Infrastructure Resilience Briefing — January 17, 2024

Executive briefing: The U.S. Department of Energy awarded $366 million across 17 projects on January 17, 2024 under the Transmission Siting and Economic Development (TSED) program, backing new high-voltage lines and community readiness along major data-centre corridors.

Key infrastructure signals

Multi-state corridors. Funded projects include the Grain Belt Express upgrades, Nevada’s Greenlink West expansion, and Mid-Atlantic offshore wind interconnections—each reducing congestion on lines serving hyperscale campuses.
Community agreements. TSED grants require host-community benefit plans, including workforce development and broadband investments that influence site-selection risk profiles.
Permitting accelerators. DOE paired awards with Federal Permitting Improvement Steering Council coverage, giving recipients accelerated National Environmental Policy Act (NEPA) timelines.

Control alignment

NERC TPL-001 & CIP-014. Update impact assessments and physical security plans to reflect new transmission topologies and construction schedules.
ISO/IEC 27001 A.17. Link continuity and load-transfer runbooks to DOE construction milestones so redundancy assumptions stay valid.

Detection and response priorities

Integrate DOE project telemetry—public milestone dashboards, outage notifications, community consultations—into resilience watch lists for each impacted campus.
Model interim outage scenarios caused by line cutovers; pre-stage generator fuel and modular data-centre loads around construction windows.

Enablement moves

Engage state energy offices and regional transmission organizations early to align hyperscale expansion timelines with TSED-funded build-outs.
Update supplier-risk registers to include local benefit commitments (training, procurement) embedded in DOE cooperative agreements.

Sources

Zeph Tech aligns grid-dependency roadmaps with DOE transmission investments so infrastructure teams can forecast capacity, permitting, and community obligations.