Three Key Facts:
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- Pennsylvania’s PPL Electric Utilities was awarded $49.5 million in federal grant funding through the Biden-Harris administration’s infrastructure law to support its “Grid of the Future” project.
- The Grid of the Future will improve grid resilience, reduce outages, and integrate renewable energy sources like wind and solar.
- PPL projects that building the Grid of the Future will create as many as 225 new jobs and benefit 800,000 Pennsylvanians.
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Pennsylvania’s PPL Electric Utilities (PPL) was awarded $49.5 million in federal grant funding through the Biden-Harris administration’s infrastructure law to support its “Grid of the Future” project.
The Grid Resilience and Innovation Partnerships (GRIP) Program, which oversees federal grants for projects like the Grid of the Future, aims to “enhance grid flexibility and improve the resilience of the power system against growing threats of extreme weather and climate change.”
The Grid of the Future project is building an automated electric grid in Pennsylvania that:
- predicts failures
- reduces outages
- increases resilience
- minimizes costs to customers, and;
- maximizes grid flexibility for integration with distributed energy resources (DERs).
(DERs are small-scale energy technologies that can be connected to the electricity grid or operate independently – including wind turbines, solar panels, batteries, fuel cells, and microturbines).PPL serves 1.5 million customers in 29 counties in Central and Eastern Pennsylvania.
PPL projects that building the Grid of the Future will create as many as 225 new jobs, relying on skilled labor in local communities.In addition to decreasing outage durations and outage frequencies, it will help ensure reliable electricity service for more 800,000 people living in disadvantaged communities.
U.S. Secretary of Energy Jennifer Granholm emphasized the importance of supporting efforts like the Grid of the Future: “Extreme weather events … will continue to strain the nation’s aging transmission systems, but President Biden’s Investing in America agenda will ensure America’s power grid can provide reliable, affordable power.”
