Jeff St. John 09 11 09, 2:37 PM

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Grant Watch: Illinois Super-Collaboration Seeks $60M in DOE Smart Grid Grants

It's a smart grid super collaboration of sorts, made up of two universities, the Chicago city and Illinois state governments, utilities Commonwealth Edison and Ameren and "more than 50 companies," and it wants $60 million from the Department of Energy.

That grant would help finance a $120 million demonstration of a regional smart grid in action, along with smart grid technology demonstration and validation centers, the collaboration said in announcing the grant request earlier this week.

It's yet another case of utilities seeking a piece of both of DOE's smart grid stimulus grant programs, which contain a total of $3.9 billion to cover up to half the cost of various smart grid projects.

The $60 million request being led by the Illinois Institute of Technology is being made to DOE's Smart Grid Demonstration Grant Program, which has $615 million set aside to test out more experimental smart grid projects (for a rundown on applications to that program so far, see Green Light posts here and here).

But both Commonwealth Edison (ComEd) and Ameren also have applications under the larger, $3.4 billion Smart Grid Investment Grant Program aimed at commercial-scale projects (see Smart Grid Applications at $2.85B and Counting).

Ameren wants $185 million for distribution automation and other projects for its Missouri and Illinois subsidiaries, and ComEd (a subsidiary of Exelon Corp.) is seeking $175 million to help pay for a 141,000 smart meter deployment featuring General Electric and Silver Spring Networks (see Green Light post).  

Both programs are likely to see far more money requested than is available, industry watchers note. In that light, projects that contain a large number of partners – and that plan to test technologies and architectures that DOE feels are most promising – may have an advantage.