Your Daily Dose of Climate Hope: February 4, 2025
A (potential) truly UNPRECEDENTED investment in America’s grid!
In January 2025, the Energy Department’s LPO announced nearly $23 billion in IRA-funded loans for utilities to supercharge America’s grid.
Tell Congress to sustain the LPO loans for much-needed grid upgrades!
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Reasons For Hope
In the final days of the Biden-Harris Administration, the Energy Department’s dauntless LPO announced nearly $23 billion in conditional commitments to Inflation Reduction Act-funded loans for eight utilities serving nearly 15 million customers across 12 states.
This is a truly UNPRECEDENTED investment in America’s grid (coming on top of lots of other Biden-Harris grid investments, it’s the capstone of a U.S. Green New Deal!), providing the financial firepower we need to scale up the cutting-edge solutions that have been proven to ensure reliable, clean electricity. If this loan survives the legally dubious freezes and claw-backs afflicting cleantech investments under the current administration (very much TBD), a cornucopia of funding is set to catalyze a truly epoch-making surge in much-needed power transmission lines, energy storage, reconductoring, methane leak reduction, and multiple gigawatt-scale new solar and wind projects. As with the recent LPO loan for the Project Polaris grid investments in California, these projects will make use of a wide array of highly impactful new technologies to help maintain and improve America’s energy security.
“Projects planned by the utilities announced today will add much-needed transmission capacity by building new transmission lines, reconductoring existing lines, and implementing grid-enhancing technologies that will get more out of existing grid.
Additional grid modernization investments include substation upgrades, virtual power plants, and strategically placed energy storage to improve the utilization and performance of the system utilities have already built and paid for.
New generation from wind, solar, and hydropower are planned at gigawatt scale.
In addition to power system enhancements, today’s announcements include replacing over 3,000 miles of leaky natural gas distribution and main lines. These replacements keep methane, a potent near-term greenhouse gas, from escaping, which also reduces the potential for accidents and keeps communities safer.”
— U.S. Energy Department
As with other major LPO cleantech loans, it may eventually be up to Congress to determine whether vital funding like this will be sustained in upcoming budget cycles - or even disbursed at all. In an uncertain political environment, in which U.S. cleantech funding hangs under a cloud of confusion due to executive orders and court challenges, enlisting vocal Congressional champions to defend specific clean energy projects is likely to be increasingly important. Your voice can help show that American voters care about sustaining strategic cleantech investments.