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 “Energy demand, as we know, is rising nationwide, and it is straining our outdated grid infrastructure.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.