The U.S. federal government committed $3.46 billion in October 2023 C.E. to upgrade the country’s aging electric grid — the largest single federal grid investment on record at the time. The money, drawn from the Bipartisan Infrastructure Law, was spread across 58 projects in 44 states, with goals ranging from preventing blackouts to accelerating the shift to clean power.
At a glance
- Grid investment: The $3.46 billion in federal funds is expected to leverage a combined $8 billion when private investment is included, according to the U.S. Department of Energy.
- Renewable energy capacity: Projects selected are designed to help bring more than 35 gigawatts of new renewable energy online — roughly equivalent to half of all utility-scale solar capacity in the U.S. in 2022 C.E.
- Microgrid expansion: The funding supports 400 microgrids that can generate and store energy locally, giving communities a backstop when storms or other disasters knock out the main grid.
Why the grid needs an upgrade now
Much of the U.S. electricity grid was built close to a century ago. It was not designed for the scale of clean energy coming online today, nor for the intensity of weather events that climate change is making more frequent and severe.
Power outages linked to extreme weather have grown more common across the country. In Louisiana, that reality hit hard in August 2021 C.E., when Hurricane Ida caused a deadly blackout that left hundreds of thousands of people without power for days. Some New Orleans residents had been calling for community microgrids as a resilience measure ever since. This round of funding includes a project through local utility Entergy New Orleans to harden its power lines — a direct response to that kind of vulnerability.
Secretary of Energy Jennifer Granholm, speaking with reporters at the time of the announcement, was direct about the stakes: “Much of [the grid] was built nearly a century ago … We need it to be bigger, we need it to be stronger, we need it to be smarter.”
What microgrids make possible
The 400 microgrids supported by this investment represent one of the more practical tools in grid modernization. A microgrid can draw on local sources — rooftop solar panels, battery storage — and disconnect from the larger utility grid when the main system goes down. That means a hospital, a neighborhood, or a rural community can keep the lights on even when transmission lines fail.
Distributed energy resources like these blur the line between energy consumer and energy producer. When they connect to the main grid, they add supply. When they operate independently, they protect the people who need power most during a crisis.
Who benefits — and who was centered in the design
Each of the 58 projects was required to meet the Biden administration’s “Justice40” Initiative, which directs that 40 percent of the benefits from federal climate investments flow to communities that are marginalized, underserved, or disproportionately burdened by pollution. That framing matters in a sector where low-income communities and communities of color have historically faced higher rates of outages and fewer resources to recover from them.
The announcement also emphasized labor standards. According to a U.S. Department of Energy press release, 86 percent of selected projects either contained labor union partnerships or would involve collective bargaining agreements. The International Brotherhood of Electrical Workers held partnerships with three out of four projects in the funding round.
The global context
The U.S. investment came the same week the International Energy Agency published a report warning that global grid investment had stagnated for a decade and needed to more than double — to over $600 billion a year — by 2030 C.E. The IEA estimated that governments and utilities worldwide would need to add or replace the equivalent of virtually every existing power grid by 2040 C.E. to keep up with clean energy goals.
The $3.46 billion announced in October 2023 C.E. was one tranche of a larger $10.5 billion earmarked through the DOE’s Grid Resilience and Innovation Partnerships (GRIP) Program. It was a meaningful step — but against that global backdrop, it also illustrated how much work remains.
Grid modernization on the scale needed is a long-term project, and funding announcements do not automatically translate into completed infrastructure. Permitting delays, supply chain constraints for grid hardware, and the sheer complexity of coordinating across 44 states mean the timeline from investment to operational capacity can stretch years beyond the initial commitment.
Still, for communities that have lived with unreliable power and limited clean energy access, the direction of this investment — toward resilience, local control, and equitable distribution of benefits — points toward something more durable than what the old grid was built to provide.
Read more
For more on this story, see: The Verge
For more from Good News for Humankind, see:
- Renewables now make up at least 49% of global power capacity
- Alzheimer’s risk cut in half by drug in landmark prevention trial
- The Good News for Humankind archive on renewable energy
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