Santee Cooper is helping other utilities acquire federal money to help strengthen the electric grid. South Carolina chose Santee Cooper to administer grant funding provided by the Department of Energy (DOE) through the Bipartisan Infrastructure Law to help protect and strengthen South Carolina’s electric grid from extreme weather events. The Grid Resilience Grant offers funding to qualifying projects aiming to reduce the number of outages and improve restoration times during extreme weather events.
As the administrator for South Carolina, we agreed to match 15% of the DOE funds each year. In 2022 and 2023, we submitted to DOE $10,766,899 in funding requests for 18 projects. Applicants included eight cooperatives, three municipal power/water utilities, and one investor-owned power company. The proposed projects are expected to impact from 87,400 residents to roughly 100 residents, depending on where the project is located.
“It has been a pleasure to work with members of the DOE, Grid Deployment Office and staff members of the National Energy Technology Laboratory, as well as working with the various electric co-ops, municipalities and other utilities as together we move through the grant application process,” said Greg Edwards, Associate General Counsel at Santee Cooper. “As the state-owned public power company, it made sense for us to be available to assist in this effort to improve our state’s power grid.”
For 2024, $5,458,242 in federal funding is available for the state of South Carolina. Santee Cooper has submitted the application for these funds on behalf of the State of South Carolina and similar to the previous funding period, awaits final approval from the DOE before opening the application process. Energy co-ops, municipalities, local utilities, transmission owners/operators, and distribution providers will be eligible to apply as soon as Santee Cooper receives administrative approval from the DOE. Projects must contain realistic and verifiable metrics to show areas of impact and improvement (metrics and resources should be sourced from acceptable, industry standard sites or tools). Questions can be sent to gridresiliencegrant@santeecooper.com.
The Department of Energy reviews the proposed projects for final approval before funds may be accessed. This portion of the Bipartisan Infrastructure Law was approved for a five-year funding period, expected to last through fiscal year 2026.