The U.S. Department of Energy selected 38 projects for nearly $2 billion in funding from its Grid Resilience and Innovation Program, DOE said Friday.
“With these projects, we're investing in resilience, which means we're supporting communities before, during and after wildfires and storms and heat waves and other extreme weather across the country by hardening the grid by, for example, undergrounding power lines or adding technology that reroutes power during storms,” DOE Secretary Jennifer Granholm said Thursday during a press briefing.
The projects will boost transmission capacity by more than 7.5 GW, speed up interconnection for clean energy and spark over $4.2 billion in public and private investment, DOE said in a press release.
Under the Biden administration, DOE has sparked $36.9 billion in public-private spending on grid projects, according to Granholm.
In its initial funding rounds, including yesterday’s announcement, the $10.5 billion GRIP project has committed to $7.6 billion in funding while receiving applications for projects totaling about $50 billion, Granholm said. DOE plans to launch a third funding round next year.
Selected projects include:
- $160 million for Georgia Power to install grid-enhancing technologies, including dynamic line rating technology and reconductoring.
- $100 million for Exelon’s Renewable-Aware project that will deploy a distributed energy resources management system and Unbalanced Load Flow technology to optimize distributed energy resources across its service territory, with an initial focus on disadvantaged communities.
- $117 million for Hoosier Energy Rural Electric Cooperative and Southern Illinois Power Cooperative to build 69-kV or 138-kV transmission feeds to loop transmission to substations in seven counties in Illinois and Indiana that face increasing outages from extreme weather events and tornadoes.
- $50 million for GridUnity, which will use cloud computing and other advanced processes to speed up the grid interconnection process around the United States. DOE expects the project will cut interconnection times by more than a year on average.
In October 2023, DOE announced $3.5 billion in GRIP funding for 58 projects in 44 states. In August, the department announced an additional $2.2 billion for eight more selections.
