Dive Brief:

• The U.S. Navy is developing a 44-MW solar-plus-storage facility on the Hawaiian Island of Kauai, according to a draft environmental assessment.

• The facility is being built on a 200 acre site at the Pacific Missile Range Facility at Barking Sands and will be built in two phases, the first of 21 MW and the second of 23 MW. Details on the battery system were not released.

• The system would use solar power to charge the batteries during the day and discharge them at night to provide power to the local community. It would reduce the need for the Navy to operate its diesel generators and, in the event of a utility power outage, provide power to the Navy facility.

Dive Insight:

The U.S. is steaming toward a more sustainable future. Among the goals of that policy are to produce at least 50% of shore-based energy requirements from alternative sources and have 50% of Navy installations be energy net zero.

The Navy also aims to increase its total energy consumption to 50% alternative sources by 2020.

The Navy says the solar-plus-storage project at its Barking Sands missile facility, which is scheduled to begin construction no sooner than December 2017, would make it a net zero installation.

Details of the battery facility, including size and duration, were not released, and the Navy did not respond to requests for comment. The Barking Sands facility already has a small energy management system deployed as a pilot project to test solar power interconnections.

In September the Navy also began producing electricity from a wave power pilot project offshore of Oahu.

And in October the Navy and the California Energy Commission signed a memorandum of understanding to develop renewable energy projects, including three solar-plus-storage facilities.