Sneak Preview: DOE Seeks Input on New Electric Grid Program

(The following was excerpted from a recent Thompson Grants Compliance Expert article.) The Department of Energy (DOE) recently issued a request for information (RFI) seeking stakeholder input to help refine the funding opportunity announcement (FOA) for the agency’s new $10.5 billion Grid Resilience and Innovation Partnership (GRIP) program, which aims to enhance the resilience and reliability of the nation’s electric grid.

Funded under the Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act (Pub. L. 117-58), the GRIP program is designed to boost the deployment of transformative projects to ensure the reliability of the U.S. power sector’s infrastructure. The program is part of the Biden administration’s goal to achieve 100% clean electricity by 2035. It will be administered by DOE’s new Grid Deployment Office.

The GRIP program comprises three grant types:

• Grid Resilience Grants ($2.5 billion) — These grants support activities to modernize the electric grid that reduce impacts due to extreme weather and natural disasters. The program will fund comprehensive transformational transmission and distribution technology solutions that will mitigate multiple hazards across a region or within a community, including wildfires, floods, hurricanes, extreme heat, extreme cold, storms and any other event that can cause a disruption to the power system. The program provides grants to electricity grid operators, storage operators and generators; transmission owners or operators; distribution providers; and fuel suppliers.
• Smart Grid Grants ($3 billion) — This funding will increase the flexibility, efficiency and reliability of the electric power system, with particular focus on increasing capacity of the transmission system, preventing faults that may lead to wildfires or other system disturbances, integrating renewable energy at the transmission and distribution levels, and facilitating the integration of increasing electrified vehicles, buildings and other grid-edge devices. Smart grid technologies funded and deployed at scale under this program will demonstrate a pathway to wider market adoption. This grant program has broad eligibility, open to domestic entities including institutions of higher education; for-profit entities; nonprofit entities; and state and local governmental entities and tribal nations.
• Grid Innovation Program ($5 billion) — These grants provide financial assistance to one or multiple states, tribes, local governments and public utility commissions to collaborate with electric sector owners and operators to deploy projects that use innovative approaches to transmission, storage and distribution infrastructure to enhance grid resilience and reliability. Broad project applications are of interest including interregional transmission projects, investments that accelerate interconnection of clean energy generation, utilization of distribution grid assets to provide backup power and reduce transmission requirements, and more. Innovative approaches can range from the use of advanced technologies to innovative partnerships to the deployment of projects identified by innovative planning processes to many others.

(The full version of this story has now been made available to all for a limited time here.)
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