The funding: The Department of Energy’s Office of Electricity is awarding 31 projects across 26 states funding for grid upgrades. The projects will receive $1.9 billion, on top of $3.4 billion in “recipient cost-share funding.” 

What’s covered: Over 1.5K miles of transmission lines will see new capacity unlocked through reconductoring or rebuilding, while another 21K miles will get grid enhancing technologies. The result? More than 23 GW of added capacity. Not only will the move address transmission buildout bottlenecks, but the DOE highlights this approach will “bypass the multi-decade timelines” that building new transmission normally requires. 

Industry groups are cheering: The awards will “ensure real projects will break ground soon,” and help push the industry to use “modern technologies to deliver the most power at the lowest cost,” Zach Zimmerman, executive director of the AMP Coalition, said in a statement. 

A local takeover: San Francisco city officials have been working for years to buy the local PG&E power grid—and they’re getting closer. This week, the city approved a final environmental impact report for the acquisition, against PG&E’s appeals to deny it. 

The motivation: Owning the local grid would allow the SFPUC to “focus on reliability and affordability for our customers,” PUC general manager Dennis Herrera said in a statement. 

The nitty gritty: The city will now need to go before the CA PUC to parse out what the local grid is worth (SFPUC estimates it’s $3.4GB). San Francisco would borrow money from investors through ‘revenue bonds,’ then repay them using money collected from electric rates. And if PG&E doesn’t agree to the purchase? The city could force a sale through eminent domain.   

Meanwhile, on a different coast: New York state is moving towards its clean energy goals with new funding for eight bulk energy storage and 13 large-scale renewable projects. Combined, they’re set to provide 1.7GW and generate $3.7B in private investment.

Windy City blowing back: Amid the mounting public outcry against data centers, Chicago Mayor Brandon Johnson has proposed a 12-month moratorium on their construction. The pause will give the city time to develop policies addressing data center impacts on local air, water, and the grid.

In a Tennessee town: The Greeneville Energy Authority unanimously adopted TVA’s proposed wholesale rate class for data centers. The new designation would raise power prices for data centers by about 10%. Worth noting: No data centers have been built or proposed in Greene County thus far.

The NY PSC has ordered all electric, gas, and water utilities to report how they use AI, and their policies around it. The Commission’s concerns? That AI systems could have “negative consequences for the safety and reliability of New York’s critical infrastructure,” the PSC wrote in its order.

Not so fast: Nearly 90% of US utility leaders agree that their ability to incorporate AI is limited by “regulatory and rate case frameworks,” according to a recent National Grid Partners survey. They cite cybersecurity, risk and trust concerns as one of the biggest challenges in scaling AI. 

The tradeoffs: Utilities are using the new tech, even though the costs of building infrastructure to run AI are raising customer bills and “compromising grid reliability.” But still: "AI presents significant opportunities to deliver value for customers, including enhancing grid operations, reliability, and storm response,” Edison Electric Institute told Energy Central.

Buying time: The transmission upgrades needed to connect new data centers can take 2-3 years, according to PowerSecure’s Todd Jackson. In the meantime, distributed energy resources can serve as a bridge, while also giving utilities fast-response capacity for peak demand and extreme weather. 

What’s next? More utilities are developing DER programs than at any point in the past decade, Jackson told Energy Central. The question is no longer whether to build them, but rather which resources should qualify.