Tag Archives: resiliency

Electric Grants and Broadband

The U.S. Department of Energy finally announced the first round of grant applications for funding that was created by the Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act. While these grants are aimed at improving the electric grid, any projects built with these grants could also build some fiber. The grants will total $13 billion. It’s worth noting that 30% of the funding will go to small utilities that sell no more than 4 million MWh of electricity per year.

There will be $10.5 billion in grants from the Grid Resilience and Innovation Partnership, or GRIP grants. Within the GRIP grant program are three separate programs:

  • $2.5 billion will go to grid resiliency grants to provide infrastructure to improve the survivability of the electric grid from weather-related and other events.
  • There are $3 billion for smart grid grants that can be used for projects that add intelligence to the electric grid.
  • Finally, $5 billion in grants is aimed at grid innovation. This grant is looking for creative ideas for improving the electric grid.

The other grant program is the Transmission Facilitation Program, which will provide $2.5 billion to improve the long-haul electric grid between communities.

The first and immediate round of funding for the GRIP program will be for $3.9 billion, with additional rounds of funding being announced next year. Unlike broadband grants, the first-round GRIP grants are on a rapid timeline. It took the DOE over a year to announce the specifics of the grants, but there are almost immediate deadlines coming. The White House has said that it wants to see more of the infrastructure spending being used, and this timeline will see grant awards made in 2023.

  • Anybody interested in applying for the smart grid or resiliency grants must submit a concept paper by December 16 that explains the proposed project. Concept papers for the innovation grants are due January 13. Concept papers for the transmission grants are due February 1. The DOE will have to accept a concept paper in order for an applicant to move on to the next phase of the grant application.
  • Full grant applications for the smart grid, grid resilience, and innovation programs will be due in March, April and May, respectively.

All of these grants could propose building fiber as part of the solution. Fiber is a way to get more brains into the electric grid and as a tool for making networks more resilient. There is no reason why any constructed fiber from these grants couldn’t serve the dual role of supporting a broadband network.

The short timelines for the first round of funding are going to make it a challenge for anybody that doesn’t already have a grant proposal on the drawing board. It seems unlikely that anybody who hasn’t already done so could create a partnership with an electric company and meet the concept paper deadlines. But electric companies can do this quickly, and I would expect that municipal electric companies and electric cooperatives will propose concept papers that will both improve the electric grid and also improve fiber infrastructure.

These grant announcements are a wake-up call for communities that have not already had discussions about how to improve the electric grid. There is still time to create partnerships for future grant cycles, but the time to start these discussions is now.

According to the DOE, these grants are only the down payment for the funding needed to improve electric grids. Jennifer Granholm, the Secretary of Energy, says the country might need to triple transmission capacity by 2050. Unfortunately, there were insufficient votes in the Senate to approve a large amount of proposed additional funding for the electric grid.

The Demand for Middle-Mile Fiber

The deadline for the NTIA’s middle-mile grant program just closed, and the NTIA said that it received 235 applications totaling $5.5 billion in grant requests for a $1 billion grant program. Applicants in parts of Florida, South Carolina, Puerto Rico, and Alaska were given more time to apply due to recent natural disasters, so there may still be a few more requests. I think the program would have received many more requests, but folks already assumed it would be massively oversubscribed.

I was surprised when the IIJA legislation allocated only $1 billion to middle-mile fiber. That works out to only $20 million per state. That may sound like a lot, but to put it into perspective, California set aside $3.25 billion of its ARPA funding just for middle-mile. The one billion is nice, but it is not nearly enough to satisfy the nationwide need for more fiber backbones reaching into rural areas and connecting cities.

What exactly is middle-mile fiber? It’s the fiber used to connect communities to the Internet. Middle-mile fiber brings the transport that is needed to serve last-mile ISPs, cell towers, and any large broadband users like hospitals, factories, or other key anchor institutions.

It’s easy to understand why middle-mile fiber is needed. Much of rural America is connected to the Internet by a single fiber route provided by one of the big rural telephone companies. If there are fiber cuts or problems with the electronics on the only existing fiber route, an entire region will lose broadband. Just over the last month, I’ve talked with three counties that have experienced broadband outages this year that lasted from half a day to several days. It’s easy to imagine in today’s world how these outages can decimate a local economy.

Middle-mile is needed for several reasons. First, some of the fiber routes reaching remote areas were built in the 1980s and 1990s and are aging. There have been big improvements in the manufacturing of fiber since then, and new fiber is expected to have a much longer expected life, but some of the fiber built in those years is wearing out. Part of the problem with older fiber is that we used poor construction techniques decades ago, where we tugged fiber through conduits and created small stress points that went bad prematurely – we are much gentler with fiber installation today. Aerial fiber reaching into rural areas tends to follow the main roads, and aerial fibers have likely been cut over time from accidents that broke poles or storm damage.

The other reason we need more fiber is resiliency. Until recently we used the word redundancy to describe this need. Redundancy meant building fiber into rings so that a single fiber cut wouldn’t knock out a town or region from broadband. Resiliency stretches that definition further to talk about building fiber in such a way that it is better protected from fiber cuts and can be repaired more quickly.

The final reason we need more middle-mile fiber is cost – monopoly providers tend to charge a lot for transport on monopoly routes. Prices tumble when there is middle-mile competition.

Grants are needed to build rural middle-mile fiber because there is likely not going to be enough revenue on most rural fiber routes to justify funding a middle-mile route with normal financing. Grant funding for middle-mile makes the statement that rural communities are important. It doesn’t do much good to build rural last-mile networks if there is no affordable and reliable way to bring bandwidth to the new networks.

It will be interesting to see how the NTIA spreads the funding. I have to imagine that some of the grant requests are from states or groups of counties asking to build large statewide or regional networks. It’s likely that most of the grant requests hope to build fiber routes that immediately solve existing problems. But unfortunately, more than 80% of the requests are not going to get funded. Maybe the great demand for this grant program will prompt Congress to find more funding for middle-mile. It’s one of the best investments they can make.

Embracing Resiliency

For years the industry used the word redundancy when talking about how we protected our networks. The primary aspects of redundancy are having multiple fiber routes in place so that areas don’t become isolated if a fiber is cut or having enough spare electronics to quickly recover from problems.

But in recent years, we’ve started to talk about resiliency, which encompasses redundancy but means a whole lot more. Resiliency means taking proactive steps to prepare against reasonably expected problems of all sorts. There are many examples of how network owners are thinking in terms of resiliency.

For example, we’ve recently started seeing prolonged power outages or brownouts in Texas, parts of California, and elsewhere. This is due to a number of reasons like aging electrical grids, hotter temperatures putting stress on local electric networks or worsening winter ice storms. We’ve seen fiber network owners deal with this problem in several ways. One is to design networks with fewer powered locations. This is one of the biggest benefits of fiber PON networks compared to active electronics – but this can be applied to any network design with good planning. Fewer powered nodes mean fewer sites that need backup power and generators.

Another way to increase resiliency is the increased use of solar power. For small devices needing power, solar is a good alternative to wiring to the grid. But even for larger devices and locations, a good solar array can provide enough power to keep batteries charged.

One of the newest problems hitting networks in many parts of the country is the increase in average temperature and an increase in hot days each year. There are some clever solutions to the heat problem. One is to use reflective paint on huts and other devices to keep heat out – this can be very effective for larger air-conditioned huts. Another strategy for smaller network elements like cabinets is to install shade over the unit by deploying what looks like a sail. In some extreme cases, we’re seeing new kinds of cabinets on the market that come with air-conditioned doors to hold down the heat inside of a unit.

Much of the west is seeing a lot more fires than in recent years. One of the most commonsense strategies being used is to severely cut back on vegetation near huts and cabinets to decrease the vulnerability to fire damage. I also have clients who are more aggressive in areas with aerial wires to keep up with tree trimming programs.

We’ve also seen larger and more frequent floods in recent decades, including in areas that never had bad floods before. The most immediate step to protect against flooding is to make sure to have no electronics in basements or even on first floors if avoidable. I’ve not seen it yet, but I expect more network owners will consider a step taken for many years by telcos located in hurricane areas, which is putting huts and cabinets on stilts to keep them out of range of floodwaters.

I’ve also been having a lot more discussions with clients in recent years about burying networks. Most network builders have elected the lowest-cost option when building a network, and this has often meant putting fiber on poles. But when considering the total life cycle cost of operating the network, it’s becoming clear that in many cases fiber is a lower-cost option. I have one client that lost a new fiber network to fires last year and is replacing all routes with buried fiber even though the cost is significantly higher.

Another aspect of resiliency that is becoming more important is to have a mutual aid plan – to be part of a group that will respond when there is a network disaster. This means providing aid to others when there are problems, but having a swarm of technicians to help fix problems in your own network can be a lifesaver.