The United States Department of Energy (DOE) has selected 38 projects spanning 42 states and the District of Columbia for a potential award of $2 billion under the Grid Resilience and Innovation Partnerships (GRIP) program.
Funded by the 2021 Bipartisan Infrastructure Law, GRIP backs projects that increase transmission capacity, integrate renewable energy into the grid, develop innovations to improve grid resilience and reliability, and develop solutions to climate-proof the transmission system. The program aims to enable 55 gigawatts (GW) of grid capacity, enough to power more than 40 million homes.
The DOE has now announced a total of $7.6 billion under the $10.5 billion GRIP. The program was rolled out October 2023 when the DOE announced the first selections with $3.5 billion in funding, followed by a $2.2 billion cohort August 2024. Selected projects, which still need to negotiate terms with the DOE before locking in their allotments, now number over 100.
“The selected projects announced today through the Grid Resilience and Innovation Partnerships program will deploy new, innovative transmission and distribution infrastructure and technology upgrades to enable over 7.5 gigawatts of grid capacity, speed up interconnection for new clean energy projects, support nearly 6,000 good-paying jobs, and catalyze over $4.2 billion in total public and private investment to bring reliable, affordable, clean energy to Americans”, the DOE said in a statement.
The latest cohort will also “upgrade more than 950 miles of transmission by constructing more than 300 miles of new transmission lines and reconductoring or adding grid-enhancing technologies to more than 650 miles of transmission lines to increase the capacity of existing lines”, the DOE added. The selections unveiled last year and August this year will upgrade 1,650 miles of transmission.
The latest selections include six Florida utilities impacted by hurricanes Helene and Milton.
“The devastating and deadly Hurricanes Helene and Milton have put on stark display how extreme weather events continue to stress the nation’s aging electric systems – but across the country, the Biden-Harris Administration is using every tool in the toolbox to make sure America’s power grid is hardened in the face of this challenge”, Energy Secretary Jennifer M. Granholm said.
Unconnected Capacity
Last April the DOE released what it said is the country’s first-ever roadmap for fast-tracking the connection of renewables to the grid, in an effort to help achieve the goal of migrating the U.S. to 100 percent clean electricity by 2035.
The Transmission Interconnection Roadmap sets targets by 2030 concerning project approval time, costs and completion rates. It presents measures for “increasing data access, transparency, and security for interconnection; improving interconnection process and timeline; promoting economic efficiency in interconnection; and maintaining a reliable, resilient, and secure grid”, the DOE said in a statement then.
The roadmap aims to reduce the average time it takes to reach an interconnection agreement to less than 12 months — from 33 months in 2022 — using the date of the interconnection request as the reference point.
For interconnection costs, the roadmap targets to cut the cost deviation of an interconnection project to less than $150 per kilowatt (kW), from $551 per kW in 2020–21.
“Cost variance is a proxy for cost certainty”, the DOE explained in the roadmap text. “More cost certainty should, in principle, encourage higher project completion rates and shorter interconnection times”.
By standardizing deviation, the DOE hopes to lower the “cost variance for average customers rather than for outlying projects”, said the official text.
The target completion rate for interconnection projects is set at 70 percent, from 45 percent in 2016. The target only covers projects that entered the facility study phase.
According to a report published earlier in April by the government-run Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory (LBL), nearly 12,000 power projects representing 1,570 GWs of generation capacity were seeking interconnection to the grid. Solar, wind and storage projects accounted for 95 percent of the queue capacity.
“Only ~19 percent of projects (14 percent of capacity) requesting interconnection from 2000-2018 reached commercial operations by the end of 2023”, said the LBL report funded by the DOE. “Completion rates are even lower for solar (14 percent) and battery (11 percent) projects.
“The average time projects spent in queues before being built has increased markedly. The typical project built in 2023 took nearly 5 years from the interconnection request to commercial operations, compared to 3 years in 2015”.
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