The Department of Energy recently released a roadmap detailing the ways utilities, project developers, and regulators can speed up the process of connecting renewable energy and energy storage projects to the nation’s power grid — and is encouraging applications for some of the over $300 billion available in Loan Programs Office funding for relevant projects.
This Transmission Interconnection Roadmap, developed by the DOE’s Interconnecting Innovation e-Xchange, is designed for the broad swath of regulators, transmission providers, interconnection customers, state agencies, federal regulators, transmission owners, equipment manufacturers, consumer advocates and anyone else with a stake in the electricity grid to get a clear picture of the ways to solve the challenge of bringing 12,000 solar, wind, and storage projects waiting to be connected onto the power grid.
According to another report from the DOE, commercially available advanced grid solutions—like advanced conductors, dynamic line rating, and energy storage—can cost effectively increase the existing grid’s capacity to support upwards of 20–100 GW peak demand growth.
Image Credit: Department of Energy
The technologies can also improve reliability, resilience, and affordability for consumers — key goals for the Biden Administration.
Taken together, the two reports underscore how critical transmission and distribution upgrades are to the government’s plans to ensure renewable energy projects can generate power for the grid — and how to fund those projects now.
The DOE emphasizes how dynamic line ratings, advanced power flow control, and energy storage systems, coupled with advanced conductors and distribution management systems and distributed energy resource management systems can all play a role in improving the performance of the existing grid.
There is as much as 100 gigawatts of support for incremental peak demand that existing infrastructure spending could address, according to the Department of Energy. And these solutions are potentially cheaper to deploy than the existing infrastructure it would replace.
To meet its goals for commercial liftoff, the DOE is calling for six-to-twelve deployments to prove out its thesis and the efficacy of deploying these readily available technologies to meet grid demand.
However, the agency also recognizes that the current incentive structures for utilities and other infrastructure developers don’t favor these more efficient deployments in all cases.
This lack of financial incentives is one reason why the Department of Energy is encouraging regulators (including the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission) to explore novel ways of encouraging invesment in alternative technologies.
The DOE has roughly $13.1 billion to spend on transmission and distribution through funding allocated through the Inflation Reduction Act and the Bipartisan Infrastructure Law.
For instance, the Grid Deployment Office’s Grid Resilience and Innovation Partnerships (GRIP) Program, is authorized to distribute a $10.5 billion grant program to enhance grid flexibility and resilience. In October, the DOE announced nearly $3.5 billion in GRIP funding that supports 58 projects in 44 states across the United States. And twelve projects selected for funding included next-generation investment in grid-enhancing technologies (GETs) like dynamic line rating (DLR) or distributed energy resource management (DERMS).
At a smaller scale, the DOE’s Solar Energy Technologies Office and Wind Energy Technologies Office recently released a $10 million funding opportunity for analytical tools and approaches to accelerate interconnection and will be leading a series of forthcoming public forums aimed at implementation of interconnection standards to maintain a reliable, resilient, and safe grid.
Furthermore, through the Title 17 Clean Energy Financing Program, the Loan Programs Office will fund energy infrastructure projects, including transmission infrastructure investments to support transmission interconnection, reconductoring transmission lines, and upgrading voltage.
To learn how companies can access non-dilutive financing from the DOE and other federal, state, and local agencies, reach out to Energy Transition Finance.
