The US Department of Energy has announced $3.46 billion for 58 projects to strengthen and modernise city and state electric grids. The projects include city-wide microgrids.

Funded by the President’s Bipartisan Infrastructure Law, these projects will leverage more than $8 billion in federal and private investments. The projects will all support the Justice40 Initiative to benefit disadvantaged communities and bring more than 35 gigawatts of new renewable energy online. They include investment in some 400 city and urban microgrids.

Among cities taking advantage of the new funding are New Orleans, Detroit, Pittsburgh and Portland.

Entergy New Orleans will enhance the local grid’s resilience to severe weather, including hardening existing transmission lines and distribution systems to reduce outage frequency and duration. It will also deploy a battery backup project that will reduce energy bills for disadvantaged communities.

In Detroit and its surrounding service territory, DTE Energy will deploy adaptive networked microgrids, which have the capability to adapt to changing energy demands and supply conditions in real-time, especially after extreme weather events. The microgrids will rely on new grid sensing and fault location devices and communication tools that will enhance reliability and reduce the number and total duration of outages in the microgrid areas. Consumers Energy (CE) will build out much-needed infrastructure investments in some of Michigan’s most historically underinvested communities. The project will work to upgrade the backbone of CE’s circuit systems and increase capacity at local substations to better support redundancy and reliability in disadvantaged communities.

In Pittsburgh, Duquesne Light Company will enhance system capacity to unlock clean energy generation and meet targets established in the State’s Climate Action Plan while also mitigating customer cost increases, growing high-quality job opportunities and training, and boosting equitable access to clean energy.

Portland General Electric (PGE) will upgrade transmission capacity and connect PGE customers with the currently isolated renewable resources east of the Cascade Mountains, including those on the Warm Springs Reservation—building a bridge to up to 1,800 MW of carbon-free solar resources. PGE will also deploy an artificial intelligence-enabled, grid-edge computing platform to improve the connection of distributed energy resources, such as solar, as well as informed modelling that can predict pre-outage conditions and assist real-time decisions.

“Extreme weather events fuelled by climate change will continue to strain the nation’s ageing transmission systems, but President Biden’s Investing in America agenda will ensure America’s power grid can provide reliable, affordable power,” said U.S Secretary of Energy Jennifer M. Granholm. “Today’s announcement represents the largest-ever direct investment in critical grid infrastructure, supporting projects that will harden systems, improve energy reliability and affordability—all while generating union jobs for highly skilled workers.”   

The Grid Resilience and Innovation Partnerships (GRIP) Program, managed by DOE’s Grid Deployment Office (GDO), funds activities to modernise the electric grid to reduce impacts of natural disasters and extreme weather worsened by climate change; increase the flexibility, efficiency, and reliability of the electric power system with a particular focus on unlocking more solar, wind, and other clean energy and reducing faults that may lead to wildfires; and improve reliability by deploying innovative approaches to electricity transmission, storage, and distribution.

Today’s announcements of up to $3.46 billion represent a first round of selections under the broader $10.5 billion GRIP Program, which itself is one of several tools from President Biden’s Investing in America agenda.