Massive Federal Transmission Rebuild Funds Will Soon Flow to Projects

The U.S. Department of Energy is closing in on a timeline for disbursing $80 billion allocated to electric grid upgrades contained in the Bipartisan Infrastructure Law passed by Congress. In this episode of Grid Talk, host Marty Rosenberg talks with Michelle Manary who is the Acting Deputy Assistant Secretary for Energy Resilience Division in the Office of Electricity at the U.S. Department of Energy. The discussion focuses on when and how the money from the infrastructure package will be spent.“I would love to see it [flowing] this calendar year. That is a goal but we’ll see what happens there,” said Manary. There’s a lot of planning that goes in to allocating the funding.“That hat $80 billion-ish to the DOE comes in several different flavors and so everything’s kind of continuing on from solar and battery and kind of that generation or storage-side but you also have probably about $20-ish billion or so on the transmission side.”Manary also talks about the collaborative nature of the new programs. “We’re trying to set this up, so it works for the industry.”Michelle Manary helps lead DOE's division focused on national transmission infrastructure policy issues in support of national clean energy objectives. She came to the Department of Energy from the Bonneville Power Administration where she served as executive vice president and chief financial officer. Manary joined BPA in 1998 and successfully held several management positions within the agency’s Corporate, Power and Transmission organizations.Manary holds a Bachelor of Science in finance from Linfield College in McMinnville, Oregon, and Master of Business Administration and Public Administration from Willamette University in Salem, Oregon.