Wildfire and Grid Reliability Act

Key Points

• This bill creates a $15 billion per year grant program through the Department of Energy's Office of Electricity to help electric utilities upgrade aging infrastructure. Grants can fund undergrounding power lines, replacing wooden poles with steel, installing fire-resistant wires, clearing vegetation, and building microgrids for community resilience.
• The program has two core goals: preventing power lines from igniting wildfires and making the grid more reliable during natural disasters like earthquakes, ice storms, heat waves, and wind storms. At least 40 percent of funding must go toward wildfire risk reduction specifically.
• Small utilities that sell 4 million megawatt-hours or less per year get special treatment: 20 percent of the total funding is reserved for them, and they only need to match one-third of the grant amount instead of the full 100 percent match required of larger utilities.
• Utilities must submit a wildfire mitigation plan or a grid reliability report to qualify for grants, and they generally must match federal dollars dollar-for-dollar. Work they have already done in the past year on grid hardening can count toward that match requirement.
• The total authorized funding is $150 billion over a decade, from fiscal years 2027 through 2036. The program must be set up within 90 days of enactment, and the Department of Energy must report to Congress every two years on how well it is working.