§18715b Interregional and Offshore Wind Electricity Transmission Planning, Modeling, and Analysis

Summary

Provides $100,000,000 from the Treasury for fiscal year 2022, available through September 30, 2031, to the Secretary. The money must pay for bringing together the people and groups needed to plan power lines between regions and lines that carry offshore wind power. It must also pay for planning, computer modeling, and studies about those transfers of electricity. Those studies may cover many topics, such as adding clean energy to the grid, how climate change affects grid reliability, ways to split costs for big transmission projects, coordinating generator hookups with transmission planning, effects of more electrification, power-flow modeling, linking the Western Interconnection, Eastern Interconnection, and the Electric Reliability Council of Texas, combining transmission and generation planning (including variable resources, storage, and demand-side actions), non-wire options and grid-improving tech, local economic opportunities, reviewing current rights-of-way and new corridors, and designing a national grid to connect offshore wind.