Funding Opportunity: $10.5 Billion for Grid Resilience Innovation Partnership Programs
As part of the Bipartisan Infrastructure Law, the Grid Deployment Office is administering a $10.5 billion Grid Resilience and Innovation Partnership Program to enhance grid flexibility and improve the resilience of the power system against growing threats of extreme weather and climate change.
These programs will accelerate the deployment of transformative projects that will help to ensure the reliability of the power sector’s infrastructure so that all American communities have access to affordable, reliable, clean electricity anytime, anywhere.
The Program includes three funding mechanisms:
GRID RESILIENCE UTILITY AND INDUSTRY GRANTS ($2.5 BILLION)
Grid Resilience Utility and Industry Grants support activities that will modernize the electric grid to reduce impacts due to extreme weather and natural disasters. This 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. This program provides grants to electric grid operators, electricity storage operators, electricity generators, transmission owners or operators, distribution providers, and fuel suppliers.
SMART GRID GRANTS ($3 BILLION)
Smart Grid Grants increase the flexibility, efficiency, and reliability of the electric power system, with a particular focus on increasing the 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; non-profit entities; and state and local governmental entities, and tribal nations.
GRID INNOVATION PROGRAM ($5 BILLION)
Grid Innovation Program provides 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.
