Energy Department Awards $2.2B to Strengthen the Electrical Grid and Add Clean Power

By  JENNIFER McDERMOTT

The Department of Energy on Tuesday announced $2.2 billion in funding for eight projects across 18 states to strengthen the electrical grid against increasing extreme weather, advance the transition to cleaner electricity and meet a growing demand for power.

The money will help build more than 600 miles of new transmission lines and upgrade about 400 miles of existing lines so that they can carry more current.

Energy Secretary Jennifer Granholm said the funding is important because extreme weather events fueled by climate change are increasing, damaging towers and bringing down wires, causing power outages.

Hurricane Beryl made landfall in Texas on July 8 and knocked out power to nearly 3 million people, for example. Officials have said at least a dozen Houston area residents died from complications related to the heat and losing power.

The investments will provide more reliable, affordable electricity for 56 million homes and businesses, according to the DOE. Granholm said the funds are the single largest direct investment ever in the nation’s grid.

“They’ll help us to meet the needs of electrified homes and businesses and new manufacturing facilities and all of these growing data centers that are placing demands on the grid,” Granholm said in a press call to announce the funding.

It’s the second round of awards through a $10.5 billion DOE program called Grid Resilience and Innovation Partnerships. It was funded through the Bipartisan Infrastructure Law of 2021. More projects will be announced this fall.

Among the ones in this round, more than 100 miles of transmission line in California will be upgraded so that new renewable energy can be added quickly and as a response to a growing demand for electricity. A project in New England will upgrade onshore connection points for electricity generated by wind turbines offshore, allowing 4,800 megawatts of wind energy to be added, enough to power about 2 million homes.

The Montana Department of Commerce will get $700 million. Most of that will go toward building a 415-mile, high-voltage, direct current transmission line across Montana and North Dakota. The North Plains Connector will increase the ability to move electricity from east to west and vice versa, and help protect against extreme weather and power disruptions.

The Virginia Department of Energy will get $85 million to employ clean electricity and clean backup power at two data centers, one instate and one in South Carolina. The DOE chose this project because the data centers will be responsive to the grid in a new way: They could provide needed electricity to the local grid on a hot day, from batteries, or reduce their energy use in times of high demand. This could serve as a model for other data centers to reduce their impact on a local area, since they place such high demand on the grid, according to the department.

“These investments are certainly a step in the right direction and they are the right types of investments,” said Max Luke, director of business development and regulatory affairs at VEIR, an early-stage Massachusetts company developing transmission lines capable of carrying five times the power of conventional ones. “If you look at the scale of the challenge and the quantity of grid capacity needed for deep decarbonization and net zero, it’s a drop in the bucket.”

According to Princeton University’s “Net-Zero America” research, the United States will need to expand electricity transmission by roughly 60% by 2030 and may need to triple it by 2050.

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