The five transmission lines in MISO and SPP’s joint targeted interconnection queue (JTIQ) portfolio are among the 58 grid resilience and improvement projects designated to receive a total of $3.46 billion in funding from the Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act.

Announcing the awards during a Wednesday press call, Energy Secretary Jennifer Granholm hailed the funding as the “largest-ever investment in the American grid,” which would help to deploy 35 GW of new renewable energy projects — providing a 10% increase in renewable capacity — as well as 400 microgrids. Matching funds to the IIJA awards will bring the total investment to $8 billion, she said.

“Right now, the U.S. electric grid is the largest connected machine in the world. It’s 5.7 million miles of transmission and distribution, and about 55,000 substations; and it needs upgrading, clearly,” Granholm said. With the IIJA and the Inflation Reduction Act unleashing a “tidal wave of clean energy investment, the grid as it currently sits is not equipped to handle all the new demand. We need it to be bigger; we need it to be stronger. We need it to be smarter to bring all of these new projects online and to meet the president’s goal of 100% clean energy by 2035.”

Aimed at improving interregional connections and transfers along the MISO-SPP seams, the JTIQ projects are designated to receive $464 million — the largest single award made — which will put a major dent in the latest revised costs for the portfolio of $1.86 billion. Adjusted for inflation and other rising costs from the original project estimate of $1.1 billion, the revised price tag had raised concerns among stakeholders in the seven states involved: Minnesota, the Dakotas, Iowa, Nebraska, Kansas and Missouri. (See JTIQ Portfolio Cost Estimate Nearly Doubles to $1.9B.)

MISO and SPP have been collaborating with the Minnesota Department of Commerce and the Great Plains Institute on the project. MISO has estimated the projects will help to interconnect 28 GW of new, mostly renewable resources.

Maria Robinson, director of DOE’s Grid Deployment Office, praised the portfolio as a model. “My hope is that by this particular project showing what excellent planning and amazing cooperation and coordination across RTO lines can do that we will see more of those types of projects in future iterations.”

In a joint press release, Minnesota Commerce Commissioner Grace Arnold called the award “a historic opportunity to leverage federal clean energy funds to deliver reliable, affordable and safe energy that is increasingly generated by carbon-free and renewable energy resources.” The JTIQ will “expand our electric grid with new transmission lines and to reduce the burden of costs to utility ratepayers for adding those needed transmission lines,” she said.

Echoing Robinson, David Kelley, SPP vice president of engineering, said, “It’s tremendously exciting to think about what these funds will mean for the SPP and MISO regions, and for our industry. As our organizations worked together with our partners and with the DOE, it’s been our goal not only to create value for people living in our service territories, but also to model effective collaboration that spans the borders of states, utilities and grid operators.”

Real-life Effects

Wednesday’s awards are being funded under the Grid Resilience and Innovation Partnerships (GRIP) program, which received a total of $10.5 billion in the IIJA.

The program is aimed at enhancing grid reliability and resilience in the face of the increasingly extreme weather caused by climate change, while also funding innovative, “transformative” grid projects.

The $3.5 billion going to the 58 projects represent the first round of the funding, which drew about 700 initial applications, according to a senior administration official. About 300 of those applicants then were invited to submit full proposals.

The funding also will create good-paying jobs, DOE said in a press release, with about three-quarters of the projects partnering with the International Brotherhood of Electrical Workers. All projects also were required to have community benefit plans, a senior administration official added in a Wednesday press teleconference.

A second round of funding should begin accepting new applications before the end of the year, Granholm said. As with other DOE funding announcements, the projects selected still have to go through contract negotiations with the department before the awards are finalized.

The amounts range from $1.1 million to the municipal utility in Naperville, Ill., to install a distributed energy resource management system to $250 million for new transmission lines to connect renewable energy resources on tribal lands east of Oregon’s Cascade Mountains to Portland General Electric’s urban demand centers.

According to DOE, the Oregon project could bring 1,800 MW of clean energy from the Confederated Tribes of Warm Springs Reservation to PGE. The utility 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 modeling that can predict pre-outage conditions and assist real-time decisions,” the release said.

Clean energy advocates stressed the effect the funding would have on grid resilience and renewable energy deployment.

“As we learned this summer, a larger grid is a resilient grid, and the funding for planning and coordination from today’s grants will go a long way toward accelerating these efforts,” said John Moore, director of the Sustainable FERC Project at the National Resources Defense Council. The funding is “a critical step in [DOE’s] efforts to expand the capacity of the nation’s transmission system, increase connectivity between regions and add more clean energy.”

“This announcement shows how important building new transmission is to making the transition to a 100% clean energy grid across the country,” said Harrison Godfrey, managing director of Advanced Energy United. “The best use of public funds is to leverage [them] to unlock private sector investment and create new, good jobs across America.”

The Permitting Question

Besides being the largest, the JTIQ award also is the only one for interregional transmission lines, which are widely seen as critical for grid operators to begin interconnecting the 2,000 GW of renewable and storage projects sitting in their queues at present.

Other projects will provide intrastate HVDC lines, such as the Railbelt Innovative Resiliency project in Alaska, which will receive $206.5 million to bolster grid reliability in the state with the addition of an underwater HVDC line and battery energy storage.

Several projects also will deploy grid-enhancing technologies to increase power flows on existing lines. For example, the Electric Power Research Institute is partnering with the Vermont Electric Power Co. on a project that will use a technology called advanced power flow control, which can pull power from congested lines and redirect it to lines with excess capacity. The project grant is $18 million.

Electric cooperatives were well represented in the funding, with a range of projects focused on improving grid resilience in rural areas. In New Mexico, the Kit Carson Electric Cooperative is vulnerable to power outages from wildfire threats, drought and high winds. The co-op will receive $15.4 million to add battery storage and microgrids in key locations so it can, if needed, shut down its grid for public safety power outages to prevent wildfires while still keeping the power on for critical services in remote communities.

During the press call, a reporter asked about obstacles these projects might face with permitting, as any efforts at permitting legislation have ground to a halt with the House of Representatives still without a speaker.

A senior administration official said that, in general, the projects were developed with strong support from their state or local governments and other stakeholders. Many of them also will provide benefits to low-income, disadvantaged communities. A priority for DOE, the official said, was to choose projects that would be able to move forward quickly.