Weeks after back-to-back hurricanes hammered parts of the Southeastern United States, leaving millions temporarily without power, the Department of Energy announced the latest round of investments to improve the resilience of the country’s electricity grid.
The department will provide almost $2 billion for 32 projects to protect the power grid from extreme weather events and bolster electricity capacity for manufacturing, data centers and electric transportation.
“The funding couldn’t come at a more critical time because energy demand is rising nationwide and it is straining our outdated grid and infrastructure,” Energy Secretary Jennifer Granholm said Thursday during a call previewing the announcement. “And as climate change worsens, we’re seeing more frequent and devastating storms like Helene and Milton.”
The money will go toward upgrading more than 950 miles of electricity transmission lines, including 300 miles of new transmission cables and 650 miles of upgraded lines to double their capacity. The projects include putting power lines underground to protect them before, during and after wildfires, storms, heat waves and other extreme weather events. Some power lines will also be upgraded with technology to re-route electricity during storms. Power substations in some areas will also be lifted above the floodplain so they don’t flood during extreme high tides.
The investments will span 42 states and the District of Columbia and include six new projects President Biden announced last weekend during his visit to Florida to improve the resilience of utilities impacted by Hurricanes Helene and Milton in the Southeast.
All of the projects are funded through the Bipartisan Infrastructure Law and its Grid Resilience and Innovation Partnerships program, which is investing $10.5 billion to make the nation’s power grid more resilient to climate change.
Already this year, the United States has experienced 20 storms that caused at least $1 billion in damage. Hurricanes Helene and Milton alone are each estimated to have caused $50 billion in devastation, making them some of the most costly storms in U.S. history.
The United States currently has 450,000 miles of transmission lines and 6,000 power plants, much of which was built decades ago and wasn’t constructed to withstand the effects of a changing climate.
Since 2023, the DOE has already awarded $7.6 billion to fund 104 projects to improve grid resilience and increase capacity.
Entergy Texas Inc., the Arizona Public Service Company and the Randolph Electric Membership Corporation in North Carolina are among the utilities receiving the latest round of DOE funds to reduce power outages.
The Black Hills Electric Cooperative in South Dakota will receive money for a wildfire alert system to mitigate the effects of high winds and extreme temperatures and decrease the risk of power lines sparking wildfires. The Kotzebue Electric Assn. in Alaska will receive funds to protect its power plant from blizzards.
Granholm expects the investments to create almost 6,000 new jobs, 80% of which will use unionized labor. Still, she said, more investment is needed because “demand for grid investment continues to outpace the funding that we have available.”
Applications for the DOE’s GRIP program were 6-1/2 times higher than the money DOE can grant.
“In order to effectively tackle the climate crisis and stay on course to reach 100% clean electricity by 2035, we need to double our current transmission capacity in that time frame,” Senior Adviser to the President John Podesta said during the briefing.
Podesta praised the DOE’s awards for expanding and upgrading transmission capacity but said the country as a whole needs a better system of planning transmission lines to increase their reliability and lower costs and to “cut through the red tape” to get it done.