Commentary: The Pentagon could help improve resilience of the US electric grid – By Beth Lachman and Aimee Curtright (Defense News) / Mar 24 2021
The recent, massive blackouts in Texas have revealed serious technical and market failures that have cost Texans dearly in terms of human suffering and economic losses. Post-mortem analyses and finger-pointing can be expected to continue for many weeks and months as the factors that contributed to the failure become better understood. However, one thing that can be said even now is that the resilience and robustness of the grid needs to be improved, especially given the likely increased occurrence and magnitude of natural disasters because of climate change.
This is where government entities that operate large facilities in the United States, such as the Department of Defense, can potentially play a role.
Military installations are large electricity customers, drawing power from the grid as well as generating electricity on site. The DoD has already begun innovative and strategic activities to install renewable energy, microgrids, battery storage and other projects that help increase installation resilience. Such projects could serve as models for collaboration between private industry and state or local governments. In addition, U.S. military installations could potentially improve grid resilience by increasing energy storage capacity throughout the system.
Because of the technical challenges associated with integrating and managing distributed energy resources, such as variable generation (like rooftop solar), energy storage technologies are increasingly important for grid stability.
