Seabees from Naval Mobile Construction Battalion 1 drilled three 800- to 1,000-foot holes in the area to assist the U.S. Navy Geothermal Program Office in their research of local geothermal energy potential.
The Office of the Assistant Secretary of Defense, Energy, Installations, and Environment (OASD(EI&E)) is leading energy resilience initiatives to ensure that the DoD has the ability to prepare for and recover from energy disruptions that impact mission assurance on military installations. Further, energy resilience encourages the necessary planning and capabilities to ensure available, reliable, and quality power to continuously accomplish DoD missions. DoD continues to pursue a number of initiatives to enhance the energy resilience of its military installations, which are detailed in the following.
On December 16, 2013, as an initial step in its energy resilience initiatives, the OASD(EI&E) released its DoD Electric Power Resilience memorandum. This initial step realized the existence of key resilience policies and requested Defense Components’ adherence to them. It directed an electric power resilience review to examine installation adherence to key resilience policies, identify gaps in policy, and engage with the Defense Components to define future energy resilience requirements. The OASD(EI&E) has led an Energy Resilience Working Group, established in December 2012, with representation from the Defense Components to better understand energy resilience requirements to enhance mission assurance on its installations.
From January 2014 to August 2014, DoD continued to lead its power resilience initiative to examine installation adherence to key energy resilience policies. As a result of the review, DoD found that several policies already exist to provide guidance to Components and installation commanders to ensure energy resilience of military installations. Further, DoD is now pursuing an update to installation and facility energy policy that will help raise awareness and prioritize important energy resilience requirements. This update will assist Components to better align energy requirements with critical DoD missions, encourage integrated and holistic energy solutions beyond typical standby generators, and support continued performance to already existing requirements. These existing requirements include the appropriate sizing of energy generation systems as well as maintenance, fueling, and testing of energy generation systems.
On April 28, 2015, the OASD(EI&E) commissioned a study to investigate business case analysis approaches for energy resilience. An important objective of the study is to identify energy projects that improve energy resilience and are cost effective on military installations. The study will consider broad, cost effective energy resilience solutions to improve mission assurance on military installations.
DoD continues to build on its energy resilience partnerships with its Federal partners and the private sector. Collaboration with local utility providers, as well as state and local emergency management agencies, is critical to enhance the resilience and rapidly restore the commercial electric grid. The DoD continues to collaborate and engage with its Federal and private sector partners to enhance the resilience of the commercial electric grid.
DoD has a reporting requirement under Title 10, U.S.C §2925(a)(11) to provide information to Congress on utility outages at military installations. To comply to this reporting requirement, DoD conducts a survey of utility outages on military installations resulting from external, commercial utility disruptions of its electric, gas, and water utilities lasting greater than eight hours. In fiscal year 2014, DoD Components reported one hundred and fourteen utility outages at United States and overseas locations. The utility outages were primarily a result of electric disruptions, of short duration, and resulted from natural or reliability related issues. The full details of this survey can be found in the DoD’s Annual Energy Management Report, located at the following: Energy Management Reports
