The Biden administration just poured $2.2 billion into the grid

It’s no secret that the grid needs all the help it can get. The patchwork of lines that serve the United States is being taxed by rising energy demand — just as gigawatts of clean energy come online and extreme weather increasingly complicates things. 

But that help doesn’t come cheap; it’s really only the federal government that has the resources to provide it. The 2021 infrastructure law devoted $10.5 billion to a program to bolster the power system’s resilience, its largest ever investment in the grid.

And today, the Department of Energy shared the next projects that will receive a portion of that pot.

• The top line: The second round of Grid Resilience and Innovation Partnerships program’s grid innovation awards will send $2.2 billion to eight projects in 18 states. Those projects are aimed at protecting the grid from extreme weather, lowering overall costs, and — crucially — expanding the grid’s capacity to meet load growth, including via grid-enhancing technologies and techniques like reconductoring. 
• The market grounding: The GRIP Program has three funding mechanisms in total: smart grid, utility and industry grants, and grid innovation. In October, DOE invested $3.46 billion in 58 projects, spanning all three mechanisms. Today’s outlay, though, is focused on grid innovation technologies specifically. Announcements of the selected projects for the other two categories are coming later this year. 

While October’s round represented a larger chunk of the funding, each award was smaller on a per-project basis. The sheer size of these awards, reaching up to the hundreds of millions of dollars in some cases, reflects the huge scale of the needed transmission and grid infrastructure upgrades.

DOE said that the funding — which is generally awarded via a cost-sharing with recipients — is expected to result in $10 billion in total public and private investment, and will add nearly 13 GW of capacity to the grid. It aims to upgrade more than 1,000 miles of transmission, widely understood as crucial for accelerating the energy transition. 

The two projects deploying transmission infrastructure are Clean Path New York via the New York Power Authority, and the North Plains Connector via the Montana Department of Commerce. Both will deploy high voltage direct current (HVDC) cables; in DOE’s recent liftoff reports on GETs, the agency characterized HVDC technology as a high priority for scaling. 

The North Plains project represents the biggest award on the GRIP list for this round, at a whopping $700 million. (The recipient cost share is $2.9 billion.) The funding will be put toward a 3,000-megawatt HVDC transmission line aimed at linking both the Eastern and Western interconnections. It would be the first HVDC project in the country to connect three separate systems: WECC, MISO, and SPP. 

A number of projects will deploy other technologies designed to make the most of the existing grid, including dynamic line ratings and advanced conductoring. For instance, the CHARGE 2T public-private partnership in California will reconductor more than 100 miles of transmission lines with both technologies.

There are also a collection of projects aimed more at improving collaboration and partnerships to improve the energy system, such as the RELIEF project Power Up New England projects, which each span five states. 

Further awards will be announced later this year, DOE said.