The U.S. Department of Energy's (DOE) Advanced Materials and Manufacturing Technologies Office (AMMTO) today announced renewed funding for the Clean Energy Smart Manufacturing Innovation Institute (CESMII), DOE’s institute expressly dedicated to smart manufacturing (SM) innovation. CESMII will receive an initial $6 million with potential additional funding across four subsequent fiscal years. The purpose of this renewed funding is to further advance the widespread adoption of SM, a technology that remains crucial for the domestic competitiveness of clean energy manufacturing and to accelerate America’s transition to a net-zero carbon economy.
Since its creation in 2016, CESMII, through its program home at the University of California Los Angeles (UCLA), has built a robust public-private partnership with 181 current member organizations to date across industry and academia. As DOE’s third established institute, CESMII has developed foundational SM solutions, technologies, practices, and educational content to develop the smart manufacturing workforce of the future.
“Over the past seven years, CESMII has scaled a diverse ecosystem of innovation and expertise,” said AMMTO Director Dr. Christopher Saldaña. “The institute has been highly successful in developing and deploying SM solutions across a wide swath of industry sectors and supply chains that are critical to a clean, decarbonized economy. The Institute's sustained focus on small and medium-sized manufacturers continues to drive change from the ground up.”
CESMII has established a network of SM regional Innovation Centers across the nation to support and promote SM across the U.S. In addition, the institute’s education and workforce development initiatives have produced over 50 SM courses to train over 6,000 members of the manufacturing workforce annually. With this renewed funding, CESMII will continue its work in SM research development and demonstration, workforce training and development, and the scale and deployment of SM across industry.
This federal funding builds upon initial federal funding of $70 million, in addition to $72.8 million in cost share from its member partners, for a total of $142.8 million in initial funding.