US DOE Offers $44MM in Funding to Boost Clean Power Distribution

The United States Department of Energy (DOE) has set aside a total of $44 million to improve the reliability of clean power distribution, including $34 million for tools that will advance a clean, reliable electricity grid run on wind and solar energy.

The DOE said in a media release $10 million is for streamlining the interconnection of clean energy with the grid.

Collectively, these undertakings will empower grid planners, operators, and utility firms to efficiently link and oversee renewable energy and battery storage assets, leading to a decrease in outages caused by severe weather conditions. This financial support will reduce project connection wait times to the grid and expedite the dependable implementation of clean energy resources, aligning with President Joe Biden's objective of attaining 100 percent clean electricity by 2035, the DOE said.

“We can’t deploy clean energy if we can’t get renewable sources connected onto our grid”, said Secretary of Energy Jennifer M. Granholm. “Thanks to support from the Biden-Harris Administration, we are developing new, state-of-the-art tools to break up logjams to connect more clean energy sources to the grid even faster,  giving Americans access to more affordable and resilient sources of clean energy”.

Renewable sources contribute up to 21 percent of the electricity supply in the U.S., and the proportion of clean energy derived from cost-effective renewables must rise to fulfill the country's climate objectives, the DOE said. With the integration of larger quantities of variable renewable energy sources like solar and wind into the power grid, grid planners and operators require new approaches to manage the intermittency associated with these generation technologies, it explained.

This necessity becomes particularly pronounced due to escalating temperatures influenced by climate change, the decommissioning of power plants, and growing demand stemming from extensive electrification in the residential, transportation, and industrial sectors, the DOE said. These factors exert additional pressure on grid operations, heightening the risk of blackouts if reliability challenges are left unaddressed, it said.

In the upcoming years, several hundred gigawatts of solar energy, wind energy, and energy storage resources are anticipated to be added to the grid, according to the DOE. By the conclusion of 2022, the transmission interconnection queues held over 2,000 gigawatts of solar, wind, and storage capacity. With the persistent rapid rise in interconnection requests for integrating clean energy into the electric grid, existing procedures are unable to match this pace, it said.

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