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Building and maintaining a hardened, resilient and secure grid of the future is essential for our nation to function at its best in a modern society. The electric power grid faces an increasing number of hazards and threats – whether they are in the form of severe storms or cyberattacks. In the face of those challenges, the U.S. Department of Energy is committed to working with the interagency as well as partners in Canada to ensure the reliable and secure delivery of electricity throughout North America.

The Department of Energy today announced the issuance of a Record of Decision and Presidential Permit for the New England Clean Power Link. The 154-mile underground and underwater direct current transmission line will bring up to 1000 megawatts of hydropower from Quebec, Canada to Southern Vermont.

The Department of Energy today announced the issuance of a Record of Decision and Presidential Permit for the Great Northern Transmission Line. The 224-mile overhead alternating current transmission line will bring up to 883 megawatts of hydropower from Manitoba Power in Canada to Grand Rapids, Minnesota and deliver wind power generated in North Dakota to Manitoba Power in Canada.

The project has the potential to provide enough reliable, affordable and carbon-free electricity to serve approximately 600,000 residential customers in the Upper Midwest.

I recently joined the North American SynchroPhasor Initiative (NASPI) community for its Working Group meeting where industry representatives, researchers, and vendors gathered to share lessons learned and discuss advances in a technology that is a core component of a modernized power grid.

The Office of Electricity Delivery and Energy Reliability (OE) is working with Idaho National Laboratory (INL) to enhance the places where we can test advanced systems, at the scale of a real neighborhood or zip code, without risk to actual customers. Under the guidance of OE, INL works with industry, universities and government stakeholders to provide a testing environment which reduces the risks and enables real world validation and verification of new ideas, devices and systems including new smart grid devices, distribution automation, communication systems, renewable energy, and grid scale energy storage. INL just broke ground this week on enhancements to its Critical Infrastructure Test Range Complex, which is part of INL’s 61 miles of transmission system, seven substations and associated distribution systems.

Today, at the North American SynchroPhasor Initiative (NASPI) meeting in Seattle, I announced over $5 million in fundamental research that will allow electric sector organizations in California, New York, and Tennessee to develop synchrophasor applications in two important areas: reliability management and asset management.

As Hurricane Matthew bears down on Florida, the Energy Department (DOE) is monitoring energy infrastructure and coordinating responses across the federal community, state and local governments, and with partners in industry.

As part of the Energy Department’s commitment to a strong and secure power grid, DOE announced new funding to strengthen protection of the nation’s electric grid from natural and manmade hazards on September 28, 2016. More than $1.5 million will catalyze new designs of large power transformers (LPTs). Producing LPTs that are more flexible will help the energy sector better prepare for the sharing and long-term replacement of LPTs in the event of catastrophic failures. This funding will allow corporations, small businesses, and academic institutions in Georgia, Illinois, New York and North Carolina to create new designs that will help produce the next generation of LPTs.

On September 27, 2016, DOE announced that it will transition EAGLE-I to a new infrastructure platform at Oak Ridge National Laboratory (ORNL), taking advantage of the laboratory’s world-class capabilities and expertise in energy infrastructure assurance and urban resilience utilizing geospatial data and analysis architectures, and scalable performance computing environments. EAGLE-I (Environment for Analysis of Geo-Located Energy Information) is a real time situational awareness tool for the Nation’s energy infrastructure was developed by the Office of Electricity Delivery and Energy Reliability’s (OE) Infrastructure Security and Energy Restoration (ISER) division. EAGLE-I provides capabilities for monitoring energy infrastructure assets, reporting energy outages, displaying potential threats to energy infrastructure, and coordinating emergency response and recovery.

Learn what the Final Rule for the Integrated Interagency Pre-Application Process is and why its important.