Expanding and modernizing the electric grid to meet growing electrification will be a holistic effort across communities, states, tribes, and the nation. Success will not be achieved with individual projects, but only with a national coordinated effort. The Grid Deployment Office is committed to working with a wide range of community partners, and collaboration with states, tribes, and territories will be critical to success.
Below is a list of valuable resources geared specifically to communities.
Grid Deployment Office Activities
The 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.
The Grid Resilience State and Tribal Formula Grants are designed to support communities in strengthening and modernizing America’s power grid against wildfires, extreme weather, and other natural disasters that are exacerbated by the climate crisis. The program will distribute funding to States, Territories, and Tribes based on a formula that includes factors such as population size, land area, probability and severity of disruptive events, and a locality’s historical expenditures on mitigation efforts.
The Grid Resilience Analysis and Climate Change Impacts (GRACI) program will assemble a consortium of universities, non-profit, and for-profit organizations to provide technical assistance to grant recipients of the Grid Resilience State and Tribal Formula Grants Program.
GDO selected six applicants to receive up to $4.6 million in funding for GRACI grants. These selectees will conduct grid resilience and climate change impact analyses that will help Grid Resilience State and Tribal Formula Grants Program recipients strengthen and maximize the impact of GDO's grid resilience funding.
Supported by the Grid Deployment Office, Pacific Northwest National Laboratory has released a publicly accessible online database of wildfire mitigation plans to support electric utilities, state governments, policymakers, and regulators in understanding and improving wildfire risk and resilience strategies. The resource offers a centralized, searchable collection of more than 400 publicly available wildfire mitigation plans developed by 170 utilities across 19 U.S. states. These plans span from 2019 through 2028 and provide a broad overview of how utilities are preparing for wildfire risk.
Released on October 30, 2023, the National Transmission Needs Study (Needs Study) serves as DOE’s triennial state of the grid report and is a robust assessment of current and near-term future transmission needs through 2040. The Needs Study is not intended to displace existing transmission planning processes and is not intended to identify specific transmission solutions to address identified needs, but it does identify key national needs that can inform investments and planning decisions.
Including Tribal governments, Tribal enterprises, Tribal utilities, and American Indian communities in the National Transmission Planning (NTP) Study is critical to identifying pathways for necessary large-scale transmission system buildouts that meet community, regional, and national objectives. Incorporating tribal input and perspectives into the system modeling and algorithms used to develop the NTP Study will help form test scenarios and refine input data.
The Transmission Acceleration Grants (TAG) Program is making $10 million available to states, tribes, and non-profit organizations to accelerate transmission deployment. Created in response to feedback from state and tribal entities facing growing transmission needs and project backlogs, the TAG Program will support capacity building and local and regional transmission planning or siting and permitting process reforms.
The Tribal Nation Transmission Program was developed to support the engagement of Tribal Nations in activities related to the planning and development of electricity transmission. This technical assistance program was created in direct response to Tribal input. It offers capacity building through educational resources, training, and on-call assistance from technical experts and researchers from the National Renewable Energy Laboratory. The program will also provide funding to mitigate the financial burden of Tribal participation in key transmission forums.
The Wholesale Electricity Market Studies and Engagement Program provides states and regions with technical and financial assistance related to developing, expanding, and improving wholesale electricity markets. This engagement will ensure these stakeholders are able to provide critical insight into market design, expansion, and improvement activities.
Additional State and Tribal Grid Resources
The Office of State and Community Energy Programs (SCEP) works with state and local organizations to significantly accelerate the deployment of clean energy technologies, catalyze local economic development and create jobs, reduce energy costs, and avoid pollution through place-based strategies involving a wide range of government, community, business and other stakeholders.
The Office of Indian Energy Policy and Programs promote tribal energy development, efficiency and use; reduce or stabilize energy costs; enhance and strengthen tribal energy and economic infrastructure; and electrify Indian lands and homes. To advance its mission, the Office of Indian Energy works with American Indian tribes and Alaska Native villages to maximize the value of their energy resources through technical and financial assistance and education and capacity building.
The Tribal Energy Loan Guarantee Program supports tribal investment in energy-related projects by providing loan guarantees to federally recognized tribes, including Alaska Native villages or regional or village corporations, or a Tribal Energy Development Organization that is wholly or substantially owned by a federally recognized Indian Tribe or Alaska Native Corporation.
Access materials from GDO-sponsored workshop videos and/or webinar materials:
- Application Guidance Videos for the Grid Resilience State and Tribal Formula Grants Programs (July 2023)
- Grid Resilience Formula Grant Webinar for Tribal Entities (June 2023)
- Resilience Training for the Southeast (May 2023)
- Grid Resilience Formula Grants Webinar for Tribes (February 2023)
- 2023 Tribal Energy Webinar Series: Federal Funding for Tribes (January 2023)
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