By Timothy Gardner
WASHINGTON (Reuters) - Four electricity transmission projects serving the U.S. southwest, southeast and New England will get $1.5 billion in public funding to improve the grid's resilience and connect customers with clean energy, the government said on Thursday.
The funds for the second phase of the Transmission Facilitation Program come from a 2021 bipartisan infrastructure law and will enable nearly 1,000 miles (1609 km) of new transmission lines in Louisiana, Maine, Mississippi, New Mexico, Oklahoma and Texas.
"We're using it to help large transmission projects get off the ground, projects that otherwise would not get built," David Turk, the deputy U.S. energy secretary, told reporters on a call.
The investments will create nearly 9,000 jobs, the Department of Energy said.
The first phase of the program, announced a year ago, is supporting grid projects in western and northeastern states.
Turk said his department will buy electricity capacity on the lines and then sell it back when new customers show up.
The projects are:
--Aroostook Renewable Project which will provide New England with access to wind power generated in Maine
--Cimarron Link a 400-mile (644 km) high voltage direct current line from Texas that will deliver power from wind and solar to growing areas in eastern Oklahoma
--Southern Spirit will build a 320-mile (515 km) line connecting the Electric Reliability Council of Texas grid for the first time with grids in the southeastern power markets to prevent outages during extreme weather events like the deadly storm Uri that hit Texas in 2022
--Southline, which will build a transmission line to bring electricity from wind power from western New Mexico across the desert Southwest.
The Energy Department said its National Transmission Planning Study found the U.S. will need to roughly double or triple transmission capacity in the three decades to 2050 in order to meet demand growth and reliability needs.
It said hundreds of billions of dollars of cost savings could be gained through transmission expansion and interregional planning.