U.S. Department of Energy Announces Three Funding Opportunities to Ensure Electricity Grid Resilience, Reliability, and Security

WASHINGTON, D.C. – The U.S. Department of Energy’s (DOE) Office of Electricity (OE) today released three Notices of Funding Opportunity (NOFOs) totaling nearly $18.4 million for programs to support research and development of groundbreaking electricity grid technologies. The programs will reduce the cost of high-voltage direct current (HVDC) circuit breakers, improve risk assessment and communication for grid operators, and ensure communities are ready to respond to unanticipated energy storage system failures.

Upgrading critical systems and controls will extend the life of existing grid components, increase the grid’s ability to receive, transmit, and deliver electricity, and improve communications to help predict and prevent failures. Moreover, quantifying and clearly communicating risk and uncertainties to decision-makers and human operators enables more accurate and effective prediction, prevention, and mitigation of cascading failures in the grid. In addition, ensuring communities are prepared to safely manage and monitor energy storage systems is critical to successfully deploying storage technologies.

The three funding opportunities are:

$8 million for the Renewable Integration Management with Innovative High-Voltage Direct Current Power Circuit Breakers (REIMAGINE BREAKERS)
$6.25 million for the Human-Centric Analytics for Resilient & Modernized Power sYstems (HARMONY)
$4.125 million for the Blue Sky Training Program

“These opportunities address different aspects of the electricity grid, but when added together, they will ensure an electricity grid that is more resilient, reliable, secure, and affordable for the American people,” said Gene Rodrigues, Assistant Secretary for the Office of Electricity. “Predicting and preventing power outages, keeping communities safe where energy storage is in use, and looking for more cost-effective grid equipment will benefit all consumers by bolstering reliability and improving affordability for the long run.”

REIMAGINE BREAKERS

OE is providing $7 million and the Office of Energy Efficiency and Renewable Energy’s (EERE) Wind Energy Technologies Office (WETO) is providing $1 million to this joint funding opportunity for the REIMAGINE BREAKERS program. This NOFO will support research and development related to HVDC power circuit breakers.

HVDC is a key technology that can increase the electric grid’s capacity to receive, transmit, and deliver a large amount of energy from generation sources like wind, and it can be more efficient and reliable compared to today’s existing solutions. HVDC lines can also lead to improved grid integration of variable renewables, as well as long-distance electricity transmission to population centers. This NOFO aims to support grid modernization and the advancement of wind energy by reducing the cost of high-voltage circuit breaker technology, therefore supporting widespread adoption of HVDC transmission systems.

Interested parties may apply for REIMAGINE BREAKERS funding here. The deadline to apply is February 28, 2025.

Discover more wind energy funding opportunities from EERE.

HARMONY

Preventing and mitigating power grid failures are crucial for reliability and resiliency. This NOFO from OE intends to improve risk assessment and communication for grid operators in the age of big data. Grid transformation trends, which include the integration of renewable energy and EV charging, are changing long-standing assumptions about power system operations. This is causing significant gaps in assessing and resolving systematic uncertainties in power grids.

Better understanding the impacts to power grid operations requires more advanced analytics to help grid operators to predict, prevent, and mitigate cascading failures in power grids. These analytics are also important for enabling renewable integration, increasing infrastructure decentralization, and infrastructure interdependency under a changing climate. Advanced analytics that extract actionable information from data and knowledge need to consider not only systems’ physics but also human factors to be effective.

Interested parties may apply for HARMONY funding here. concept papers are due January 27, 2025, and full applications are due March 20, 2025.

Blue Sky Training Program

As storage technologies like advanced batteries continue to be widely deployed, communities must be “storage ready.” In addition, stakeholders must be assured new or existing energy storage systems (ESS) will operate safely and reliably. In U.S. localities, uncertainty over proper response procedures to security threats and unanticipated ESS failures can delay or even prevent deployment.

The Blue Sky Training Program will train first responders, law enforcement agencies, local communities, utilities, authorities having jurisdictions, and others on how to respond to unanticipated failures of ESS. This NOFO will bring together these stakeholders to participate in planning exercises and boots-on-the-ground drills that will outline roles and responsibilities to ensure the safety of the hosting community, personnel, and infrastructure.

Interested parties may apply for Blue Sky funding here. The deadline to apply is February 2, 2025.

Learn more about OE and EERE’s Wind Energy Technologies Office.