In a July 15 court filing, the Department of Energy admitted it terminated 321 grants in October 2025 because of how each recipient’s state voted in 2024 — and not because of anything wrong with the projects themselves. The total came to $7.56 billion, spread across 16 states that voted for Kamala Harris and sent two Democratic senators to Washington.
It wasn’t a surprise. OMB Director Russ Vought called the billions “Green New Scam” funding meant to “fuel the Left’s climate agenda” in a post on X just days before the original terminations. This month’s filing confirmed a motive nobody seriously doubted.
Much of the $7.56 billion did fund decarbonization and clean energy work, like California’s $1.2 billion ARCHES hydrogen hub, terminated in the same October purge. But the largest single grant, $630.6 million awarded to California for a transmission upgrade, has nothing to do with any of that.
CHARGE 2T, short for California Harnessing Advanced Reliable Grid Enhancing Technologies for Transmission, secured one of 26 awards from DOE’s Grid Deployment Office. The office administers GRIP, the Grid Resilience and Innovation Partnerships program, which has no climate mandate. DOE has since rebranded GRIP as SPARK, and its own language for the new program says the goal is expanding capacity and reducing costs for consumers, not cutting emissions, the same justification Congress used when it created the original program through the Bipartisan Infrastructure Law, passed with Republican votes.
CHARGE 2T exemplifies what lawmakers were looking for. DOE awarded CHARGE 2T to a consortium led by the California Energy Commission, alongside the California Public Utilities Commission, CAISO, PG&E, and Southern California Edison, in August 2024.
The $630.6 million federal award, paired with more than $1 billion in state matching funds, was meant to restring 100 miles of existing transmission line with higher-capacity cable, install sensors that let those lines carry more electricity in real time, and build a new interconnection portal to speed up how quickly new generation connects to the grid.
Grid-enhancing technologies specifically, the sensors and advanced conductors CHARGE 2T would install, typically unlock more than 20% additional capacity on existing lines and cut congestion costs by half, and can often pay for themselves within two years. Transmission congestion cost the country more than $12 billion in 2024, the fourth straight year above $10 billion, while national electricity prices rose 7.4% in the year through April. Upgrades like CHARGE 2T were planned to push those numbers down. DOE canceled it while they were climbing.
The savings on the line
California projected the CHARGE 2T upgrades would save ratepayers $200 million by easing transmission congestion.
That’s modest next to the $734 million the state’s grid lost to congestion in 2024 alone, and consistent with what similar projects have delivered elsewhere. Pennsylvania utility PPL Electric spent under $1 million on dynamic line rating for three of its most congested lines and projected $23 million a year in savings from that alone.
Those potential savings, however, weren’t enough to save the federal funding — though there’s now a chance it will be reinstated. After the grant’s termination in October, California sued in February 2026, arguing DOE had no authority to claw back money Congress had already appropriated; earlier this month a federal judge rejected the administration’s bid to dismiss the case.
Nine months after the money stopped, CHARGE 2T remains canceled but not closed, its $200-million promise unrealized, even as the state needs the capacity, and savings, more than ever.
California’s own grid planners are already recalculating for growth nobody had priced in when CHARGE 2T was awarded. CAISO’s board approved a $6.7-billion transmission plan in May, more than half of it driven by load growth the state didn’t anticipate a year earlier.
The Bay Area’s projected peak demand growth rate rose from 2.21% to 3.95% in a single planning cycle as data centers cluster there. The California Energy Commission expects data center demand on the CAISO grid to reach 4.9 GW by 2040, and CAISO is already studying 4.5 GW of it in the current planning cycle alone.
The entire appeal of grid-enhancing technology like CHARGE 2T’s is that it adds capacity to wires that already exist, on a timeline measured in months, while new transmission lines take the better part of a decade to permit and build.
The broader GRIP context
Latitude Intelligence checked all 321 terminated awards against their self-reported descriptions filed with the federal government, rather than against how officials characterized them afterward. Almost none of the 26 Grid Deployment Office awards frame themselves around cutting emissions. They run the gamut from new transmission to grid software to distributed energy programs, but nearly all of them describe their purpose in terms of capacity and cost, the same two things DOE’s own SPARK program now says it exists to deliver.
The second-largest of the 26, $464.5 million, funds the Joint Targeted Interconnection Queue, or JTIQ. This project was planned to develop five new transmission lines between MISO and SPP, the grid operators covering the Upper Midwest and Great Plains, built to unlock 28 gigawatts of generation currently stuck waiting to connect. Under MISO and SPP’s own cost allocation rules, 90% of that project’s cost falls to the generators trying to interconnect and 10% to the customers who eventually use the power.
Pulling the federal share doesn’t make that cost disappear; it just means both generators and ratepayers have to pay more.
JTIQ, arguably even more so than CHARGE 2T, is an example of DOE shooting itself in the foot politically: The lines the lines for the project run through Iowa, Kansas, Minnesota, Missouri, Nebraska, and both Dakotas, a list that includes the very states that put Trump in the White House.
