The United States electric grid will face unprecedented reliability challenges this winter, and that means the nation’s military and defense installations will also see rising energy-related risks, experts said Tuesday at a panel hosted by the American Council on Renewable Energy.
The U.S. power grid is not reliable, the national security community and the U.S. Department of Defense have concluded, said Jonathon Monken, a principal at Converge Strategies. The consulting firm works with DOD and others clients to manage the energy transition.
“The way they view it is, if they want resilient power — if they want energy assurance — then they just have to bring it inside of the fenceline because they can't trust the grid anymore,” Monken said. “That mentality should worry all of us for a variety of different reasons, not the least of which is: We need to be able to understand and meet the needs of a critical defense customer like that.”
ACORE’s webinar focused on reliability challenges that civilian and military customers could see this winter.
There is an elevated risk of blackouts across much of the U.S. bulk power system, the North American Electric Reliability Corp. warned in November in its annual winter reliability assessment. A long-term reliability assessment will be published in the next week, said Mark Olson, manager of reliability assessments for NERC.
“For this upcoming winter, we've identified a number of areas being at risk of insufficient energy supplies to meet severe winter conditions,” Olson said. Regions at risk “extend over much of the eastern two-thirds of the continent, so it's a much bigger area than we've seen in the past.”
That means military bases and defense installations also face a risk of losing power or seeing prices spike.
About 98% of DOD installations depend on private energy to function, Monken said. Severe weather has caused problems in the past.
During Winter Storm Uri in 2021, 12 out of 15 “primary defense installations in Texas lost power for some amount of time. That's a huge number,” Monken said. Power bills were affected as well. Fort Cavazos saw its monthly electricity bill reach $30 million — compared with an average of $350,000 for the month of February, he said.
Data for fiscal year 2021 shows there were over 6,000 energy outages at DOD installations across the United States, Monken added. “It's a massive number. We're talking about more than 3,000 days of lost power across all of the installations.”
One possible solution is to develop more interregional transfer capacity, panelists said.
A study looking at PJM Interconnection and the MidContintent ISO found regional transmission could reduce their need for generation capacity by 6,900 MW, said Elise Caplan, vice president of regulatory affairs at ACORE.
Transmission, and especially longer interregional lines, “can really capture the variation in resource output, the variation in consumer demand. And that can be both from renewable energy but also conventional resources that may be experiencing ... difficulty accessing fuel supplies in one region and not in another region,” Caplan said.
There is a “huge connection” between national security and transmission, said Thomas Coleman, executive director of SAFE’s Grid Security Project. “We all know interregional transfer capability will help the power grid. It will help us not only bring renewables to the market, it will also help us with existing inefficiencies that are out there.”
“There’s a lot of value to be added through transfer capability,” said NERC’s Olson. “We are going to have times where transfers are going to help solve reliability challenges.”
But the approach to grid planning must shift in order to embrace new solutions, Monken said.
“We have not fundamentally changed our approach, which is: larger reserve margins, more generating assets, add to the capacity side,” Monken said. But that “leaves some very open ended questions about interregional transfer capability, the presence of transmission, improved hardening standards, better redundancy ... these are all things that are on the table.”
