In 2021, Congress passed the Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act (IIJA), a law that instructs the Department of Energy (DOE) to distribute $10.5 billion in competitive grant funding to projects that enhance electric grid resilience, flexibility, and reliability. In August of 2022, DOE issued a Request for Information seeking comment on how to implement this program, which is known as the Grid Resilience and Innovation Partnerships (GRIP) Program.
We submitted comments urging DOE to clarify how it will distribute project funding and to enhance program transparency. We encourage DOE to more specifically detail how it will evaluate applications and to offer a more precise definition of what "community benefits" it hopes to achieve. We also suggest that DOE require project applicants to submit cost-benefit analyses so that the agency can better compare projects when making funding decisions.