Announcing a Blogging Slowdown as a New Energy and Security Business is Born

Dear Reader,

You may have noticed the number of posts has tapered off lately on the DOD Energy Blog. I've got to tell you that it's not from lack of interest or diminished activity in our space ... far from it.

Rather, since I departed IBM last September I've been working overtime putting my consulting business together. I've now reached the point where my focus is set, my offerings are defined, and my first partners and customers have emerged.

That means the taxiing period is over and it's time to push the throttle all the way forward and lift off ... hence, less blogging here, at least for a while.

The new business is called Bochman Advisors, and as you'll see when you visit the NEW SITE I just built, it immediately identifies its focus as "Strategic security consulting for the energy sector".  So far, this is working out as helping security companies get smarter on energy matters, and energy companies do better with security.

How to Make a Microgrid

I've been reading about, sometimes writing about, and occasionally extolling the many virtues of microgrids for some time now.  I even remember when, shortly after starting this blog, I was at a DOD energy gathering at NDU in 2008 or 2009 I think.

This perky bald guy in the row behind me said, kind of like in the movie The Graduate: "the future is microgrids." I could be wrong, but I believe that hairless wonder was Army O-6 and future DOD Energy Blogger Dan Nolan himself.  (I'll get my fact checker on that just in case.)

Since then we've copiously covered the SPIDERS program, as well as the great secure microgrid work at Naval District Washington.

Flash forward to yesterday when I came across Stuart McCafferty's "Top 6 Things to Consider When Developing Microgrids." The title says 6 but altogether it's more like 50 or 60 questions - born of his hands-on project management experience - you need to answer before moving forward.

Out of all of them the first two resonate the strongest with me:

Mission: What is the organization’s mission? How will a Microgrid help support the mission?

If your reasons for building a microgrid aren't directly related to supporting the mission, then what the heck are you doing?  Everyone's free to build their own microgrid after work on their own dime, but if you're building one at a DOD installation, then the connection to mission support has got to be a solid and not a dotted line.

After that the rest of the questions are about everything you need to think about beforehand to do it right.  For the full article click HERE.

And by the way, here's a piece on an early stage USMC microgrid project at Miramar Air Station in San Diego, where energy assurance is the major mission driver.

Image courtesy of National Defense Magazine

You're Invited to DOD "Power Surge" Energy Security Webinar

I have a one-time special good deal for you, DEB aficionados.  You are cordially invited to a briefing announcing the research findings from:

Power Surge: How the Department of Defense Leverages Private Resources to Enhance Energy Security and Save Money on U.S. Military Bases

Date: this Thursday, January 16, 2014
Time: 11 a.m. – 12 p.m. EST
Access: Click here to log into the webinar

Event Overview:

Deployment of clean energy technologies is accelerating across military installations operated by the U.S. Department of Defense, according to The Pew Charitable Trusts. Pew’s new report, “Power Surge,” examines how the military is using private-sector capabilities and harnessing innovative financing to obtain advanced energy systems. These projects are helping the Pentagon enhance mission assurance, save money, and meet congressional and executive branch requirements. The briefing will review the military’s progress on meetings its renewable energy and efficiency goals and how it’s funding the initiatives. The report will be available online starting 16 Jan 2014 at    www.pewtrusts.org/energysecurity.

Presenters:

• Phyllis Cuttino, director, clean energy program, The Pew Charitable Trusts
• Katherine Hammack, assistant secretary for the Army, energy and installations
• Scott Provinse, director of government programs, Sun Edison
• John Warner, former U.S. senator and secretary of the U.S. Navy, and senior adviser to the Pew project on national security, energy, and climate

I'll be online, and hope you can make it too!  ab

BTW, if the direct link does not work, go to www.webex.com and enter:
Meeting Number: 636 286 510, Password: Clean123

RFI Alert: USMC Tactical Energy Generation

We've posted on the great work of the Marines exFOB many times before, and I'm happy to be doing so once again to kick off 2014.

There's an RFI out for submissions on "Tactical Energy Harvesting," but rather than siphoning off watts from dormant humans encased in glass cocoons, the Marines want to leverage a fraction of the energy already generated by able bodied soldiers in motion. And there's another element related to capturing waste heat from generators.

Response due date is 21 February 2014.  I'd expect the good folks down the street from me in Natick to have some ideas up their sleeves on this, but I know there are many other sources for thinking along these lines as well.

For more details on this solicitation click HERE.

Photo credit: Extremetech.com

The Energy KPP now Crawls, no Running Yet, but Considers Walking

The concept of a key performance parameter (KPP) or metric for Energy goes back to the two DSB Reports on Energy in 2001 and 2008 and by 2009 it made it to the NDAA.

This blogger has been writing about and advocating for measuring energy to better manage energy almost since its inception.  I just searched for "KPP" and found maybe a couple of dozen posts, the first in Oct 2008.

Seemed like it was going to take forever, but I'm happy to announce to readers who haven't gotten the news via other sources that the Energy KPP is most definitely alive and in motion. Consider this guidance excerpt OSD is passing to DOD Services:

Service performs macro analysis early in requirements process considering:

• CONOPS and OMS/MP 

• Refueling assets (force structure) and capacity 

• Frequency of refueling and % assets needed at one time 

• Convoy distances (doctrine) and estimated travel times 

• RED action on BLUE logistics 

• Attrition of refueling assets 

• Security for refueling assets 

Great stuff, right? Imagine the work involved in exploring the threat vectors to blue logistics and the motivation that would give you to get this thinking baked in early.

Here's a link to a one page overview which includes a link to this somewhat jumbled presentation.

Dr. Geiss Provides Best Definition of Energy Security

Air Force DAS Energy's Kevin Geiss, in a recent panel discussion, made the case for improved and continued partnerships on energy with all of the DOD services.

Along the way, he took a turn at defining the most eternally-difficult-to-define term in our business:

Energy security is having the power when and where you need and in sufficient amounts to do the job and the ability to protect that and recover from any disruption. It's not just having the power but recognizing that there are risks.

If I may use the word zeitgeist here, Geiss is in tune with our current one. In cyber security circles in 2013, when we weren't talking about Snowden and NSA, we were talking about resilience, and that's the special sauce he adds that makes it, in my mind, the strongest, most succinct definition yet.

Knowing that despite best plans and intentions, things are still going to go wrong and orgs need to be ready to respond and recover. And learn.

Article HERE.  And thanks for the hundredth time to OSD's Ollie Fritz (must buy him another beer at Miracle of Science someday).

Sandia and Hayden on Cybersecurity Strategies for Micgrogrids

This DOD-relevant post comes to you courtesy of the good folks at the Smart Grid Security Blog.

First off, thanks to friend and colleague Ernie Hayden for writing a microgrid security post following his mini-immersion in the topic last week. You can read his write-up HERE.

In particular, want you to see something he linked to: SNL's Microgrid Cybersecurity Reference Architecture. That's Sandia National Labs, btw, not Saturday Night Live; talented though he is, Jimmy Fallon is not a contributor to this piece.

Note: the microgrid concept described by Sandia is principally for energy security in DOD use cases, for emergency fall-back scenarios. Not necessarily for improving day-to-day operations or achieving efficiencies or cost savings, though you get some of those as part of this.

An excerpt from the Executive Summary makes that concept clear:

The design of a microgrid control system needs to be more robust than that of a traditional industrial control system (ICS) for the following reasons: 

-- The microgrid is used in emergency situations and may be critical to continuity of operations of an installation

-- The microgrid must function during active attack by a capable adversary.

As such, the traditional design and implementation for an ICS may not be sufficient for implementing a robust and secure microgrid.

Of course, there are an increasing number of non-military microgrid use cases and a burgeoning technology and integration market that supports them. But my guess is all those civilian applications should go to school on how Sandia and the DOD are hardening theirs, and select from among those approaches security that's right for their own risk tolerance objectives.