Reimagining Energy for the DoD AFWERX Challenge

The Department of Defense (DoD) consumes large amounts of operational and facility energy to provide a combat-credible force. In fact, the DoD is one of the largest single consumers of energy globally, and the Air Force is the largest user of fuel energy in the US Government. The way we generate, transmit, store, and use this enormous amount of energy today is both a paramount combat enabler and a potentially crippling vulnerability.

We are soliciting proposals for six individual challenge topics, each with its own evaluation team.

The outcomes that we are hoping to achieve from this challenge include:
-Energy availability when and where needed for mission effectiveness and quality of life
-More effective warfighting and humanitarian missions less reliant on fossil fuels
-Increased ability to rapidly respond to humanitarian crises
-Leveraging all energy sources for military use such as wind, water, nuclear, hydrogen, thermal, etc.
-Creation of new industries and capabilities inspired by the U.S. DoD
-Leveraging energy from space

We also have two aspiration targets from this challenge:
--Elimination of all fossil fuel dependency
--Carbon negative DoD

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AFWERX is the Air Force's team of innovators who encourage and facilitate connections across industry, academia, and military to create transformative opportunities and foster a culture of innovation. Our mission is to solve problems and enhance the effectiveness of the service by enabling thoughtful, deliberate, ground-up innovation.

We do this with an approach that combines startup urgency with the largest pool of motivated talent in the world to uncover opportunities to improve Air Force capabilities, connect and engage the right stakeholders, and facilitate outcomes.

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