On Monday, February 27, the Grid Deployment Office (GDO) of the Department of Energy (DOE) provided a webinar to help grant applicants for its Grid Resilience Innovation Partnership (GRIP) program. The purpose of the webinar was to emphasize the emphasize certain aspects of the program, as applicants prepare final applications.
The first point of emphasis was that GRIP is expected to be a HIGHLY COMPETITIVE program. The DOE noted that over 700 initial “concept papers” had been submitted. It also reminded applicants that its intent is to only make 90 awards. Ten awards for the resiliency program, of which 144 concept papers were “encouraged” to file a full application, although technically 289 were eligible to continue. The statistics for the Smart Grid and Grid Innovation programs were slightly less frightening as they DOE expects to issues 25-40 awards for each of those programs. Even so, DOE received 326 concept papers for Smart Grid awards, of which it encouraged 157 to continue. It received 135 concept papers for Grid Innovation, although its determination on those will not be made for a few more days.
The second point of emphasis was how important an applicants Community Benefit Plan (CBP) would be to the overall selection of winners. The evaluation of the CBP is worth 20% of the overall “score” for any application. And DOE made a special point of reminding applicants that a CBP will be required for ALL grant programs funded by BIL. DOE also reminded applicants that its expectation is that an applicant’s CBP will be key to differentiating the winners from a field of regulated utilities where most companies have similar technical and program management capabilities.
Finally, the DOE emphasized how important it was for the CBP to have been developed with input from the community and to represent an integrated approach to working with the community to achieve DOE’s eight key policy objectives.
BRIGHTspot Partners, Inc. (BPI) has been working with several applicants for GRIP grants since the Funding Opportunity Announcement (FOA) was first released. BPI has been emphasizing the same three points: (1) that applicants must understand the DOE is looking for applicants that will “partner” with the DOE to achieve the DOE’s goals; (2) that the selection of DOE partners will be HIGHLY COMPETITIVE, and based largely on the CBP; and (3) that winning CBP’s must focus on how the applicant can use its “Muscle Power” to come alongside the community to help connect the dots between the needs of the community and the BRIGHT future in which they can thrive.
This is why we created the CBN. It is the platform for connecting the dots. It aligns projects to purposes. It aligns opportunities to the skills needed to take advantage of those opportunities. It aligns applicants, to beneficiaries, to community leaders, and to the individuals that can find the “good-paying jobs” that the BIL is all about.
If you haven’t already joined the CBN, you should do so today.
Even more, if you are an GRIP Applicant, you should consider BPI’s offer to enter into a Community Benefit Agreement (CBA) as a way to establish a highly integrated, no-risk, approach to engaging your community.
If you are interested in establishing a CBA with BPI, simply use the Learn More link to contact us. Select “GRIP Applicant” from the “Area of Interest” field and drop us a note in the “tell us how” box. We’ll get back to you immediately with an approach that we think will meet you needs.