Biden admin awards $2B in new grid resilience grants

In the wake of Hurricanes Helene and Milton, the Biden administration has awarded a total of nearly $2 billion in new grants to help harden, expand, and modernize U.S. power grids.

Friday’s awards, the third round from the Department of Energy’s Grid Resilience and Innovation Partnerships (GRIP) Program, ​“couldn’t come at a more critical time,” Energy Secretary Jennifer Granholm said in a media briefing. ​“Energy demand, as we know, is rising nationwide, and it is straining our outdated grid infrastructure. And as climate change worsens we’re seeing more frequent and devastating storms like Helene and Milton.”

Among Friday’s awards are the up-to-$612 million in grid grants President Joe Biden unveiled earlier this week during a visit to storm-ravaged Florida. That funding will flow to utilities in Florida, Georgia, and North Carolina, as well as to the federal Tennessee Valley Authority.

The 38 projects that received grants on Friday are in 42 states and Washington D.C., and range in scale from $7.5 million to harden a remote grid in Alaska to $160 million for utility Georgia Power to deploy advanced power cables and ​“dynamic line rating” technologies to expand the capacity of its transmission network.

DOE forecasts that the projects funded on Friday will enable over 7.5 gigawatts of grid capacity, support nearly 6,000 good-paying jobs, and catalyze a total of $4.2 billion in public and private-sector investment.

Many of the new awards from GRIP, created by the 2021 Bipartisan Infrastructure Law, are focused on both building new power lines and protecting existing grid infrastructure from flooding, wildfires, and extreme heat.

“The climate crisis is already devastating communities and straining our existing grid infrastructure at the precise moment when we need that infrastructure to be larger, stronger, and more reliable,” John Podesta, senior advisor to the president for clean energy innovation and implementation, said during the briefing.

Other awards will help fund enhanced technologies, such as software that can speed interconnection of wind and solar farms now languishing in grid interconnection queues, or systems that can integrate rooftop solar panels and electric vehicle charging stations into virtual power plants.

The DOE’s first round of GRIP awards came in October 2023, when it chose 58 projects across 44 states to receive a collective $3.5 billion in grants. Among those recipients was the country’s largest multi-microgrid project in Louisiana as well as interregional transmission grid expansion projects in the Midwest expected to enable the interconnection of about 35 gigawatts of wind and solar power.

In August, DOE issued another $2.2 billion in grants, including $700 million to build high-voltage direct current (HVDC) interconnections across the wind-rich Montana and North Dakota plains and $389 million to expand onshore transmission infrastructure — and build the country’s largest battery — to enable offshore wind farms along the Maine coast.

These grants are substantial, Granholm said — but not sufficient to meet the country’s grid needs. DOE has received $50 billion in applications for the GRIP program to date, she noted, but the program has already given out about $7.7 billion of its total $10.5 billion in appropriations.

“Upgrading our grid is an ongoing project, and we need sustained investment if we’re going to equip our communities with the infrastructure they need to thrive for the next five or 10 or 20 years,” she said.