Advanced grid tech gets a $1.9B DOE boost

For years now, grid experts have been trying to get utilities to deploy advanced transmission technologies that can squeeze more capacity out of overstressed U.S. power grids. On Thursday, the Trump administration put a $1.9 billion down payment on 31 projects that will help greatly scale up these underutilized solutions.

The funding comes from the Department of Energy’s $1.9 billion SPARK grant program, created last year to repurpose money obligated by Congress in the 2021 bipartisan infrastructure law. SPARK represents a rare example of alignment between the Trump and Biden administrations on energy policy, even as Trump appointees have blocked billions of dollars for other Biden-era grants.

But Republicans and Democrats alike want to reform energy permitting and expand and strengthen the nation’s transmission grid. In a Thursday statement, Energy Secretary Chris Wright said the grants will ​“get more out of the infrastructure we already have, move more electricity across the grid, and help deliver affordable, reliable, and secure power that will fuel American prosperity for decades to come.”

Awardees range from projects that combine technology upgrades with multibillion-dollar grid expansions to ones involving smaller-scale technology deployments. Participating utilities have pledged a collective $3.35 billion in matching funds, bringing total investment to $5.25 billion.

Recipients include major power providers across 26 states such as American Electric Power, CenterPoint Energy, Duke Energy, Eversource Energy, Rocky Mountain Power, and PPL Electric Utilities. Awards were also issued to four public power utilities and rural electric cooperatives in Arizona, New Mexico, and North Carolina.

Many of the projects will use the funds to deploy advanced conductors — newer power cables that are lighter, stronger, and capable of carrying more power than the traditional aluminum-and-steel cables used across most of the grid. Stringing these cables along existing transmission corridors can increase capacity for moving electricity long distances without having to build new towers or tear down and replace old ones.

Another technology many grant recipients will deploy is dynamic line rating — systems that can assess the true capacity of power lines from hour to hour, enabling utilities to push more power through them. This can include devices attached to power lines, sensors on transmission towers that monitor lines via optics and electromagnetics, and software-only approaches.

Taken as a whole, the DOE grants will greatly boost the use of technologies that have already proved their capability in pilot projects, some of which stretch back more than a decade.

“The experience that will be developed through these grants will be phenomenal,” said Julia Selker, executive director of the trade group Working for Advanced Transmission Technologies Coalition. ​“Not only is each project improving reliability, saving money, and enabling economic development — each will also catalyze innovation across the utility sector.”

Studies from the DOE, utilities, grid research organizations, and clean energy think tanks have found that advanced transmission technologies can deliver benefits far greater than the cost of deploying them. In many cases, given the time and expense of building new grid infrastructure, these technologies are the only near-term solution to grid congestion or the lack of capacity to move power across regions.

Still, adoption has been slow. That’s partly because utilities are leery of new technologies and partly because they’re not incentivized to choose alternatives to making grid investments, on which they earn regulated profits.

At the same time, utilities are under pressure to control rising costs of upgrading and expanding their grids, which are driving up already high customer rates. That’s why federal funding is so helpful, Selker said: ​“It’s a great deal for utility ratepayers to have the taxpayer split the cost.”

Federal grants also help put to rest arguments over how the cost of new projects should be shared across the multiple utilities and regions that benefit from them, she noted. That’s an important consideration for the biggest projects on the DOE’s grant list: a $1.2 billion project headed by the Colorado Energy Office and an $832 million project by the Oklahoma Office of Management and Enterprise Services. The DOE has awarded a $250 million grant to each project, which are both meant to expand capacity to share power between the Eastern and Western U.S. grids.