Secretary Wright Announces SPARK Initiative in Allentown, Pennsylvania - September 24, 2026

We're going to get started. I'm Christine Martin, President of PPL Electric Utilities, and on behalf of PPL Electric Utilities, welcome and thank you for joining us today. Secretary Wright, thank you for being here and for your leadership and support. It's greatly appreciated. We're honored to host you, grateful for the Department of Energy's continued partnership as we work together to build a stronger and more resilient electric grid for the future. We also appreciate the community leaders, elected officials, and members of the media who've joined us for this important occasion. At PPL Electric, everything begins with our customers. Every decision we make is guided by a simple question. How can we continue providing safe, reliable, and affordable service to the more than 1.5 million customers who depend on us every day? And they expect us to prepare today for the needs of tomorrow. And that's why today's announcement is so significant. This SPARC grant for PPL Electric's Montour Grid Resilience and Advanced Reconductoring Project embodies our vision for the utility of the future. By modernizing critical infrastructure with advanced technologies, we're strengthening a key transmission corridor and nearly tripling its grid capacity while improving our ability to monitor system performance. Just as important, this project reflects our commitment to affordability. It not only optimizes the use of our current infrastructure, but the Department of Energy's funding can provide up to $71.5 million. That's half of the total project cost, helping ensure we can continue to deliver safe, reliable service while meeting the growing needs of the future. But what excites me most about this project is it's not just a transmission rebuild. It is a platform for innovation. Through this project, we'll be deploying advanced conductor technology and demonstrate distributed acoustic sensing, evaluating new tools to better understand, monitor, and operate the electric grid. The insights we gain won't stop with this project. They'll help inform future investments, accelerate innovation, and identify opportunities to strengthen reliability and resilience across our broader system. This is exactly the kind of collaboration that delivers meaningful value. Together, we're demonstrating how public-private partnerships can accelerate investments that improve reliability, strengthen resilience, and benefit the communities we serve. This award also continues a relationship between PPL Electric and the DOE that's helped drive innovation for more than 20 years. Federal support played an important role in helping us advance smart grid technologies that today automatically detect problems, reroute power, and restore service more quickly. The work we're announcing today represents the next chapter in that important journey. The future electric grid won't be built by doing things the way they've always been done. It will be built through innovation, partnership, and willingness to embrace new technologies. That's exactly what today's announcement represents, and that's exactly the future we're building for our customers. Thank you, and I'd like to invite Congressman Ryan McKenzie to the podium to deliver some remarks. Thank you, Christine, and the entire PPL team for hosting us today, and thank you to Secretary Wright, Congressman Muser, and everybody else for joining us. Pennsylvania is an energy powerhouse, and the Lehigh Valley and the Poconos deserve a grid system that promotes affordability and reliability for local families and businesses. PPL's Montour project is essential to delivering this, upgrading 29 miles of transmission lines, and significantly increasing the amount of electricity that this corridor can carry. Over the past number of decades, we've experienced significant growth right here in our community, and as our electricity demands continue to grow, we need more reliable generation and the infrastructure necessary to deliver it. But we also have to make sure that working families, seniors, and small businesses are not left paying the costs created by new and extremely large energy users. That's why I've co-sponsored and voted to pass the Bipartisan Ratepayer Protection Act, which is focused on making sure qualifying large load customers cover the infrastructure costs necessary to serve them. And it's why I introduced the Bipartisan Bill Drivers Act, so that families and small businesses have greater transparency into what is actually driving their electricity bills. By supporting the common sense, all of the above approach that strengthens our grid and keeps affordability front and center, we can give our communities a stronger future built on the foundation of Pennsylvania energy. So today's announcement brings that to light and brings that reality one step closer with this public-private partnership. I appreciate Secretary Wright and PPL working together on this project, and I look forward to continuing to work for families and businesses all across the Lehigh Valley and the Poconos. With that, I will turn it over to my colleague from the north-central part of the state, Congressman Dan Muser. Well, Ryan, very well said. Thank you, and we certainly have to thank PP&L for hosting us and who I consider to be my friend and just a great leader in the Trump administration. Our Secretary of Energy, Chris Wright, thanks again for being here in Pennsylvania. He's visited us quite a few times over the last several months, and it's very appreciated. We are an energy-producing state, a very significant one. I want to thank Christine Martin so much for everything she does, her leadership, and of course Vince Sorgi as well. They're just a great company, and that's why you received the SPARC grant, because of the care that you have, the serious approach that you take towards delivering for our constituents, for our state, helping Pennsylvania become that much more competitive with affordable energy. You know, we just had a great discussion with some really smart people, really enjoyed being with you all, and reliable energy source, affordable energy source, responsible energy couldn't have been stated more often in our discussion. And that's what we're all, in Congress, with Jared Coleman as well, in the State Senate, and in the Trump administration, and particularly the Department of Energy, we're all working towards those three goals. And from a legislative standpoint, Brian mentioned the Ratepayer Protection Act, but there's other things, of course, the SPARCs, and we have the SPEED Act as well, which is delivering some regulatory reform. So we're all in this together. We just want to continue to improve for our wonderful commonwealth, as well as our nation. So thank you very much. My honor to introduce the one and only Secretary of the Department of Energy, the best we could have chosen, Chris Wright. Thanks, everyone, for being here on this beautiful start of fall day. I love it. Look, energy is life. Get energy policy right, and you create a community with tremendous opportunity. Affordability, you attract businesses which bid up wages, you create a stronger, more thriving community. If you get energy wrong, you increase energy prices, you make it harder for people to pay their bills, businesses look for how they can exit your community. One need no look no further than California to see in the United States, if you get energy wrong, businesses, citizens flood for the exits, you get the highest adjusted poverty rate of any state in the nation, despite enormous abundant advantages. Pennsylvania is an energy powerhouse and has been for over a century. This is a state with a thriving, powerful industrial state. It will be again, it's on its way there again, but that relies critically on getting energy right. We're announcing today the Department of Energy SPARC, which is Speed to Power Through Advanced Reconductoring and Other Conductor Technologies. What a great way to make an acronym SPARC. This is projects, 31 projects across the country, from Allentown, Pennsylvania to Albuquerque, New Mexico, from Fargo, North Dakota to Tampa, Florida. All across the country, 100 million Americans will be impacted by these efforts. And what drove the selection of these projects and the winners in this, because they're all co-funded. The money we're talking about today and this tremendous enhancement of the grid transmission capabilities right here, is half funded by PPL, half funded by the Department of Energy. We're looking for people that believe in their projects, co-funding with them to make them happen faster, because this is a quick way to lower electricity prices and increase reliability. Using fibers that are already in the transmission lines to analyze what's the temperature out, what's the wind out, how can we use this transmission line to distribute more power, but safely and only in the right conditions. PPL won that and won a reward two months ago, because they focus on their rate payers, they focus on their communities to build smart, thriving communities. This sounds like common sense, and it is common sense, but 17 years ago, starting with the Biden administration and their push that led to the first Clean Power Plan, was to shelve the interest of American rate payers and say, no, no, it's not about affordability and reliability, it's about climate change. Incremental tweaks and global greenhouse gas emissions in the U.S. electricity sector are somehow going to save the world. They aren't, and we lost our way, and we started to spend money only based on decarbonization goals, forgetting American people, forgetting taxpayers, forgetting jobs and opportunity. Again, I mentioned where that led with California, led to the de-industrialization of the United Kingdom and Germany. We know where that goes. The Republicans and the huge effort to pass the Taxpayer Protection Act last summer was to bring common sense back to energy. Every project the Trump administration Department of Energy does, every project is evaluated in economics. Is that going to increase energy supply, drive down energy prices and increase energy security? Because that's how America thrives. So thrilled to be here in this great community with our great partners at PPL and our great partners in the community of Allentown. And I am one of eight Department of Energy officials that today are around the country announcing our SPARC program, announcing what it is, why we're doing it and how it's going to benefit Americans. But I think with that, I'll open it up to questions for anyone who hasn't, to any of the speakers, any of the panelists. This is a great day. This is about increasing prosperity in Pennsylvania, lowering wages, lowering prices, but growing the grid. You need both and they go together. You grow the capacity of your electric generating capacity to advance new loads. That is a pathway to lower rates. That's how communities win. You get new investment, new job opportunities, new economic growth and lower prices. This is often presented as a trade-off. It is absolutely not a trade-off. The historical data shows that as well. The states with the most expensive electricity prices, California, New York, Massachusetts, all of them produce less electricity today than they did five or ten years ago. All of the very expensive states have declining electricity production because of malinvestments and driving prices up. The states with the fastest demand growth, North Dakota, Texas, Nebraska lead that list. All of them have lower than average national electricity prices and much flatter trajectory. All of them have declining electricity prices in inflation-adjusted terms. Demand growth is your friend. It's the way to greater affordability, greater job growth, greater economic opportunities and greater national security. Common sense matters in energy most of all. Thanks everyone for being here and again open up questions for any one of us. Thank you all.