The $1.2 trillion U.S. infrastructure bill finally passed by Congress last week and likely to be signed into law by President Biden early next week will allocate more than $70 billion toward energy projects decarbonizing the power and transportation sectors.
The bipartisan Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act includes $65 billion which will be spent on both upgrading the nation’s transmission and distribution system to better more remote clean energy resources to electric demand centers such as cities.
Clean energy advocates are celebrating the legislative victory can help facilities greater adoption of wind, solar and energy storage. The latter two are key components of microgrid projects.
The upgrades also are intended to bolster a grid system which loses about $70 billion annually to power outages impacted by increasingly destructive weather events.
In addition, the Biden infrastructure package will invest more than $7 billion in electric vehicle charging infrastructure. The president wants to build a nationwide network for 500,000 EV chargers by 2030 to accelerate the adoption of electric vehicles, reduce emissions and create a new manufacturing sector.
“U.S. market share of plug-in EV sales is only one-third the size of the Chinese EV market,” the White House release says. “That needs to change.”
The IIJA also seeks to incentivize development of clean energy resources with tax credits and additional investment.
