The Biden-Harris Administration, through the U.S. Department of Energy (DOE), has announced US$ 26 million to fund projects that will demonstrate that America's electricity grid can reliably run with a mix of solar, wind, energy storage, and other clean distributed energy resources.
Funded by President Biden’s Bipartisan Infrastructure Law, the Solar and Wind Grid Services and Reliability Demonstration Program will show how clean energy resources can address key reliability challenges facing the grid by developing and testing tools and plant functions that allow the grid to stay online amid disturbances and restart if it goes down.
The Solar and Wind Grid Services and Reliability Demonstration Program will fund up to 10 projects that demonstrate how large-scale solar, wind, and energy storage can support the power grid by automatically adjusting to changing demand and disruptions. Projects, which require testing at a plant of at least 10MW in size from a mix of solar, wind, or other generation or storage technology, will also demonstrate how a clean energy grid prevents blackouts by quickly identifying and responding to faults.
Academic institutions, private companies, nonprofits, state and local governments, and tribal nations are encouraged to apply and form diverse teams that include representation from entities such as historically Black colleges and universities and minority-serving institutions, and community-based organizations.
Through DOE’s new Building a Better Grid Initiative DOE, is deploying more than $20 billion in federal financing tools, including through the Bipartisan Infrastructure Law’s new $2.5 billion Transmission Facilitation Program, $3 billion expansion of the Smart Grid Investment Grant Program, and more than $10 billion in grants for States, Tribes, and utilities to enhance grid resilience and prevent power outages, and through existing tools, including the more than $3 billion Western Area Power Administration Transmission Infrastructure Program, and a number of loan guarantee programs through the Loan Programs Office.