To bolster and update the country’s aging power grid, the U.S. Department of Energy awarded $34 million in grants to 12 projects in 11 states.

The grants are part of the Grid Overhaul with Proactive, High-Speed Undergrounding for Reliability, Resilience and Security (GOPHURRS) program, and support President Biden’s Investing in America agenda to build strong and secure energy infrastructure across the country. Grants were awarded to projects aiming to lower costs, reduce inefficiencies, minimize extreme weather-related disruptions and accelerate the adoption of clean, renewable energy.

“Modernizing our nation’s power grid is essential to building a clean energy future that lowers energy costs for working Americans and strengthens our national security,” said U.S. Secretary of Energy Jennifer M. Granholm.

One particular focus of the program is the development of innovative approaches to burying power infrastructure. The electric power distribution systems stretches over 5.5 million line-miles with over 180 million power poles. These are vulnerable during severe weather and are chiefly responsible for most power outages. As climate-fueled weather extremes increase in frequency and ferocity, more citizens will be affected. But underground power lines are protected from weather.

Among the projects chosen are:

• Arizona State University (Tempe, Ariz.): $4,263,082 to create a water-jet underground construction tool for deploying medium-voltage electrical cables and conduits simultaneously. This lowers the risk to existing utilities by eliminating the need for a hard drill bit.
• GE Vernova Advanced Research (Niskayuna, N.Y.): $3,674,998 to develop a robotic worm tunneling construction tool for digging and installing conduit and cables for underground distribution power lines in one step without surface disruption. This could be deployed from a standard pickup truck and install 1,000 feet of cable and conduit in 2 hours.
• Melni Technologies (Twin Falls, Idaho): $2,000,000 to redesign and develop medium-voltage power cable splice kits that streamline connections, thereby reducing human error by up to 90%. The kits will improve the reliability of underground electrical power distribution systems and could be installed in 10-15 minutes.
• Oceanit (Honolulu, Hawaii): $3,276,836 to develop a look-ahead subsurface sensor system that can detect what lies beyond a drill bit. This would avoid damaging existing utilities when undergrounding powerlines by incorporating machine learning interpretation and high-resolution imaging capabilities to provide real-time guidance for the drill path. 
• Pacific Northwest National Laboratory (Richland, Wash.): $3,750,000 to develop an artificial intelligence system capable of autonomously processing data from geophysical surveys into a digital twin to identify existing utilities and other obstacles belowground in just minutes. According to the DOE, this could eliminate weeks of analysis, visualization and reporting.
• Prysmian Cables and Systems USA (Highland Heights, Ky.): $4,500,000 (the largest grant) to develop a hands-free power cable splicing machine capable of operating in underground vaults. This could reduce the number of splicing-caused errors to less than 5% (from the current 60%–80%).
• Sandia National Laboratory (Albuquerque, N.M.): $1,400,000 to develop a drill-mounted cross-bore detector that could use narrow-band ground-penetrating radar. This would eliminate hitting existing utilities while installing new buried lines.