With many opportunities coming from the bipartisan infrastructure law, or Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act, public power utilities and agencies are finding themselves in the new position of going after and managing aspects of federal funds. A particular funding area of interest is around the programs to support boosting grid resilience, as the funding can be applied to a host of grid modernization and hardening efforts that might have been on a utility’s wish list.
Navigating the federal funding process — from the application to keeping up with requirements and executing on major projects — requires a broad array of expertise and time. Here’s what a few public power providers learned about the process, including other groups who helped along the way or are likely to be key to the project's success.
Small Team, Big Plans
For Jamestown Board of Public Utilities in New York, having a small team was an asset for its proposal to develop a microgrid in its downtown area.
“For a small team, it took everyone working hard to get the proposal together, but also small teams have the advantage of being able to be make decisions quickly and the team members feel directly accountable to do their best quickly,” said Kristofor Sellstrom, Electric Transmission and Distribution Manager at Jamestown BPU.
The BPU will receive up to $17.3 million from the Department of Energy through the Grid Resilience and Innovation Partnerships program for the microgrid, and the BPU will have a nearly $5.8 million cost share. The microgrid aims to boost resilience and reliability for key buildings in the downtown area, which includes a hospital, first responders and shelters, key businesses, and city government. The project will add advanced controls, black start, and battery storage to its generation facility, upgrade aging underground cables, and add smaller, distributed battery storage and distributed energy controls throughout the area.
During normal conditions, the new battery assets could be dispatched to manage the grid and during times of high demand. The new underground-fed electric vehicle charging stations to be added could leverage the system anytime. In and following major events, the microgrid could help to keep power flowing to at minimum the 608 customers directly on the downtown grid, and potentially help feed the entire community of 19,000 as long as overhead lines were not damaged and it is not during a system peak time.
The negotiation process with DOE should take about six months, after which the BPU will have a final scope of work and budget and can get the project underway, including getting bids from potential contractors.
“It will be interesting to see how this deployment works because we are trying to do it all at once,” he said. And while the BPU plans to keep project management in-house, Sellstrom said their interest is in finding a vendor that can offer a fairly holistic solution.
In addition to the vendors BPU expects to work with, Sellstrom noted how the project will require more engagement with the customers with battery deployment and eventual conversations about demand response and rates that can better value distributed resources.
Sellstrom said the project application came together by starting to bring the team together to discuss the suite of items the public power utility would like to accomplish, and then, when the specific grant opportunity opened, aligning these items with the funding opportunities.
A grant writer affiliated with the city helped the BPU team get access to the various federal portals and forms necessary to complete the application and community benefits program, but the technical writing was handled in house. He credited cloud-based document sharing as a key capability for the team approach to writing the concept paper, which allowed for contributors to provide real-time input within the short application timeline.
“The concept paper is a great way to vet your idea, to get it on ‘paper,’ and learn who in your group has buy in. It helps solidify the idea, and could help move it forward,” he said. “Then, if a grant opens that aligns with your goals, it isn’t as hard to go after it. That’s what happened here. We have wanted to do all of these projects, but lacked the resources, and we realized we can do all of them under this one solicitation, so why not ask for it?”
Putting all the ideas into a concept paper, Sellstrom said, allowed the team to identify and work through any holes in the plan, which led to a stronger, comprehensive project. “The effort is probably worth it even if you don’t submit the grant application.”
Strengthening Connections
The Naperville Electric Utility in Illinois is also part of the first round of projects announced for the GRIP program. The public power utility, which serves about 62,000 electric customers, was awarded $1.1 million and will be using the funds to develop a distributed energy resources management system for its tech-oriented area.
Brian Groth, the electric utility’s director, said that there are a proportionally large number of electric vehicle drivers within its system, and that its local school system is planning to transition its fleet of buses to electric ones. Being able to manage this load and these resources effectively and efficiently necessitates the development of a DERMS and other systems, including conservation voltage reduction.
The utility works closely with the Illinois Municipal Electric Agency, which is Naperville’s power provider, to forecast load and reduce system peak.
“Our goal is to shave Naperville’s peak, and then IMEA’s as a whole,” said Groth. He said that IMEA currently operates its demand response program, including calling businesses during peak times to help curb usage. He would like for the new DERMS software to automate and expand that process.
A big part of the success of this program will be in engaging customers with these resources. That means starting with the low-hanging fruit of customers with EV chargers and programmable thermostats. The utility currently has a rebate program for residents to install EV chargers, and Groth said they are looking at moving the rebate to being applicable only to bidirectional chargers, so the utility can potentially access that energy. A part of changing customer interactions will likely be expanding its energy portal, which allows customers to see real-time consumption data and serves as a communication channel for the utility. Groth said the adoption rate for the portal is already fairly robust, with about 10% of customers using it.
Another part of his vision for the project, long-term, is that these systems may be able to help make better use of existing facilities and equipment by giving keener insight into real usage trends. In the case of the utility’s EV driver population, for example, the utility is looking at actual usage when there is a cluster of EVs on a transformer, and if usage is properly staged, before automatically pegging the transformer for an upgrade. The utility previously received federal funds under the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act to deploy advanced metering infrastructure, and the AMI data has helped in right-sizing transformers.
Groth said the utility engaged a consulting firm to pull together the grant application.
“We worked with various SCADA vendors and DERMS providers to align our goals before we applied to make sure our goals were realistic and something we could reasonably obtain,” said Groth.
While Groth acknowledges that the general idea of DERMS isn’t new, the full suite of components the utility is looking to deploy is a more cutting-edge model.
“We have been talking to a lot of manufacturers, large customers, specifically the school district, to make sure that new purchases are compatible with our system in general. Want to be sure we have all the options available,” he said. “When things move quickly, you want to be sure you are as flexible as possible for the future.”
Leveraging Local Expertise
In South Carolina, Santee Cooper was named the administrator for the Grid Resilience State and Tribal Formula Grant awards, overseeing the competitive selection process for projects to receive funding under the initiative. The first award cycle, announced in May 2023, awarded $10.4 million to the state for projects to strengthen and modernize the grid.
Vicky Budreau, Santee Cooper’s chief customer officer, said that the involvement in federal funding programs has been a learning process for the state agency, which has not historically gone after grants. But, she said, given the volume of grant money available, the agency saw it as an opportunity to put its experience to good use.
“This is a way we can show value back to the state, to leverage our experience as a utility for how to administer it effectively for the state of South Carolina,” she said.
Budreau said the Santee Cooper team engaged a third party to set up how to receive and evaluate proposals, and that the third party will also be helping to administer the grants.
According to the program narrative, the focus for South Carolina is on projects that help prevent or mitigate disruptions from natural hazards including hurricanes and tropical storms, floods, tornadoes, and severe winter weather. Projects should be able to be readily implemented and applicants can be transmission owners and operators or distribution providers. The project goals, according to the fact sheet posted by DOE, include those that enhance situational awareness, harden or adapt the electric system, reduce tree-related damage, or provide adaptive capacity (e.g., storage and microgrids) around extreme weather events. At least a third of the state formula funds are set aside for utilities that sell 4,000,000 megawatt-hours or less per year.
Budreau said that some of the smaller entities that applied for funding in the first round engaged third parties to help put the application package together.
Given the requirements and resources required to complete the application, Budreau said she wouldn’t be surprised to see future applicants come from collaborative efforts. Although, she did note the relative funding allotment for South Carolina does limit the scale of what projects can achieve.
“There is a lot of bureaucratic burden that comes with the dollars, so be prepared,” cautioned Budreau. “One of the things that our accountants kept pointing out to us is that when you get an award, and you look at all the reporting that you’re going to do, it will be very similar to what you do with [the Federal Emergency Management Agency].”
As with Sellstrom in Jamestown, Budreau pointed to the value in going through the concept paper process to help hone the concepts and projects before getting into the full-blown application process.
