DOE Makes Vital Investment in Grid Expansion

WASHINGTON – Today the Department of Energy announced a significant investment of $3.46 billion for 58 projects across 44 states to strengthen electric grid resilience and reliability across America.  

Funded by the Bipartisan Infrastructure Law, the funds will go toward the Grid Resilience and Innovations Program (GRIP) to support grid modernization, expanded access to renewable energy, and improved storage and distribution technology. Funding will also go toward the Joint Targeted Interconnection Queue Transmission Study Process and Portfolio (JTIQ) in MISO and SPP, an innovative approach to cross-regional grid planning will help reduce unnecessary delays and redundancies that delay projects and increase costs. 

The following is a comment from John Moore, director of the Sustainable FERC Project at NRDC (Natural Resources Defense Council):  

“A cleaner and more reliable grid requires a vast transformation in how we get our electricity. Today’s announcement is a critical step in the Deparment’s efforts to expand the capacity of the nation’s transmission system, increase connectivity between regions, and add more clean energy.  As we learned this summer, a larger grid is a resilient grid, and the funding for planning and coordination from today's grants will go a long way toward accelerating these efforts.” 

NRDC (Natural Resources Defense Council) is an international nonprofit environmental organization with more than 3 million members and online activists. Established in 1970, NRDC uses science, policy, law, and people power to confront the climate crisis, protect public health, and safeguard nature. NRDC has offices in New York City, Washington, D.C., Los Angeles, San Francisco, Chicago, Bozeman, MT, Beijing and Delhi (an office of NRDC India Pvt. Ltd). Visit us at www.nrdc.org and follow us on Twitter @NRDC.