The White House on Thursday announced new executive actions, including those at military facilities, to accelerate integration of renewable energy and storage into the electric grid.
The Navy and Air Force in particular announced three specific new projects and activities each as part of this administration effort, the White House said in a fact sheet.
The Navy will begin a new 50-11 MW grid-scale battery project to be developed by a third-party developer at the Naval Weapons Seal Beach, Calif.; a new seven MW solar photovoltaic (PV) system with a six MW (18 MWh) battery system to be developed by a third-party developer on the local grid as Naval Base Ventura Country (NBVC), Calif; and a battery second use (B2U) pilot project in Indiana with Naval Support Activity Crane, Duke Energy [DUK], and other stakeholders to repurpose the Navy’s fleet of decommissioned submarine batteries into distributed energy resources to serve mission-critical loads.
The new solar PV system in California is planned to serve NBVC during electric outages and would cover over 65 percent of the base’s peak load for up to 3 hours. The B2u project will illustrate if the Navy’s battery fleet is repurposed rather than recycled it can grow the Navy’s overall battery capacity to 44 MWh by 2019, the White House said.
The first of three Air Force programs under this initiative includes the service’s Resilient Energy Demonstration Initiative (REDI) announcing the release of a Request for Information (RFI) to energy developers and technology companies to provide energy assurance services to critical facilities at Beale AFB, Calif. The REDI program simultaneously announced the launch of a new energy assurance collaboration with industry at Beale. The REDI program develops and deploys “innovative energy resilience technologies and business models” and plans to create a comprehensive energy assurance plane for Beale by the end of 2016.
The Air Force Research laboratory and Hawaii Air National Guard also jointly announced the launch of the design phase of a new distributed energy microgrid project at Joint Base Pearl Harbor-Hickman. The project plans to demonstrate the ability to integrate and demonstrate several renewable energy and energy storage technologies as well as provide the ability to power critical mission assets during electricity disruptions.
The final Air Force energy announcement was the launch of the Forward Operating Base of the Future project at Joint Base San Antonio (JBSA). This project plans to integrate renewable energy, energy efficiency, and energy storage technologies in a simulated deployed environment. It is also expected to reduce fuel requirements for forward operating bases by over 85 percent.
Combining these military actions, other executive actions, and 33 state and private sector commitments, the administration expects at least 1.3 gigawatts of additional storage procurement or development over the next five years.
“President Obama believes in the need to transition to a cleaner, more reliable, and affordable 21st century power grid. Under his leadership, transformations in how we produce and consume electricity are decreasing carbon pollution, scaling up renewable energy, and generating savings on consumers’ energy bills,” the White House said in a statement.
Along with the announcements the White House concurrently hosted a Summit on Scaling Renewable Energy and Storage with Smart Markets. The event brought together regulators, power companies, municipalities, and energy developers leading efforts to promote smart electricity markets and greater electric grid integration of renewable energy and flexible resources like energy storage, the administration said.