“A bill to extend a program for preventing outages and enhancing the resilience of the electric grid, and for other purposes.”
No CRS summary available for this bill.
This section revises the electric grid resilience grant program, which provides supplemental funding to eligible entities (e.g., electric grid operators, transmission owners), States, and Indian Tribes for activities to reduce power line wildfire risks or mitigate disruptive events (i.e., electric grid disruptions from extreme weather, wildfires, or natural disasters). Specifically, the section (1) defines the terms Customer Average Interruption Duration Index (CAIDI), System Average Interruption Duration Index (SAIDI), and System Average Interruption Frequency Index (SAIFI) per IEEE Standard 1366 (or successor), including all outages greater than 5 minutes even on Major Event Days; (2) directs the Secretary, States, and Indian Tribes, when awarding grants, to give special consideration based on these indices over the previous 5 years, prioritizing applicants with lower reliability (i.e., higher SAIDI, SAIFI, or CAIDI scores); (3) prohibits the Secretary, States, or Indian Tribes from conditioning grant applications or giving preferences based on addressing multiple types of hardening activities, technologies, equipment, or measures; and (4) extends funding availability to FY2027 through FY2031, to remain available until expended (from FY2022 through FY2026).