DOE Opens $3.9B Grant Opportunity for Grid Resilience Partnerships
Eligible applicants: NA. Applications are due: April 6, 2023
Announcement Type: Funding Opportunity Announcement (the opportunity is now open for applications)
Opportunity: Grid Resilience and Innovation Partnerships (DOE, Office of Clean Energy Demonstrations)
Overview and Eligible Uses and Applicants: The program contains 3 funding mechanisms:
Grid Resilience Utility and Industry Grants: 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: Smart Grid Grants increase the flexibility, efficiency, and reliability of the electric power system, with particular focus on increasing 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. 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: 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.
Amount: About 40-110 awards for a total of $3.9B. Awards will be made up to $250M or $1B (for interregional transmission projects).
Award Type: Competitive grant
Key Dates: Concept papers are due December 16, 2022 (Topic Area 1&2) or January 13, 2023 (Topic Area 3). Full applications are due April 6, 2023 (Topic Area 1), March 17, 2023 (Topic Area 2), or May 19, 2023 (Topic Area 3)
Key Links:
Full Funding Opportunity Announcement (pdf)
FedConnect Opportunity - contains additional documents and link to apply
For a full list of currently available grant programs under the Infrastructure Law and other helpful tools, take a look at our Helpful Resources page.
This tracker will continue to send updates when new funding opportunities are announced.