Connecticut will share a portion of $389 million in federal funds for electrical infrastructure projects in New England — including one in Montville — aimed at accommodating an influx of offshore wind power.

The U.S. Department of Energy on Tuesday announced it had awarded the competitive grant to Power Up New England, a joint proposal from all six New England states.

The proposal includes the expansion and construction of electrical substations or switching stations in Somerset, Mass., and in Montville. Both are intended to provide better transmission points for offshore wind power — which is brought to shore by power cables buried under the seabed — and boost the amount of power the infrastructure can handle.

The Power Up New England proposal also calls for a battery storage project in northern Maine that will help store energy produced by offshore wind.

News of the federal funds, which will need to be matched by the six states, was cause for celebration among state and local officials who recently signed a memorandum of understanding with neighboring states to collectively solicit offshore wind power bids in an effort to meet renewable energy goals.

“This selection is a strong endorsement of the New England States’ longstanding cooperative approach to solving our region’s grid challenges, including through new and innovative technologies like offshore wind and long-duration storage that will enable us to equitably and affordably transition to a cleaner and more reliable grid,” Gov. Ned Lamont said in a statement.

Federal and state officials gathered Wednesday at State Pier in New London against a backdrop of activity associated with the offshore wind industry. State Pier is crowded with turbine parts, some of which will be shipped off the coast of Rhode Island this week for the start of the installation of turbines at Revolution Wind, a joint project of Ørsted and Eversource and the first offshore wind farm to supply power to Connecticut.

The state Department of Energy and Environmental Protection is expected to announce within the next month if it plans to purchase more offshore wind power from among several bid proposals submitted to Connecticut, Massachusetts and Rhode Island.

With Connecticut residents smarting from more electrical rate hikes, state DEEP Commissioner Katie Dykes said on Wednesday the investment in the electrical infrastructure is a step toward helping to lower costs for future offshore wind projects and the cost of the power from these projects by providing “ready made points on the grid for these projects to plug in reliably and affordably.”

The investments to substations in Connecticut and Massachusetts, Dykes said, will ready the electrical transmissions system for up to 4,800 megawatts of additional offshore wind power. The 704 MW Revolution Wind farm is supplying 304 MW to Connecticut, enough to power 100,000 homes.

Funding for the project comes through the Department of Energy’s $10.5 billion Grid Resilience and Innovation Partnerships grant program, funded through the Bipartisan Infrastructure Law. Last month, Connecticut and four other New England states were awarded $450 million in federal funds for a heat pump adoption program, an effort to encourage residents to move away from natural gas and oil heating systems to electric heat pumps, which use electricity to heat and cool.

Part of the stated goal of the government’s grid resilience program is to “protect against threats of extreme weather events, lower costs to communities and catalyze additional grid capacity to meet load growth stemming from an increase in manufacturing and data centers.”

U.S. Sen. Richard Blumenthal said Connecticut residents are rightly concerned about skyrocketing electricity bills.

“It is a problem that can’t be solved overnight. We need to invest in affordable, environmentally friendly energy sources so we can lower the cost of electricity in people’s homes,” Blumenthal said. “This investment is a solid commitment to the future of energy in Connecticut and New England.”

While the timeline for the Power Up New England projects is 96 months, Eversource officials said the switching station in Montville will be built by 2031 in a remote location off Chesterfield Road.

g.smith@theday.com