggle to express "risk" in a clear, comparable way. The program's central objective is to develop innovative technologies and approaches that can quantify and manage risk for electric power systems, both at the level of individual assets and at the level of grid-wide operations and planning. In this context, "risk management" is not just reliability in a general sense, but an explicit, measurable way to understand the likelihood and consequences of not meeting electricity supply and grid support obligations under uncertainty.

At the asset level, ARPA-E is looking for methods that assess an individual grid asset's ability to deliver on its commitments for energy and ancillary services. Ancillary services are the supporting capabilities the grid needs beyond raw energy delivery, such as reserves, frequency response, voltage support, and other services that keep the system stable. PERFORM envisions an asset-level risk score or metric that communicates "physical delivery risk" in a standardized, easy-to-interpret way, similar in spirit to how a credit score summarizes an individual's creditworthiness. The idea is that an asset's offer to provide energy or grid services would be accompanied by a quantified, defensible indicator of delivery confidence, informed by real performance data, operating conditions, and uncertainty drivers.

At the system level, PERFORM aims to develop risk-driven grid management tools for operations and planning that treat uncertainty as a first-class input rather than an afterthought. ARPA-E describes a vision where grid management systems "endogenously capture uncertainty," meaning uncertainty is built into the decision-making engine itself, not tacked on as a separate sensitivity study. These systems would evaluate the grid's overall risk position and actively hedge that risk while serving electricity demand at lowest practical cost, with the explicit goal of meeting or exceeding a baseline system risk index. In plain terms, the program is pushing toward operational and planning paradigms that continuously measure system risk, compare it to a target threshold, and choose actions (dispatch, commitment, reserves, asset utilization, or other levers) that balance cost against quantified risk.

The anticipated outcome is described as transformative and disruptive: a risk-driven grid management approach that makes better use of all available assets, including emerging technologies, in order to reduce system costs and improve reliability. That emphasis matters because a risk-aware framework can, in principle, unlock more efficient participation from newer or more complex resources by making their performance characteristics and uncertainties explicit and comparable. It also suggests PERFORM is interested in technologies that improve feedback loops between real-world performance and operational decisions, so that predictions and risk scores become better over time as more data is collected and models are validated.

In terms of basic award details, the opportunity is run by ARPA-E within DOE under CFDA (now commonly referenced as Assistance Listing) 81.135. The funding instrument type is a cooperative agreement. Eligibility is listed as unrestricted (open to any type of entity), subject to any additional constraints that may appear in the full FOA text. ARPA-E anticipated making around 12 awards, with an award ceiling of $10,000,000 per award. The FOA was created on September 19, 2019, with an original closing date of October 28, 2019 (with the FOA indicating that specific timing details are in Section IV).

Operationally, applications for PERFORM had to be submitted through ARPA-E's eXCHANGE portal, and ARPA-E stated it would not review submissions sent by email, mail, fax, or hand delivery. Applicants were required to register in eXCHANGE and submit full applications and any replies to reviewer comments through that system, with additional instructions available in the ARPA-E eXCHANGE Applicant Guide. This reflects ARPA-E's typical process of structured electronic submission, compliance checks, and iterative reviewer feedback before final award decisions.

• The Department of Energy, Advanced Research Projects Agency Energy in the science and technology and other research and development sector is offering a public funding opportunity titled "PERFORMANCE-BASED ENERGY RESOURCE FEEDBACK, OPTIMIZATION, AND RISK MANAGEMENT (PERFORM)" and is now available to receive applicants.
• Interested and eligible applicants and submit their applications by referencing the CFDA number(s): 81.135.
• This funding opportunity was created on Sep 19, 2019.
• Applicants must submit their applications by Oct 28, 2019 See Section IV. of the FOA.. (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 $10,000,000.00 in funding.
• The number of recipients for this funding is limited to 12 candidate(s).
• 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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