Employing Microgrids for Military Installation Energy Resilience

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Estimated reading time: 15 minutes

Why This Matters for Rural Electric Co-ops

This article surveys six Air Force microgrid projects, each with a different configuration and a different way of paying for it. They range from standby generation at a single substation to campus-scale combined heat and power and a geothermal district system.

This describes military installations, but the model applies to any critical facility a co-op serves, including hospitals, water treatment plants, and emergency operations centers. The transferable example is Tyndall, where a utility builds, owns, and maintains a solar and storage microgrid, serves its regular customers with it, and islands critical facilities during an outage. The rest is useful for design choices such as prioritizing critical circuits over whole-system backup, since most of these projects run on federal contracting authority a co-op cannot use.

Key Takeaways

Implementation Considerations

• Cost or Funding Requirements: Energy savings performance contracts are a federal contracting vehicle and are not available to a cooperative as the host. The transferable structure is the Tyndall lease, where a utility finances, owns, and maintains the system under a long term agreement. A co-op evaluating that needs to settle asset ownership, maintenance responsibility, and what happens at term end.
• Staffing or Technology Requirements: Microgrid controls, islanding, and black start capability require engineering depth that most distribution co-ops do not carry in house. Smaller co-ops would likely need consultant support, G&T involvement, or a partnership with the load being served.
• Time-Sensitive Information: Project statuses and dollar figures date to early 2024. The Kirtland direct current demonstration and the F.E. Warren geothermal microgrid were still in development at publication. The solar renewable energy credit values cited depend on state markets that move, and federal energy and climate program framing has shifted since publication. Verify current status before citing any figure.

Notable Examples

• Tyndall Air Force Base and Florida Power and Light, Florida: Energy Assurance Lease under which the utility owns and maintains a 175 kW solar array and 1,575 kWh battery system for 10 years, serving its regular customers between outages.
• Kadena Air Base, Japan: Standby microgrid of five generators totaling 10 MW, distributed through the existing substation with critical circuits prioritized rather than backing up the whole installation.
• F.E. Warren Air Force Base, Wyoming: 3.5 MW geothermal plant feeding a district microgrid, described as the first major geothermal generation microgrid in the Defense Department.
• Air Force Research Laboratory, Kirtland Air Force Base, New Mexico: $4.8 million direct current microgrid demonstration that removes the inverter conversion step and a common failure point.

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Estimated reading time: 15 minutes