DOE to loan up to $8.25B to enhance, expand electrical transmission grid

The U.S. Department of Energy (DOE) announced a massive plan to modernize the nation’s transmission grid this week, through up to $8.25 billion in loans.

These funds have been made available through two different financing streams: up to $5 billion in loan guarantees from the Loan Program Office (LPO) and up to $3.25 billion from the Western Area Power Administration’s (WAPA) Transmission Infrastructure Program (TIP) revolving loan program.

The former will provide targeted support of innovative transmission projects and those owned by federally recognized tribal nations or Alaska Native Corporations. The latter is a debt financing program meant to support transmission and related infrastructure projects to the West. However, applicants can also benefit from WAPA’s technical expertise for project development support.

“DOE is making financing available for projects that improve resilience and expand transmission capacity across the electrical grid, so we can reliably move clean energy from places where it’s produced to places where it’s needed most,” Secretary of Energy Jennifer Granholm said. “This is a down payment on our efforts to modernize our transmission nationwide—but we need the American Jobs Plan to complete them. These investments will make our power system more resilient against threats and more reliable as we increase our clean energy capacity, creating thousands of jobs in the process.”

All of this is being undertaken to expand and improve the U.S. transmission grid and convert it to 100 percent clean energy by 2035. It adds to the Biden administration’s push for greater renewable energy capacity and shoring up transmission challenges. Notably, without added transmission capacity, the DOE noted that the electricity grid could struggle to reliably and consistently provide renewable sourced power from rural areas to high-demand areas.

While this push is being undertaken with the present tools at hand, the DOE also emphasized that passage of the American Jobs Plan, as promoted by the White House, would allow the department to expand on the resources being offered for this modernization effort.