The Biden administration announced nearly $3.5 billion in funding Wednesday to strengthen United States power grids in an effort to boost reliability and avoid capacity shortfalls or blackouts during extreme weather events.
The funding, created by the Bipartisan Infrastructure Law, is the largest-ever direct investment in U.S. critical grid infrastructure, White House officials said.
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It will fund 58 separate projects in 44 U.S. states, ultimately bringing online more than 35 gigawatts of renewable energy.
The money will also help bolster grid reliance, including building out interregional transmission that can help the region export available capacity to other parts of the country in the event of a shortage.
Other spending will fund wildfire resilience efforts in Western states particularly vulnerable to wildfires and help bring more renewable energy projects online.
Speaking to reporters to preview the investment on Wednesday, White House Infrastructure Implementation Coordinator Mitch Landrieu stressed the importance of investing in the U.S. power grid at a time when high-heat events and winter storms have put millions at risk for rolling blackouts or extended outages.
“Our outdated grid is especially vulnerable to the increasing impacts of the climate crisis,” Landrieu said. “Older equipment can overload during extreme heat and cold when power is needed most. And it’s more likely to fail when communities are washed out by historic floods and decimated by stronger storms.”
The funds are managed by DOE’s Grid Resilience and Innovation Partnerships, or GRIP program, which is meant to modernize the U.S. power grid and mitigate the effects of natural disasters and extreme weather events worsened by climate change, according to a description provided by the White House.
Its goals include adding more renewable energy sources onto the grids and increasing reliability by deploying “innovative” approaches to electricity transmission, storage, and distribution, in line with the administration’s clean energy and emissions reduction targets.
This includes adding more renewable projects favored by the administration, Energy Secretary Jennifer Granholm said Wednesday.
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“The grid, as it currently sits, is not is not equipped to handle all the new demand,” Granholm told reporters.
“We need it to be bigger, we need it to be stronger, we need it to be smarter” in order to bring all these projects online and meet the Biden administration’s goal of reaching 100% clean electricity by 2035, she said.
