The U.S. Department of Energy (DOE) Water Power Technologies Office (WPTO) within the Office of Energy Efficiency and Renewable Energy (EERE) announced the opening of the Fish Protection Prize, a prize focused on developing more reliable and sustainable water structures while protecting fish from traveling into unknown, dangerous waters, diversions, and intakes. The goal of the Prize is to improve fish protection, or exclusion, technologies to decrease the number of fish susceptible to river and canal diversions, unscreened diversion pipes, or intakes at hydropower dams.

Fish exclusion is a way of preventing fish from going into a water diversion or intake. Without a fish exclusion device or method, fish can be trapped, or entrained, which means that they are removed from their natural environment. This can result in the loss of native fish and the reduction of operating capabilities of the involved energy infrastructure, like hydroelectric dams. Fish entrainment can have population-level impacts, threatening biodiversity and impeding fish recovery efforts for threatened and endangered species.

Building off of a successful scoping prize administered by the Bureau of Reclamation in 2019, the Fish Protection Prize is designed to improve fish exclusion technology by decreasing the number of entrained fish from river and canal diversions, unscreened diversion pipes, or intakes at hydropower dams. Based on the American-Made Challenges Prize Model, the three-stage competition will be run jointly by DOE and Reclamation, with three winners ultimately awarded up to $700,000 of combined cash prizes and voucher support from the National Laboratories and Reclamation. The competition is open to radically new ideas that need technical support to develop and improve existing technologies that would benefit from a testing campaign to validate their use.

The American-Made Challenges incentivize the nation's entrepreneurs to reassert American leadership in the energy marketplace. These new challenges seek to lower the barriers U.S.-based innovators face in reaching manufacturing scale by accelerating the cycles of learning from years to weeks, while helping to create partnerships that connect entrepreneurs to the private sector and the network of DOE's National Laboratories across the nation.

Further information about the structure of the competition is organized as follows: