During a visit to Wisconsin on Thursday, President Joe Biden and U.S. Department of Agriculture Secretary Tom Vilsack will announce more than $7.3 billion in financing for rural electric cooperatives to build clean energy for rural communities across the country through the Empowering Rural America (New ERA) program.
Together, New ERA and other investments in rural clean energy in the President’s Inflation Reduction Act make up the largest investment in rural electrification since President Roosevelt signed the Rural Electrification Act into law in 1936 as part of the New Deal.
Collectively, the 16 selections announced today – funded by the administration’s Investing in America agenda – will leverage private investments of more than $29 billion to build more than 10 gigawatts of clean energy for rural communities across the country. The selectees announced today will reduce and avoid at least 43.7 million tons of greenhouse gases annually, equivalent to removing more than 10 million cars off the road every year.
These projects will create good-paying jobs, lower energy costs for rural communities, significantly reduce pollution, enhance the resiliency of the nation’s electric grid, and advance the Biden administration’s Justice40 Initiative. The 16 selectees will use New ERA funds to:
- Deliver cleaner, more affordable and more resilient electricity to approximately 5 million households across 23 states, representing 20% of the nation’s rural households, farms, businesses and schools. The states served by this set of selectees include Alaska, Arizona, California, Colorado, Florida, Illinois, Indiana, Iowa, Kentucky, Michigan, Minnesota, Montana, Nebraska, New Jersey, New Mexico, Nevada, North Dakota, Ohio, Pennsylvania, South Dakota, Texas, Wisconsin and Wyoming.
- Support more than 4,500 permanent jobs and 16,000 construction jobs.
- Reduce pollution by 2.9 billion tons over the lifetime of the projects, or more than 43.7 million tons of greenhouse gases annually, equivalent to removing more than 10 million gasoline-powered cars off the road.
- Build or purchase over 10 gigawatts of clean energy – including 3,723 megawatts of wind, 4,733 megawatts of solar, 804 megawatts of nuclear and 357 megawatts of hydropower – and make enabling investments in transmission, substation upgrades, and distributed energy resource management software, lowering energy costs for rural Americans and enhancing grid resiliency, all of which will help meet growing electricity demand and power President Biden’s manufacturing renaissance.
- Build 1,892 megawatt hours of battery storage, which increases grid reliability and significantly reduces outage times for local customers.
