The Biden administration announced nearly $2 billion in funding to expand and protect the United States’s electrical grid, which is facing growing threats of blackouts and failure due to extreme weather and rising demand.
The funding, enacted through the 2021 Bipartisan Infrastructure Law, is set to go toward 38 projects across 42 states intended to strengthen the grid and increase its capacity as electrification, manufacturing, and data centers have caused energy demand to soar.
Six of the projects selected are set to use the funding for boosting and restoring grid infrastructure in the southeastern regions of the country devastated by hurricanes Milton and Helene within the last month.
Managed by the Department of Energy’s Grid Resilience and Innovation Partnerships, also known as the GRIP program, the investments are expected to upgrade more than 950 miles of integral transmission lines nationwide. This will primarily be done through the construction of over 300 new miles of transmission as well as reconductoring or adding grid-enhancing technologies to over 650 miles of transmission lines to increase grid capacity.
One project selected is seeking to increase capacity across eight states managed by the Tennessee Valley Authority and its partners. TVA plans to add more than 2,400 megawatts of capacity in Alabama, Georgia, Kentucky, Missouri, North Carolina, Tennessee, and Virginia. It is expected to help reduce local outage durations by 94% while creating the first interconnection tie between TVA and the Southwest Power Pool.
The dozens of projects are expected to increase capacity by over 7.5 gigawatts, support almost 6,000 new jobs, and speed up interconnection for renewable energy, administration officials said.
Many of the projects are meant to guard against extreme weather by protecting grid infrastructure against the risk of wildfires, hurricanes, tornadoes, and more through undergrounding power lines or lifting substations above the floodplain.
For example, the Hoosier Energy Rural Electric Cooperative and Southern Illinois Power Cooperative plan to build new transmission feeds to connect 10 substations across seven counties in Illinois and Indiana. This is expected to reduce outages already seen as a result of tornadoes and other events.
Similarly, the Arizona Public Service Company is planning to use the funds to upgrade its system devices, monitoring systems, and wood utility poles and implement microgrids in certain regions. The upgrades are expected to prevent almost a million customer interruptions while saving $113 million in emergency repair costs caused by wildfires, according to the administration.
Administration officials said the recent funding now brings the Department of Energy’s total investments in public and private funding for the grid to $36.9 billion.
“With this funding, we’re building or upgrading more than 4,377 miles of transmission lines,” Energy Secretary Jennifer Granholm told reporters Thursday, previewing the spending. “We’re enabling those lines and additional lines to add more than 32 Hoover Dams worth of renewable energy to the grid. These projects are creating nearly 30,000 good paying jobs overall, and over 90 million homes and businesses stand to benefit from more resilient, reliable power.”
Granholm said the demand for additional grid investment is currently outpacing available funding as concerns grow over the grid’s stability and reliability.
Former top regulators previously told the Washington Examiner that, in its current state, the grid is unprepared to handle rapidly growing demand from artificial intelligence data centers, other large facilities, and electrification, particularly as energy sources such as coal phase out faster than renewables are producing. Many are worried that this imbalance will lead to grid failure or unexpected blackouts.
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Granholm said there is a “tremendous need” for nationwide investment in the grid to ensure a stable grid over the next few decades.
“Today’s announcement is another important step in that direction,” the secretary said.