In the span of about two weeks in October, the Department of Energy reached for the same statute twice, for two very different kinds of infrastructure. First came up to $50 million in Defense Production Act funding for a Virginia and West Virginia transmission project that would squeeze roughly 290 megawatts of additional capacity out of existing lines using advanced conductors and dynamic line ratings. Then came up to $42 million in DPA funding for the Constitution Pipeline, a 125-mile natural gas project from Pennsylvania into New York that was proposed more than a decade ago, approved, blocked, and abandoned — and is now being revived under a national-defense banner.
Read together, the two announcements mark a genuine shift in how Washington talks about energy infrastructure. The wires project extends a thesis this publication has followed closely — that the fastest capacity is the capacity hidden inside corridors we already have. The pipeline project applies the same national-security logic to a fuel artery. What unites them is not technology but framing: both are now, in the administration’s telling, matters of national defense, and both are being advanced with a law written for wartime industrial mobilization rather than through the ordinary channels of grid and pipeline policy.
That framing deserves a careful reading, because it does real work and also has real limits. The DPA money is real, but it is not a permit, not a construction authorization, and not a guarantee that either project delivers on schedule. What it is, is a signal — and for the grid-enhancing-technologies movement, a significant one.
What the Defense Production Act actually does here
The Defense Production Act of 1950 gives the president authorities to strengthen industrial capabilities deemed essential to national defense. Its Title III is the financial-incentive arm: it allows the government to fund projects that expand domestic production capacity for critical goods and capabilities. Historically, that has meant things like critical minerals, semiconductors, and munitions components — purchases, loans, and grants to build supply, not to build infrastructure itself.
The bridge from that history to these two projects is a pair of presidential determinations. Presidential Determination No. 2026-10 identifies transmission lines and conductors, substations, and power-control and protection equipment as essential to national defense. Presidential Determination No. 2026-12 does the same for natural gas pipelines, processing, and storage. Once those determinations exist, DOE can treat wires and pipes as defense-essential capabilities and direct Title III money at them. DOE says $1 billion in federal funding has been appropriated, under the Working Families Tax Cut legislation, for energy-related projects deemed critical to national security. The Virginia and Constitution commitments are early draws on that pool.
The novelty here should not be understated. Using DPA money to directly advance infrastructure projects — rather than to bolster the supply of a critical good — is a departure from how the statute has traditionally been used. It is also, as a legal and institutional matter, a thinner instrument than it first appears: DPA funding can pay for work, but it cannot waive the permits that work requires, override a state regulator, or substitute for a Federal Energy Regulatory Commission certificate. That distinction matters more for the pipeline than for the wires, as discussed below.
The Virginia project: SPARK’s thesis, in defense dress
The Virginia project is the one that belongs most directly in this publication’s lineage. DOE announced its intent to deploy up to $50 million for Virginia Energy’s Grid Enhancing Technologies for Virginia and West Virginia Large Load Growth project. Virginia Energy, the state energy agency, would lead the proposed 48-month project in coordination with Appalachian Power, Potomac Edison, and regional partners, deploying advanced reconductoring and dynamic line rating technologies along existing transmission corridors.
The headline estimate is about 290 megawatts of additional transmission capacity across Appalachian Power’s Virginia system, delivered one to four years faster than conventional transmission upgrades. DOE’s framing is familiar to readers of our October 19 SPARK coverage: “A stronger electric grid doesn’t always mean building more power lines. Sometimes it means making better use of the ones we already have,” said Katie Jereza, DOE’s Assistant Secretary for the Office of Electricity. The department pitches the same benefits SPARK did — reduced congestion, improved reliability, and room for growing demand — with an added national-defense rationale: dependable power for communities, businesses, military operations, and defense-related industries, especially during high demand or disruptions.
The technology pairing is the same one SPARK validated at portfolio scale. Reconductoring replaces the wire on an existing line with an advanced conductor that can run hotter with less sag, carrying roughly twice the current on the same towers. Dynamic line ratings replace conservative static ratings — set for worst-case weather — with real-time ratings computed from actual conditions, unlocking capacity that operators leave on the table on cool, windy days. One is hardware, the other is information, and together they are the cheapest capacity in the system: no new corridor, no new easement, no new siting fight.
The scale, however, is worth stating plainly. SPARK was a $5.25 billion portfolio promising more than 23 gigawatts across 26 states. The Virginia DPA project is up to $50 million for an estimated 290 megawatts in one utility’s Virginia system. That is not a criticism — a focused demonstration on a real, congested system is exactly how grid-enhancing technologies earn operator trust — but it is a difference in kind. SPARK was a grid program; this is a defense-funded demonstration. Its significance lies less in its megawatts than in its precedent: the federal government is now willing to spend national-security money on the proposition that existing corridors hold the fastest capacity.
The Constitution revival: same statute, different obstacle
The Constitution Pipeline is the harder case, and the more revealing one. The project, held by Constitution Pipeline Company, LLC, would run about 125 miles of 30-inch pipe from Susquehanna County, Pennsylvania, through Broome, Chenango, and Delaware counties in New York, terminating in Schoharie County. Williams, the project developer, describes planned transportation capacity of up to 650,000 dekatherms of natural gas per day, with connections to the Iroquois and Tennessee interstate systems.
The history is what makes the DPA intervention notable. Constitution was proposed more than a decade ago and received federal approval in 2014. It was then blocked when New York regulators denied a critical water-quality certification, and the developers canceled the project in 2020 after years of regulatory dispute. The Trump administration moved to revive it in 2025, and on October 19, 2026, DOE announced up to $42 million in DPA Title III funding to advance it. The money is earmarked for eligible pre-construction and permitting activities — environmental reviews and assessments, engineering, site preparation, and the costs of securing required regulatory approvals — with remaining funds available after permits are obtained to support complementary natural gas infrastructure.
Secretary of Energy Chris Wright framed the project in consumer and security terms: “Despite America having an abundant supply of low-cost natural gas, tens of millions of Americans have limited access to this reliable energy source due to a lack of pipeline infrastructure,” he said, adding that the project would lower electricity and home heating costs and reduce blackout risk during peak demand. Administration officials have spoken hopefully about construction beginning in the spring and service in time for the winter of 2028; Williams has targeted the fourth quarter of 2028 for in-service. Both are targets pending regulatory approvals, not schedules backed by issued permits.
That last clause is the whole story for Constitution. The $42 million is a ceiling, not a statement that the money has been spent, and the funding announcement is not a construction authorization, a final investment decision, or a finding that permits are complete. The project’s original obstacle — state-level water-quality certification and the broader federal-state permitting gauntlet — is a legal and regulatory obstacle, not a financial one. DPA money can pay for the environmental reviews and engineering that a new permitting push requires. It cannot, by itself, grant the approvals those reviews support. Whether the revival succeeds will be decided in permitting dockets, not in funding announcements.
Why a gas pipeline belongs in a grid story
Readers may reasonably ask what a natural gas pipeline is doing in an electricity publication. The answer is winter reliability. In the Northeast, natural gas is the marginal fuel for electricity generation during cold snaps: when temperatures plunge, gas-fired power plants and home heating compete for the same constrained pipeline capacity, and the region has repeatedly faced the prospect of fuel deliverability problems at exactly the hours the grid is most stressed. A pipeline that moves more gas into New York and New England is, indirectly but genuinely, a grid-reliability project — it addresses the fuel side of the winter peak problem that wires alone cannot solve.
DOE’s own fact sheet leans on this logic, citing Energy Information Administration data that New York relies on supplies from other states and Canada to meet 85 percent of its total energy needs and consumes nearly seven times more energy than it produces. The argument is that expanding gas infrastructure strengthens fuel availability for both generation and heating during extreme winter weather. That is a claim about capacity and optionality, not a metered result.
There is also a deliberate symmetry worth naming. The Virginia project treats the electric grid as defense infrastructure; the Constitution project treats the fuel network feeding that grid as defense infrastructure. The national-security frame, once extended to wires, extends naturally to the pipes that fuel the plants on those wires. That logic has no obvious stopping point — which is precisely why the determinations, and the precedents they set, matter beyond these two projects.
What the DPA route changes — and what it does not
For the grid-enhancing-technologies thesis, the DPA Virginia project is a validation with an asterisk. The validation: the federal government now treats advanced conductors and dynamic line ratings as strategic capabilities worth defense money, not merely as cost-saving options in a utility’s toolbox. After SPARK’s $5.25 billion portfolio bet, a DPA commitment — even a small one — suggests the thesis has moved from program-office enthusiasm to administration-wide doctrine. If DPA funding becomes a recurring channel for reconductoring and ratings deployments, it could do for GETs what SPARK began: give utilities and grid operators a federal partner willing to share the cost of proving these technologies on real corridors.
The asterisk is that DPA funding is not a substitute for the institutional work GETs still require. Dynamic line ratings only deliver capacity if grid operators trust them enough to dispatch against them in stressed conditions. Reconductoring only delivers if outage scheduling, contractor capacity, and tower-strength analysis line up. Federal money accelerates those things; it does not complete them. The Virginia project’s 48-month window is a reminder that even the “fast” option is a multi-year build, and the 290-megawatt estimate is an estimate from project materials, not a metered result — the same caution we applied to SPARK’s 23-gigawatt figure.
For Constitution, the DPA route changes the politics more than the permitting. Federal money and a national-defense designation raise the project’s profile and signal sustained administration backing, which matters in a permitting process that has already consumed a decade. But the project still has to earn its approvals, and the history of this pipeline is a history of approvals denied. The honest way to describe the $42 million is as the price of re-entering a permitting fight with federal backing — not as the resolution of that fight.
What to watch
Three milestones will tell us whether the DPA experiment is delivering or merely announcing. The first is the Virginia project’s finalized funding agreement: whether the up-to-$50-million commitment closes on scope and schedule, and whether the 290-megawatt estimate survives contact with detailed engineering. The second is measured performance — the first reconductored corridors returning to service at higher ratings, and the first dynamic-rating deployments feeding real-time capacity into operator dispatch, with flows to prove it.
The third is Constitution’s permitting docket: whether the pre-construction work the $42 million funds produces applications that advance, and whether the approvals that killed the project last time are granted this time. That is the test of whether national-defense framing actually moves a project through a system designed to let states say no — or whether it merely pays for a second attempt at the same wall.
It is tempting to read these two announcements as a single story about an administration willing to spend defense money on energy infrastructure. That is true, as far as it goes. But the more precise story is two stories sharing a statute: one about a technology whose time has come — squeezing more from the wires we have, now with defense dollars behind it — and one about a pipeline whose obstacle was never money in the first place. The first will be judged by megawatts metered. The second will be judged by permits granted. Both judgments are still years away, and neither will be settled by the announcements that started them.