Solutions were sought to improve the energy resilience on military installations. As defined in 10 U.S.C. § 101(e), energy resilience means the ability to avoid, prepare for, minimize, adapt to, and recover from anticipated and unanticipated energy disruptions in order to ensure energy availability and reliability sufficient to provide for mission assurance and readiness, including mission essential operations related to readiness, and to execute or rapidly reestablish mission essential requirements.

Installations have a wide variety of energy systems that deliver electrical and thermal energy to power critical missions, fuel industrial processes, and power and condition facilities. Most installations rely on the commercial electrical grid for primary power and building-level diesel generators and uninterruptable power supplies for back-up power to serve critical loads. More frequent and stronger natural disasters and threats to the commercial electric grid require new solutions to improve energy resilience and meet the energy requirements for mission assurance. Solutions such as microgrids can provide improved resilience, but multiple challenges still exist. ESTCP sought demonstrations of innovative solutions to improve energy resilience that have broad application across military installations. Of particular interest were solutions that:

• Leverage existing photovoltaic (PV) solar power within the fence line of military installations to enhance energy resilience. Existing PV systems at installations offer the potential to support energy resilience, but many were not designed with resilience as their primary goal.
• Address the dependency of electric vehicles on a secure and reliable supply of electricity.
• Provide cost effective approaches to characterize sub-building critical loads. Many loads do not require continuous uninterruptible power. Accurately identifying the required peak critical load helps reduce capital and O&M costs.
• Provide advanced load management approaches to support mission functions during a grid outage (i.e., when islanded) and provide additional revenue when grid tied. Load shedding decisions must be based on the priority of mission requirements as well as their anticipated impacts.
• Are informed by gaps and needs identified by the Installation Energy Plans and/or Installation Resilience Plans.
• Offer innovative business models for financing resilience improvements at installations.
• Innovative on-base thermal energy or electric power generation that is carbon pollution-free, provides increased resiliency through higher efficiency, or is independent of external supplies. Technologies should be cost competitive or show a viable path to cost competitiveness with current alternatives.

Proposals that included modifying or integrating with existing assets (e.g., PV array, privatized utility) that were owned or operated by non-DoD entities should have included the asset owner/operator on the project team. Proposals that addressed only unique site-specific needs or sought to demonstrate mature microgrid technologies would not be considered responsive to the intent of this solicitation.

Funded projects will appear below as project overviews are posted to the website.