Biden to travel to Florida, announce energy project funds

President Biden will travel to Florida Sunday to personally assess the damage caused by Hurricane Milton and announce $612 million allotted for six Department of Energy projects in regions impacted by Hurricanes Milton and Helene. 

Two Florida-based companies will receive $94 million to assist with refurbishing power grids in the area.

Approximately, 300,000 Floridians are still without power according to the FPL outage tracker. Local officials are hopeful that new funding will help bring relief to the area ravished by tornadoes and thunderstorms. 

Gainesville Regional Utilities will receive $47 million to spearhead responses for north central Florida and hopes to create a faster restoration of energy grids by distributing self-healing devices and tools that will enable local teams to dispatch linemen more precisely.

Switched Source will receive an equal amount of funding for partnership work with Florida Power and Light to deploy Phase-EQ, which optimizes power flow in distribution circuits. It’s set to increase the system’s capacity by 200 MW and improve circuit reliability.

The Department of Energy’s Grid Resilience and Innovation Partnerships (GRIP) Program is funding these long-term investments with the goal of better equipping the nation’s power grid to withstand extreme weather conditions. The Department is also supporting four additional projects across the country that will impact states like Georgia, North Carolina, Arizona, Arkansas and Tennessee among others.

These developments come as the Biden administration has been criticized, mostly by Republicans, for its hurricane response in the wake of two major recent storms.