By Timothy Gardner
WASHINGTON (Reuters) – Four electricity transmission projects serving the U.S. Southwest, Southeast and New England will receive $1.5 billion in public financing to improve the resiliency of the electric grid and connect customers to clean energy, the government said on Thursday .
Funds for the second phase of the Transmission Facilitation Program come from a bipartisan 2021 infrastructure bill and will enable nearly 1,000 miles (1,609 km) of new transmission lines in Louisiana, Maine, Mississippi, New Mexico, Oklahoma and Texas.
“We’re using it to help get big transmission projects off the ground, projects that otherwise wouldn’t get built,” David Turk, the U.S. deputy secretary of energy, told reporters on a call.
The investments will create almost 9,000 jobs, the Energy Ministry said.
The first phase of the program, announced a year ago, will support networking projects in western and northeastern states.
Turk said his department will buy electricity capacity on the lines and then sell it back as new customers arrive.
The projects are:
–Aroostook Renewable Project that will give New England access to wind energy generated in Maine
–Cimarron Link, a 400-mile high-voltage direct current line from Texas that will deliver wind and solar power to growing areas in eastern Oklahoma
–Southern Spirit will build a 515 km (320 mile) line connecting the Electric Reliability Council of Texas power grid to power grids in southeastern energy markets for the first time to prevent outages during extreme weather events such as the deadly Storm Uri that hit Texas 2022
–Southline, which will build a transmission line to bring electricity from wind power from western New Mexico across the Desert Southwest.
The Energy Department said its National Transmission Planning Study shows the U.S. will need to roughly double or triple transmission capacity in the 30 years to 2050 to meet demand growth and reliability needs.
It said hundreds of billions of dollars in cost savings could be achieved through transmission expansion and inter-regional planning.
