Grant Details

The Grid Resilience and Innovation Partnerships (GRIP) Program is meant to enhance grid flexibility and improve the resilience of the power system against growing threats of extreme weather and climate change.  

These programs will accelerate the deployment of transformative projects that will help to ensure the reliability of the power sector's infrastructure, so all American communities have access to affordable, reliable, clean electricity anytime, anywhere.

The GRIP Program includes the following 3 funding areas:

Topic 1: Grid Resilience Grants: This program supports activities that reduce the likelihood and consequence of impacts to the electric grid due to extreme weather, wildfire, and natural disaster. Key projects include: 

• Projects that address comprehensive transformational transmission and distribution technology solutions that will mitigate one or multiple specific hazards across a region or within a community, including but not limited to wildfires, floods, high wind events including tornadoes and hurricanes, and extreme temperatures (extreme heat or extreme cold).
• Applications should demonstrate how risks associated with a specific hazard were identified and how proposed investments are targeted to mitigate those particular risks. Applications should also discuss any specific resilience needs and/or disproportionate impacts associated with severe or prolonged outages that are relevant to the region or community directly impacted by the proposed scope.
• Projects that enable a system operator to develop expertise in and demonstrate the benefits of modern approaches that go beyond a grid operator's business-as-usual framework to providing improved system resilience. Proposals should describe the extent to which the proposed approach is industry-leading and how the applicant would leverage project success to de-risk the proposed approach for broader implementation.
• Projects that are structured to encourage consistency of approach and dissemination of learnings by including participation of multiple eligible entities.
• Projects that aggregate resilience efforts across multiple service territories. 
  • Cybersecurity is NOT and eligible expense for this category.

Topic 2: Smart Grid Grants- DOE particularly seeks projects that will progress the field in the following areas:

• Projects that focus on the use of innovative materials, tools, and engineering approaches to improve system capacity and flexibility. Applications should clearly delineate the ways in which the proposed approach(es) are industry leading and/or represent a significant advance in capabilities for the applicant.
• Projects that meaningfully improve grid operators' ability to use data to deliver benefits to ratepayers and support policy goals. Applications should describe the types and sources of data and provide a qualitative description of the extent of the corpus of data available. In addition, proposals should specify how the project will improve one or more grid operators' ability to use data for operational purposes, planning purposes, or both, and the extent to which the project will enable usage of data across silos within and across organizations.
• Projects that are structured to de-risk broad adoption of innovative technologies and approaches by including participation of multiple eligible entities (especially multiple grid operators) and a clear strategy for assessing the benefits of the proposed innovations. 

Topic 3: Grid Innovation Program- DOE particularly seeks projects that include Independent System Operators (ISO), Regional Transmission Organizations (RTO), and/or Power Pools and will progress the field in the following areas: demonstrate an innovation in the approach to the project or deploy a technology innovation.

• Projects that improve the reliability and resilience of the electrical grid especially in light of the need for significant changes to grid infrastructure driven by additions of clean generation (including over broad geographical areas) and electrification load (including in load pockets), updates to legacy assets, and increasing stress from climate-related weather events and other threats to physical infrastructure. Projects should provide a clear description of how the proposed scope will enable a high quality of affordable electrical service given the need for these significant changes.
• Projects that leverage this program to affect durable and transformative change within and beyond the impacted project area, both through accomplishment of the specific project scope proposed as well as through use of that scope to de-risk or establish a novel approach that can be used for similar projects. For example, proposed projects may make use of novel approaches to project planning or cost allocation that would be adopted for future projects, novel organizational structures that would persist past the scope of the project, and/or novel technical approaches that can easily be replicated at additional sites.
• Projects that demonstrate meaningful public/private partnership approaches through strategic involvement of both public and private sector actors. In particular, DOE recognizes that while eligibility for this topic area is restricted to States, local governments, Tribes, and public utility commissions, many projects may be executed primarily by private sector subrecipients. In these cases, applications should describe the approach of the public sector applicant and any additional public sector project partners to providing support to the overall project goal, including through policy and/or regulatory actions, and the approach that public sector entities will take to promote replicability of the proposed project structure.