Application of a Resilience Framework to Military Installations: A Methodology for Energy Resilience Business Case Decisions

Critical mission operations on domestic military installations for the Department of Defense DoD use backup sources of power to protect against the failure of the domestic electric utility grid. This report examines the life cycle costs and availability and reliability of the current backup power solutions at military installations and compares them to alternatives for future deployments to reduce life cycle costs or to increase the availability of energy to critical mission operations. The recently released Department of Defense Instruction DoDI 4170.11 defines energy resilience as the ability to prepare for and recover from energy disruptions that impact mission assurance on military installations. In order to quantify resilience, the metric used in this report is the availability of power to on-site critical energy loads during times of grid outage. Defining which loads are critical our installations is an important part of assessing resilience options and requires close collaboration between the mission operators and installation support personnel. This assessment reviewed Service or Defense Agency warfighting missions, life, health, and safety capabilities, critical infrastructure and facilities, and other supporting installation infrastructure to better understand critical mission operations for consideration in a more comprehensive resilience framework. In order to understand existing resilience solutions and procedures for the Air Force, Army, Marines, and Navy, site visits were conducted at four installation. These site visits were performed by the study team over the course of two to four days. Backup power sources at these installations generally comprise small building-scale diesel generators with the number of generators ranging from approximately 50 to over 350 generators at a single installation.