High on the list of this month’s Department of Energy grant funding cuts is money for five electricity transmission projects that would open new channels for Great Plains energy to flow into the central United States.
The canceled $464 million federal award would have helped pay for the $1.8 billion cost of building power lines to connect two regional grids spanning much of middle America — a project meant to move wind power across state lines and eliminate bottlenecks that are contributing to rising electricity prices.
Seen through the lens of President Donald Trump’s priorities, the power lines would appear to be just the kind of federally backed conduits for wind power that he and his closest advisers abhor. Seen through another lens, the canceled DOE grant threatens a grid expansion that should fit squarely inside the White House’s “energy dominance” agenda, grid officials say — bolstering infrastructure to move more electrons from all sources onto U.S. power grids.
The decision to kill funding for the Minnesota-based effort to build the power lines comes after DOE in July stripped another giant electricity project of federal financial support: a $4.9 billion loan guarantee for the Grain Belt Express, a 780-mile, extra-high-voltage line that would bring massive amounts of wind power from Kansas to the eastern grid, PJM.
In Minnesota, a planning process called the Joint Targeted Interconnection Queue is conceived as a first-of-a-kind partnership between two big regional grid operators: Midcontinent Independent System Operator and Southwest Power Pool. MISO runs the high-voltage grid in all or parts of 15 states from Minnesota to Louisiana, and SPP flanks MISO’s western border and delivers power from the Dakotas to Texas.
Rather than investing in one or two supersized transmission projects, JTIQ planners pinpointed choke points that restrict power flows along the two systems’ common boundary and leave both grids less secure. The DOE grant would have shifted some of the upfront investment in new transmission to federal taxpayers.
“Without these investments, Minnesota could face higher energy prices, slower infrastructure development, and increased burdens on low- and middle-income households — all while demand for clean, affordable energy continues to grow,” the Minnesota Department of Commerce protested after the White House lumped the grant cancellation in with $8 billion in cuts announced on Oct. 1.
At the project’s beginning in 2020, planners assumed that wind and solar power would be the main beneficiaries of greater transmission capacity, documents show. It was primarily clean energy projects that were requesting entry onto regional grids, and the most expansive scenario envisioned the doubling of wind and solar output in the central U.S.
So far, it’s unclear whether the funding reversal puts the entire project at risk.
There is no public analysis from DOE explaining why this grant and more than 300 others on DOE’s list were killed, except for the broad-brush denunciations this month from DOE Secretary Chris Wright and Office of Management and Budget Director Russell Vought.
“Nearly $8 billion in Green New Scam funding to fuel the Left’s climate agenda is being cancelled,” Vought celebrated on X.
Wright concluded in a statement that the canceled projects “were not economically viable and would not provide a positive return on investment.” House Democrats, noting that projects in blue states had been singled out, shot back, “That is a pretext for cancellations that track political talking points, not facts.”
In May, Wright released a memorandum outlining DOE’s criteria for reviewing projects.
The canceled DOE projects, and those on a longer DOE target list not confirmed by the department with $23 billion in awards tentatively listed as “terminated,” stand as a test of how the Trump administration will address unprecedented pressures that are mounting on the nation’s aging, stressed power systems.
‘Flowing across the seams’
Meanwhile, the need for the projects linking the regional grids and their value to consumers continue to grow, according to a pair of voluminous analyses, one the DOE Transmission Needs study in 2023 and the other by the grid’s security monitor, the North American Electric Reliability Corp.
As the JTIQ plan was being prepared, in 2021 and 2022, two huge Arctic storms swept through the Midwest. Winter Storm Uri paralyzed large parts of Texas and caused billions of dollars in windfall energy charges. Winter Storm Elliott triggered rolling blackouts in the Carolinas and the Tennessee Valley Authority.
Stronger links between MISO and SPP would have permitted more power to flow in these emergencies, contributing to a network that was “bigger than the weather,” as grid planners are urging.
In extreme weather onslaughts, scarce power supplies have caused spot electricity prices to erupt from hundreds of dollars per megawatt-hour to thousands of dollars, according to the 2023 DOE Needs study.
Grid Strategies, a research firm supporting transmission expansion, estimated that every dollar invested in stronger ties between MISO and SPP would pay $7-10 in benefits in weather emergencies, primarily by reducing overcrowding on lines that produce price surges.
“Consumers in the Great Plains [in SPP], and those in the Gulf Coast states [in MISO], each could have saved in excess of $100 million with an additional 1 GW of transmission ties,” Grid Strategies estimated.
Now, the surge in development of artificial intelligence data centers — a top Trump priority — is adding even more urgency to grid expansion.
By 2031, when the JTIQ projects are scheduled to come online, the biggest need for grid capacity in the central U.S. may come from data centers.
Strengthening transmission capacity along the MISO-SPP seam supports the connection of all types of new generators, and all new power users, whether data centers, factories or shale oil production, said Michael Goggin, executive vice president of Grid Strategies, in an interview.
“Generation from all energy sources flows across that seam, and all benefit from reduced congestion,” Goggin said.
Wrench in the innovation pipeline
Some grant recipients say they will challenge DOE actions. Others promise to go on even without DOE.
The Solar and Storage Industries Institute, the research and education unit of the Solar Energy Industries Association, noted in a statement that two of the institute’s grants are on the longer list of targeted projects. Both aim to increase public understanding and engagement in new power project development.
“While it is unclear if these proposed cancellations are final, there is no doubt that in cancelling grants like these, the administration would make it harder to build the energy infrastructure Americans rely on,” Institute Executive Director David Gahl said. “We will use every tool in our toolbox to defend them.”
California was a major target in the first $8 billion in cancellations.
For example, the Imperial Irrigation District has delivered hydropower electricity to people in Southern California for nearly a century. It was in line for a $18.3 million grant, which it would match, to install a system to help streamline operation, speed outage recovery, and aid in connecting renewable energy. It would directly aid disadvantaged, “economically challenged” communities in its region, potentially raising a red flag for Trump administration officials scrutinizing federal projects that benefit “woke” inclusion agendas.
“While we are appealing this, we remain focused on moving forward with the project,” said Imperial Irrigation District spokesperson Robert Schettler. “Since we won’t have the full $36.7 million that was planned for this project, we are seeing what we can trim from the original plan so that we can continue to make headway.”
Two companies on DOE’s longer list, Ascend Elements and American Battery Technology Co., also declared they will go ahead.
American Battery Technology Co. said in a filing Wednesday with the Securities and Exchange Commission that it is appealing an Oct. 9 DOE decision to terminate a $57 million grant to build a plant to manufacture lithium hydroxide for batteries. The company declined to comment, but said in the filing it would move forward with the project “regardless of the outcome of the appeal process,” noting it has raised $52 million in public markets.
The company’s stock fell sharply in after-hours trading after the filing
Ascend received two DOE grants totaling $480 million in 2022 funded by the Infrastructure and Investment Jobs Act, to manufacture components for lithium-ion batteries from recycled electric vehicle batteries at a planned $1 billion plant in Hopkinsville, Kentucky. The battery components would compete with supply that now comes primarily from China, the company said.
After Trump’s DOE took office, the company agreed with DOE to suspend the smaller, $164 million grant for one of its patented battery component products, because of “changing market conditions.”
According to the company, $206 million of the grant had already been disbursed, so the cancellation was essentially on the remaining $110 million.
DOE’s action “doesn’t change our trajectory,” Ascend Elements CEO Linh Austin said in a statement. “We will replace the terminated grant,” with private capital and investments by European partners, he added.
In a statement, DOE spokesperson Ben Dietderich said “no determinations have been made other than what has been previously announced. As Secretary Wright made clear, the Department continues to conduct an individualized and thorough review of financial awards made by the previous administration.”
If Ascend Elements’ plant opens in 2026, it would culminate development of a patented lithium recycling process that was conceived 14 years ago by scientists at Worcester Polytechnic Institute, a private Massachusetts research institute.
An unaddressed issue in the DOE cutback is the impact on the nation’s innovation pipeline that is deeply rooted in academic research centers, the path Ascend Elements followed.
University research was a primary target on the list of $23 billion DOE awards tentatively ticketed for termination. More than 70 colleges, universities and academic research institutes would lose $3 billion in DOE grants if the actions on the large termination list become final.
Speaking ‘Trump’
Some other recipients notified of canceled grants declined to comment on next steps, which could include filing an appeal with DOE, going to court, going on alone, or giving up.
The Electric Power Research Institute, the grid sector’s leading independent non-profit R&D organization, has 11 grants totaling $64 million on the large list, but EPRI’s spokesman said it was not commenting on DOE’s action.
Some companies that are trying to keep their DOE grants or get new ones have begun emphasizing Trump’s priorities in their pitches to the administration, according to people familiar with the process who were granted anonymity to discuss it.
In this dialogue, Trump is an audience of one, and his likes and dislikes rule, these sources say.
A possible example of alignment with Trump’s agenda comes from Avangrid, based in Orange, Connecticut. It is subsidiary of Spain’s multinational energy provider the Iberdrola Group, whose development of wind farms launched more two decades-plus of investment energy infrastructure. It operates in 23 U.S. states.
One of Avangrid’s major U.S. projects is a proposed power line in Maine that would connect 1,200 MW of renewable energy to the New England grid. The Biden administration’s DOE promised to purchase a key part of the power flowing through the future line, to a maximum of $425 million, through its Transmission Facilitation Program.
DOE is authorized to make such purchase commitments as an “anchor tenant” to give big competitive transmission projects more market credibility. DOE could resell any power it wound up with, but by the time the lines were built, all the capacity was expected to be purchased by utilities or customers, removing any financial commitment from DOE, planners predicted.
Avangrid’s purchase commitment is not on the DOE target list.
Although it still points out its clean energy investments, its statements this year herald support for data centers, aligning itself with Trump’s agenda.
Announcing the construction start of a solar project in northeast Oregon last month, the company noted it will help power a new data center “to support Meta’s operations.”
Christa Marshall contributed to this report.
