GA to receive $16M to strengthen power grid

Take you back to the White House for a live look at Washington, D.C., where some major federal funding has been announced for the state of Georgia. Good news, as Georgia is in line for more than $16 million in federal funding to help strengthen our power grid. The Energy Department says the goal is fewer power disruptions, lower energy costs. So joining us now is Katie Harisa. She is the assistant secretary for the department's Office of Electricity. Katie, thanks for being with us this afternoon. A lot of money now flowing into Georgia. How's the money going to be used? Are we talking about targeted specific projects here? Yes, these are going to be targeted projects that are prioritized according to their impact on shortening the duration of outages and actually trying to prevent them while we're at it. So these investments have been under consideration by the states and utilities. And what we're trying to do is leverage our federal investment with the state and the utilities so that we can maximize the impact of the investment. It says that it could also help lower energy costs, and that would be great news for consumers like me. How does that work? How would actually customers see a lower cost in their utility bill? So how this would work is we provide new conductors, advanced conductors that allow more power to flow through the power lines. So that means you can do that through existing infrastructure. So you don't have to spend money on building a new transmission line and you can see those results much faster. We're also using other types of technologies where we can, if it's not a very hot day and we know that we can send more power through, we have sensing technologies that will allow more power through. So it's all about getting more power through the existing infrastructure. And when you're not building that, you don't have to invest in very expensive, long-term infrastructure. So that's part of how we can lower those investments. But the second part is when you save money when the power does not go out, or if it does, your recovery is much faster. So we all know that reliable, affordable electricity is foundational to our prosperity so if we keep those lights on when you flip the switch the power is on then that's how we can save money so i know here when we have a storm or even some gusty winds outside the power can go out because um in a in a good part of the metro atlanta area the suburbs excluded because they buried a lot of their power lines our power lines are above ground there's tree branches and what have you, and transformer stations that we have to deal with. How is that going to be sort of reinforced? And is there any goal or objective to bury some of these lines so that they're not so susceptible to just a gust of wind that might have brought down a branch or something? Well, when we can underground the wires, that can give you sometimes greater than a 50% reduction in the number of outages. That's what we've been seeing on average around the country. And the other part is when you can't underground it and you've got to, tree branches are a very common cause of outages. But if we have sensing equipment or what we call automatic reclosers, sometimes a branch will fall on a line and then it will blow off. But rather than creating a short, it will reclose the line and re-energize it so that the power can be delivered. Where in the past, it might create an outage that could take hours, where instead it would take literally seconds for it to reclose and re-energize. So those are two examples of how we could do a better job with keeping the lights on. So we got a lot of money headed to our state, thanks to the energy department. How soon is it going to reach us? And when should people start seeing improvements out there? So what we're doing today is we're announcing the availability of these funds. This is the fifth year. So we're taking years four and five to provide these results. And what the states will do is they will allow they will ask for proposals and will take about 120 days for them to submit their applications. And then the decision will be made. But we already have Georgia has already received about $24 million from the first tranche of money, and those projects are underway, and we're starting to see some of those impacts today. So we'll see some from the prior years, but this set of funding we should see within the next six months to two years. Well, losing power is one of the biggest consequences of some of these storms rolling through here. And it can be really, really inconvenient for so many people. So it's good to see that it has the federal government's attention and that you all are participating on the state level of improving our grids and power infrastructures. Katie Harissa, live with us from Washington, D.C. this afternoon. Katie, thank you so much. Thanks for having me.