GAINESVILLE, Fla. (WCJB/ABC) – While visiting Florida after Hurricane Milton on Sunday, President Joe Biden announced $612 million for six U.S. Department of Energy projects in the Southeast. One of the grants will go to Gainesville Regional Utilities (GRU).
GRU was awarded $47.5 million as part of the energy department’s $10.5 billion Grid Resilience and Innovation Partnerships (GRIP) Program.
GRU will use the funding to help mitigate the effects of increasingly extreme weather in North Central Florida, “through storm hardening, as well as faster restoration through deployment of self-healing devices and tools that will enable more efficient and precise dispatching of field teams during outages,” the White House said in a statement.
Some of the improvements include:
- Replacing 10 transformers
- Replacing outdated circuit breakers with new technology
- Replacing 129 wooden poles with ductile iron poles
- Enhancing GRU’s digital meters to more easily detect and respond to outages
- Hardening and undergrounding distribution lines serving disadvantaged communities
- Building a new substation in southwest Gainesville
The grant provides funding to programs such as GRU’s Low-Income Energy Efficiency Program. It also establishes an electric lineworker apprenticeship with Santa Fe College and funds additional programs with FS and the University of Florida.
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“It’s important to point out that one of the main reasons we received this grant is because GRU is an industry leader in grid reliability,” said GRU CEO Ed Bielarski. “Because we already are innovative and reliable, DOE wants to use us as a model to further innovate and enhance our resilience and storm response, including in disadvantaged communities.”
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