WASHINGTON DC – The Biden administration is announcing it will spend $1.3 billion of new federal funding to help create three new, massive electrical transmission lines in the Southwest and New England, in an effort to improve the nation’s power grid and get more renewable energy into America’s homes and businesses.
The lines will span from Arizona to New Mexico, another from Nevada to Utah and a third running through Vermont and New Hampshire and extending into Canada.
Energy Secretary Jennifer Granholm and White House national climate adviser Ali Zaidi said at a briefing the lines will bring a significant amount of new wind, solar and Canadian hydropower onto the grid, adding about 3.5 gigawatts of additional electrical capacity to the grid – enough to power around 3 million homes.
Even so, the Energy Department has concluded the US needs about 30 gigawatts of additional interregional capacity added to its grid. While the three projects announced Monday are being built with money from the bipartisan infrastructure law, spurring more could be challenging with a divided Congress.
Granholm said a recent Department of Energy report found “we need to seriously build out transmission in order to improve reliability and resilience, and of course, to lower energy costs and relieve congestion on the grid. And that’s exactly what these three projects that we selected are going to do.”
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