Last week the US Department of Energy (DOE) began soliciting applications from states for the Preventing Outages and Enhancing the Resilience of the Electric Grid program, newly created under the Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act. This program’s goal is to demonstrate measurable improvements in energy resilience in the United States and mitigate climate related risk, and invest in modernized grid infrastructure that can enable consumer access to stable and lower-cost energy. States are now invited to let DOE know how they intend to compete and distribute funds to subgrantees (including municipal power providers and cooperatives) for such needs as advanced modeling, protection, monitoring and adaptive capacity technology.   States are likely to roll out the first of five years of competitive grants through this program this fall.
Note that this funding represents just 50% of the funds available through the new Section 40101 grant programs that seek to provide $5 billion over five years for grants to stakeholders in the electricity generation and distribution sector to improve resiliency for disruptive events including natural disasters. The other 50% will allow for direct applications; we’ll provide more information as this and other new programs become available.
For more information on Federal Funding available to utilities please go to https://tantalus.com/resources/funding/.
