US Navy Set to Lauch Floating Macro Micro Grid

You can do a lot with 78 megawatts, including power 26,000 homes, for instance. Or you use it to run absolutely everything on one of the Navy's newest warships.

I'll let IEEE explain:

The Zumwalt’s propellers and drive shafts are turned by electric motors, rather than being directly attached to combustion engines. Such electric-drive systems, while a rarity for the U.S. Navy, have long been standard on big ships. What’s new and different about the one on the Zumwalt is that it’s flexible enough to propel the ship, fire railguns or directed-energy weapons (should these eventually be deployed), or [all] at the same time.

The Future of Naval Installation Energy is Upon Us

As projected several years ago in this great 5-minute video, paving the way for demand management, energy efficiency, microgrids, support for renewables and all manner of support-the-mission, energy security goals (with cybersecurity baked in, to boot).



From all accounts, the folks involved with this initiative are right on schedule and are meeting their objectives. Recommend you keep an eye on this.  Andy

From Position Improvement to Energy Security: The Road to the Smart Microgrid

For those who have been tracking the Smart Power Infrastructure Demonstration for Energy Reliability and Security (SPIDERS) Joint Concept Technology Demonstration (JCTD) it has been an interesting trajectory. It started out as a very ambitious smart microgrid (or Energy Surety Microgrid as Sandia Labs, the designer, calls it) project, envisioning two simultaneous demonstrations of the technology at Hickman AFB, Hawaii and Fort Carson, Colorado. The original solicitation came out on 10 August 2011, for a firm, fixed price, best value contract for both locations, with site visits on 25 August at both locations, simultaneously. On 30 August 2011, amendment 5 to the solicitation was issued deleting the Fort Carson portion of the project. Presumably, that will be addressed in a later solicitation.

This project, in two phases, is estimated to cost $5.2M with a small business goal of 50% of the overall project cost and a period of performance of eighteen months. Although this seems like a lot of work for a big firm with only $2.6M in the return, this will be about getting there “firstest with the mostest”. The company that wins this will have a leg up on what is expected to be a $5B market.

DOD has some specified tasks it must accomplish. We have listed them before: buy biofuels, reduce energy consumption, and consume more renewable energy. In the case of installation energy, there are a number of implied tasks:

• Develop systems that will provide the military effective countermeasures to asymmetric vulnerabilities associated with fragile grid conditions and escalating costs while building in mission assurance and energy security for installations 
• Provide improved solutions to energy security and clean energy requirements, enable opportunity pricing and offer cooperative environments where utilities may better service military installation needs. 
• Communications and controls that allow synchronization and load optimization

This is why DOD is, and should be, chasing the smart microgrid. In the words of one DOD senior manager, “Putting DoD as an early adopter of distributed energy management systems enables the military to help shape the standards for energy security, build business case metrics, and facilitates the adoption of alternative and renewable energy generation sources needed to better meet NetZero goals”.

In addition to the R&D effort associated with this JCTD, there are folks putting smart grids on the ground today, and in some pretty tough environments. Project Manager-Mobile Electric Power (PM-MEP) is running the Afghan Microgrid Project or AMP in Camp Sabalu-Harrison. They are receiving forward engineering support from the Research, Development and Engineering Command's Field Assistance in Science and Technology – Center, part of the 401st Army Field Support Brigade.

The team put in a one-megawatt microgrid that can replace up to 20 60-kilowatt TQGs. These Tactical Quiet Generators had been producing more than 1,300 kilowatts of power to meet a demand of less than 400 kilowatts. The situation is not atypical of spot generation in theater and, if this works, could serve as a blueprint for future operations.

Even as these R&D efforts move forward there are efforts to just be smarter in how the Services deploy energy. When units first hit the ground, every facility has its own generator. Over time, the simple process of position improvement dictates that this inefficient method be replace with some sort of mini grid. This is now being done in a significant enough effort to warrant the scrutiny of the NYT. In an article last week, Annie Snider highlighted the efforts of COL Tim Hill and the Army’s operational energy program. The system is basically just “ganging” generators together for greater efficiency, but that is a start.

At last week’s 2011 Washington Energy Summit, Dr. Dorothy Robyn, the Deputy Undersecretary of Defense for Installations and Environment said, “(The) microgrid is a triple play. It's a set of self-generated electricity and controls that allow us to operate more efficiently ... in a normal mode but [also to] facilitate the incorporation of solar, wind (and) other forms of renewable energy. And most important, if the grid goes down it will allow us to prioritize and continue to operate activities that are most critical".

It looks like the lessons from the frontline are making it back to the home front. The AMP does not appear to have integrated renewables or storage as part of its construct. Putting those into the mix would seem to be the next logical step in demonstrating the importance of the smart microgrid. From dumb, ganged minigrids to smart microgrids that provide true energy security requires government investment. Third party financing for these efforts will be challenging; tough to make the business case. The technology is mature and the results are a saving in dollars and lives in convoys and ensuring mission accomplishment at installations. Without intelligent power management, renewables are just tinkering at the margins of energy security. Dan Nolan

GovEnergy 2011 Day 1: A River of Information

GovEnergy 2011 kicked off in Cincinnati this Monday with government, industry and academia in attendance. The morning pep rally featured senior folks from GSA, DOE, EPA and DOD. The theme was “A River of Solutions” and each speaker talked about the challenges facing their organizations. In every case the challenge was energy security and finding the business case that allowed the organization to justify investment in it. A gentleman from the City of Cincinnati explained that it is difficult to make the business case for renewables when the utility rate in his city is about 5 cents a kilowatt/hour. Damn that cheap, abundant coal, water and land!

One bit of good news up front. Dr. Robyn, the Deputy Under Secretary of Defense for Installations and Environment announced that she had been given the authority to approve long term contracts (up to 30 years) for power purchase agreements for all electrical energy sources (not just geothermal). Previously this authority had rested with the Secretary of Defense. We commented on this authority earlier.

There were no less than fifteen educational tracks running simultaneously. My head was spinning but I decided to follow the energy security track and the first session was déjà vu all over again. Billed as being anchored by MG Dana Pittard, CG, Fort Bliss, it was nearly the exact same panel that formed for the Army/Air Force Energy conference two weeks before. Messieurs Geiss, Kidd and Cotton (GE) brought good things to life. Geiss and Kidd were standing in for their respective General Officers who had been otherwise detained. 

A much appreciated addition to the panel was C.A. “Skip” Cofield from the Southern Company. The Southern Company owns four of the largest utilities in the southeast and if you are talking about reducing energy use or building renewables, you MUST engage the utilities early and often. Mr. Cofield gave a great adverting pitch for the Southern Company and their demonstrated ability to recover from disasters (Katrina, Alabama tornadoes, etc.), and also added a word to my meager vocabulary: Isochronous. In power generation, isochronous means that the frequency of the electricity generated is "flat" or constant. The term was used in reference to Warner Robbins AFB and their ability to continue operations when the commercial grid goes down. Warner Robbins has a Georgia Power-owned and operated facility on base that facilitates the transition, and WR can operate isochronously. I like the word, and what it signifies re: energy security capabilities.

Mr. Kidd of the Army noted that there does not exists a mutually agreed upon definition of Energy Security. One bright, enterprising employee of the U. S. Corps of Engineers rose during the Q&A to ask Mr. Kidd if we might, please, have a definition so that all the uncertainty about what is expected of the USACE and energy security could be removed. Mr. Kidd assured her that he would get right on it….by tasking the USACE for the definition. No good deed goes unpunished. Let me offer my own humble definition:

Energy Security is the assured access to mission critical energy at acceptable financial and environmental costs in an isochronous manner.

If you want levels of energy security, you can call them mission critical, mission essential and mission supportive. Assured access is about whose hand is on the lever allowing isochronous access to electricity. If it is the utility, it is not necessarily assured. If it is the commander, then it is. And acceptable financial and environmental costs will be determined on a case by case basis.

The military is a doctrine driven institution. Doctrine provides a common language, as is the case in other professions. If we are to have energy security, we must have a common understanding of what that means.

Mr. Kidd also announced (drum roll, please) that the largest energy security information effort ever launched, was, er, launched. Fort Bliss, Texas, in support of their Net Zero energy, water and waste effort, has released nine Requests for Information for multiple technologies. Bliss wants to know about waste to energy, wind (large and small), solar, geothermal, microgrids and more. 

Industry now has until early October to provide information to Fort Bliss. An army of evaluators is even now examining the documents to decide if their companies should take the next steps. Once the RFI responses are delivered, Team Bliss will use the information gathered to craft their Requests for Proposal. So, industry: dust off the responses sent into the Air Force Civil Engineering Agency for their RFIs, paint them green and send them west (or east for you Left Coasties). Also take a look at what the USACE has requested in their Sources Sought for Power Purchase Agreements. They should be mutually supporting.

Defining energy security and attaining it will be a long slog. The processes the Services are following are lengthy, but legitimate. As Jon Power of the Army likes to say, “We’ve got the Land, We’ve got the Demand”. The river of solutions flows through industry and the Department must be a good partner if we are to attain definable, demonstrable energy security for our installations and our nation. That means transparency, consistency and the ability to maintain the course. We are all in this for the long haul and we are all in it together. Dan Nolan

Bullish on Smart-BEAR for Better Expeditionary Power Generation and Management

This is still in the development stages, so don't get too excited. But Lockheed's BEAR generator is proven, so it's not as big a leap as it might seem at first. This will be renewables supplementing diesel, plus power management, and together with storage, an enabler of a true tactical microgrid. From the press release:

Key ... capabilities include operating in both grid-tied and grid-independent modes. The system will independently sustain critical power loads when the primary grid is unavailable, supplementing conventional diesel generation with solar and wind power. The system is also designed for rapid deployment and will fit in standard shipping containers.

And with SkyBuilt as a partner for the mobile renewables integration and packaging, this indeed looks promising.Skybuilt may be familiar to long-time readers of this blog, and was first covered here back in 2008.

Here's the full release, and while we're at it, you can see the Air Force's own statement of objectives for this system right here. Oh, and here's why the base systems is called BEAR: it's actually "Basic Expeditionary Airfield Resources." Acronym writers working overtime .... When ready to field, hopefully the other services will get to try Smart BEARs as well.

Latest GAO Report Hits DOD Hard on Grid Reliance

Sometimes it seems like there's just too much on the DOD's plate:

• having to simultaneously kill people and build trust with communities
• with too many risks to track and mitigate, and 
• too many jobs to be done by too few folks ...
• in an increasingly constrained budgetary environment
• and I'm not even going to mention EMP (woops)

Now comes GAO telling Congress and DOD that the Department is asleep at the wheel when it comes to plans and preparation for extended power outages in CONUS and overseas. Here's a couple of excerpts from the summary:

DOD’s most critical assets are vulnerable to disruptions in electrical power supplies, but DOD lacks sufficient information to determine the full extent of the risks and vulnerabilities these assets face. All 34 of these most critical assets require electricity continuously to support their military missions, and 31 of them rely on commercial power grids—which the Defense Science Board Task Force on DOD Energy Strategy has characterized as increasingly fragile and vulnerable—as their primary source of electricity.

and

The 10 Defense Critical Infrastructure Program vulnerability assessments we reviewed did not explicitly consider assets’ vulnerabilities to longer-term (i.e., of up to several weeks’ duration) electrical power disruptions on a mission-specific basis, as DOD has not developed explicit Defense Critical Infrastructure Program benchmarks for assessing electrical power vulnerabilities associated with longer-term electrical power disruptions.

Sounds to me like this necessary work could piggyback nicely with efforts to prepare for and take advantage of new and emerging Smart Grid and microgrid capabilities. Somebody on that?  Hope so.

Don't Forget the DSB and the Brittle Grid Problem Facing DOD Installations

Eighteen months have now passed since the public release of the DOD energy security bible, otherwise known as the Defense Science Board task force report on energy: "More Tooth, Less Tail"

I submit this post now, following recent energy conferences by the Army and Marines and with a Navy conference underway, to remind readers of how far we have to go with facilities vis a vis the brittle grid problem called out by the task force. Meeting energy efficiency and sustainability mandates is one thing; providing true mission assurance by reducing or eliminating bases' near total reliance on their local electric utilities is quite another. From page 54 on "Managing Risks to Installations":

For various reasons, the grid has far less margin today than in earlier years between capacity and demand. The level of spare parts kept in inventory has declined, and spare parts are often co-located with their operational counterparts putting both at risk from a single act. In some cases, industrial capacity to produce critical spares is extremely limited, available only from overseas sources and very slow and difficult to transport due to physical size.

In many cases, installations have not distinguished between critical and non-critical loads when configuring backup power systems, leaving critical missions competing with non-essential loads for power. The Task Force finds that separating critical from noncritical loads is an important first step toward improving the resilience of critical missions using existing backup sources in the event of commercial power outage. The confluence of these trends, namely increased critical load demand, decreased resilience of commercial power, inadequacy of backup generators, and lack of transformer spares in sufficient numbers to enable quick repair, create an unacceptably high risk to our national security from a long-term interruption of commercial power.

Energy efficiency is an essential demand reduction component and has to continue to be pursued relentlessly. But bringing true microgrid islanding capabilities and mass storage to each DOD facility ... that's the true challenge of the next few years. Let's get on it.

Next post will be on a Marine Corps microgrid pilot at Twentynine Palms.

BAE and other Integrators Gearing up to Crank out Microgrids

I'll attempt follow-on posts with more more details on individual implementations, but for now here's news of a batch of integrators starting a bunch of microgrid projects. And Jeff St. John at Greentechmedia noting the applicability to DOD facilities:

BAE, for its part, joins fellow defense contractors Lockheed Martin, Raytheon, and Boeing that are entering the smart grid space, though those companies have primarily cast themselves as system integrators and providers of security for smart grid deployments. Still, microgrid projects seem to be a natural for military contractors, since military bases could be seen as one of the "critical assets" that need to keep the power on in case of natural disruption or intentional attack.

Here's the whole thing.

Woolsey Advocates Microgrids for Energy Security and Survivability, but is Storage Tech Ready?

This account of a recent appearance by Green Hawk and former CIA Director Jim Woolsey sounds good. His messages about lessening dependence on oil and coal appeal to everyone, except for maybe those whose livelihoods depend on those products.

In this and other blogs I've noted the advantages of microgrids that can be run independently of the larger grid infrastructure when necessary, isolating themselves to keep electrons flowing when their users would otherwise experience brown outs or black outs. For DOD, this would help solve the Defense Science Board (DSB)-identified challenge of bases' reliance on the brittle national grid. For the US, if deployed widely in many if not most communities, it would greatly curtail the threat of large, regional power-loss events.

Here's Woolsey on the topic:

Microgrids, which include their own backup storage systems and generation resources and can island themselves from the grid, enable organizations or homeowners to keep vital services going in the event of grid outages caused by accidents or terrorist activities.

Maybe his words were taken out of context, but it sounds like, according to Woolsey, storage is ready to go for this application. I'd like to hear much more about energy storage systems, high tech (fly wheels, advanced batteries, hydrogen, etc.) and low tech (proven batteries, pumping water up-hill, compressed air, etc.) being ready for prime time microgrid use at scales that matter. Here's the article I'm referencing. What do you think?

Federal Government Smart Grid Security Wake-Up Call

In case you don't know, I started another blog recently, called the Smart Grid Security Blog. I generally try to keep the DOD Energy world separate from the Smart Grid Security world, but as you can imagine, there are undeniable points of intersection.

Here's a post linking to a very well framed recent article by a colleague of mine. It's a great summary of key cyber security issues and actions for Smart Grid initiates. And the strategies it recommends are as applicable to Fed Gov and DOD as they are to all sectors. Think about the security controls being built in (or left out) of new DOD and DOE garrison-level microgrid deployments such as the one discussed here.

Microgrid Proving Ground for DOD Facility Energy Security

This article in earth2tech describes the award of a microgrid demonstration project to GE citing the following faulty rationale:

Military bases are largely in remote locations and have to be prepared for events that could potentially separate them from the greater power grid.

No offense, but it's not grid separation anxiety that's keeping Commanders awake at night, it's the lack of robustness of the grid itself. As the DSB 2008 energy report (and just about everyone else) warned, bases have made themselves far too dependent on the often wobbly grid.

Hopefully this project at the Marine Corp's huge Twentynine Palms installation and others like it herald change by giving bases the capability to become electricity islands when necessary. Here's a write-up on GE's own blog with a little more detail.

Cyber Security Wake-up Call on DOD Facilities Control Systems

For some, the title of this post won't make the connection to DOD energy issues immediately obvious. Well, all I can say is: think about the Smart Grid, the growing melange of old world electric grid systems and cutting edge networking and Web 2.0 software systems.

Then consider the DSB-identified brittle grid challenge to DOD bases: "Critical missions at fixed installations are at unacceptable risk from extended power loss" and the various smart and micro grid solutions being considered to help isolate them via "islanding." See this presentation delivered at the June 2009 Air Force Cyber Security Symposium for a solid intro.

Navy ID's Trouble with Grid Reliance

A recent Navy IG report on facilities energy security took a surprising twist ... surprising to the IG, that is:

The report was commissioned to recommend a privatization strategy that would allow the U.S. Navy to “get out of the energy business” by selling its substantial network of power-generation facilities to firms in the private sector.  Ironically, the principal conclusion the IG reached was that privatization would be a disaster and that the whole policy supporting privatization erroneously presumed that the private sector’s management of the power sector was superior to the public sector. 

Readers of this blog should be less surprised.

April 2009 Update from Air Force's Energy Chief

Kevin Billings shared a few minutes today, responding to three status questions I had queued up for him on: 1) the synth fuel initiative, 2) adoption of energy metrics, and 3) the Air Force's take on smart and micro grids. Here, without much embellishment, are his updates:

1) Synthetic Fuels - Certification of USAF's current inventory to run on a 50/50 natural gas-derived fuel/J-P8 blend is on or ahead of schedule. Other details include:

• More focus coming up on bio fuels
• Will down select to 1 or 2 bio fuel blends and begin new engine cert process for them

In short, USAF will be ready for its 2016 goal of using 50% alternative fuels, and is thereby making a market for these fuels. But the big question is: will industry be ready to provide new fuels in sufficient quantities?

2) Energy Metrics - Alas, Billings noted that the Energy Efficiency KPP would have been used extensively in Future/Next Gen Long Range Bomber, which Secretary Gates just recommended for deletion. But he said that USAF's acquisition arm is taking the FBCF and Energy Efficiency KPP very seriously. (I should be able to report more on that in the future.)

3) Air Force Smart / Micro Grids - According to Billings, while still in embryonic stages, new grid technologies and processes are at the forefront of USAF thinking. The primary driver is mitigation of the risk posed by the brittle national grid. The task re the smart grid is to work with utility providers to coordinate and collaborate on bringing smart sensors and other energy management capabilities on base to capture savings. The micro grid concept applies when thinking about bases as power islands, being able to run their own critical mission systems during local or regional blackouts. One of the lead agencies he referenced is the civil engineering team, AFCESA, at Tyndall AFB in Florida.

A detail I especially liked was Billings referring to the towns that host USAF bases as "community partners." He's interested in seeing if, should local blackouts occur, USAF bases could provide surplus power for critical community services. Wouldn't that be something ... something great.

Can Cars Drive DOD Micro Grids? We'll Soon See.

This is about devising the technical means for a "Plan B" so when DOD units lose the steady flow of electrons from extant power grids, they don't lose their ability to fulfill their missions. Last month's amendment to an Army Broad Agency Agreement (BAA) boosted the incentives for integrators to make headway on the "brittle grid" problem facing bases, both CONUS and forward deployed (FOBs). This action seems to build on battlefield energy management work in a program called Army "HI-Power" noted here last year.

Competitors in position to win this R&D funding are already in motion, but others who follow the space more generally may not have seen it yet. Most interesting is the provision for tapping the power storage (see: gas tanks & batteries) and power generation (see: engines) capabilities of vehicles to supplement other forms of power, including standard diesel generators, wind, solar, etc. Thanks to the Defense Logistics Agency (DLA), one thing the DOD knows how to do is get fuel to where it's needed.

The short-term schedule for those seeking the $5.7M in first year funds is: 

• Informal Talks: March 5, 2009 thru April 6, 2009 
  
• Proposals Due: April 7, 2009 thru May 7, 2009 
  
• Estimated Award Date: June 22, 2009 
  

From an energy security point of view, this is good stuff; we'll be keeping an eye on it for sure.