The Biden-Harris Department of Energy, led by Energy Secretary Jennifer Granholm, announced Tuesday the awarding of debt-funded grants totaling $2.2 billion to help fund 8 power transmission projects impacting more than 1,000 miles of lines across 18 states.
The department’s release says the grants are designed to “protect against growing threats of extreme weather events, lower costs for communities, and catalyze additional grid capacity to meet load growth stemming from an increase in manufacturing and data centers.”
It also specifically identifies projects for states like New York, Montana, North Dakota, Utah, Arizona, Idaho, Oregon, Wyoming, California, Massachusetts, Connecticut, Maine, Rhode Island, New Hampshire, and Vermont. That is all great, and no one can doubt those states have pressing needs to upgrade their electricity infrastructure.
Given the language in the release that talks about “hardening” transmission systems to protect them against extreme weather events, it does seem more than a little odd that none of the specified projects would do anything to upgrade systems in states like Texas, Florida, Louisiana, Alabama, or Georgia. These states, of course, are historically the most vulnerable to hurricanes and tropical storms.
Hurricane Debby just slammed its way through Florida and southern Georgia, causing massive flooding and wind damage, and leaving more than 300,000 citizens without power. Another such storm, Hurricane Beryl, barreled through the Houston area a few weeks ago, causing massive power infrastructure damage and leaving more than 2 million people without electricity — many for days on end.
Even more disappointing than the administration omitting any projects in these states from DOE’s new grants is the fact that, when Houston-based CenterPoint Energy, the company that maintains the transmission infrastructure in that region, sought a grant of $100 million last year, Granholm and DOE rejected the request. E&E News reported on July 22 that seven House Republicans had sent a letter to Granholm asking her to explain the reasons that request was rejected. Though this would seem a reasonable request for information, it has thus far gone unanswered.
Back to that $2.2 billion in grants announced Tuesday. While that sounds to any normal person not named Musk or Bezos or Buffet like a very robust number, the reality is that it is just a drop in the bucket of the total amount needed to upgrade the nation’s transmission grid, according to DOE’s own numbers.
In March 2023, DOE published a study that estimates the U.S. will need to install 47,000 miles of new high-capacity transmission lines by 2035 to meet the Biden-Harris administration’s net zero by 2050 goals. That is new transmission and does not include the thousands of miles of existing lines that are in dire need of hardening and upgrades. If the government’s portion of upgrading 1,000 miles of existing infrastructure costs $2.2 billion, one can only imagine how many tens of billions more would be required to build out 47,000 miles of new transmission systems in just the next 11 years.
Actually, we do have some idea on that. As I reported here last year, the 732-mile TransWest Express transmission project that received its final federal permits in 2023 came with an estimated price tag of $3 billion. Using that as a general rule of thumb, it would bring the total cost for 47,000 miles to well into the hundreds of billions of dollars. That is if you can even get that many projects permitted — after all, the permitting process for TransWest took 18 years to complete. That number is not a typo.
Note also that the March 2023 publication date of that DOE report was before the power industry became aware of the massive new power needs demanded by AI technology and its supporting data centers. Thus, the country’s real needs in this subset of the overall energy transition are far larger than imagined just a year ago.
What we see here is the Biden-Harris administration’s suite of energy policies making a real mess of America’s energy security. With President Joe Biden now having been forced into the background by his party’s power brokers, it is a mess that Vice President Kamala Harris now fully owns as she seeks a promotion to the presidency.
Good luck with that.
David Blackmon is an energy writer and consultant based in Texas. He spent 40 years in the oil and gas business, where he specialized in public policy and communications.
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