The Installation Energy and Water (EW) program area recently reorganized their research & development focus areas into two main pillars in support of Mission Assurance: resilience and efficiency. Within the resilience pillar, the program has funded several microgrid (MG) and battery energy storage demonstration projects to validate advanced MG capabilities and battery energy storage use-cases that reduce costs and improve energy security. Similarly, within the efficiency pillar, the program has funded several promising technologies that reduce DoD installation’s operating costs through more efficient system performance. At this year’s SERDP & ESTCP Symposium, EW will showcase some of these successful technologies at its technical sessions and short courses. The program will present two technical sessions: Energy Resilience Session 1: Outlook and Applications of Distributed Energy Resources, and Energy Resilience Session 2: Building Energy and Water Efficiency Solutions as well as two short courses on the cybersecurity Risk Management Framework (RMF).

Figure 1: Microgrid Configuration with Storage & Market Participation

Figure 2: Air-Source Cold Climate Heat Pump (CCHP)

The Energy Resilience Session 1: Outlook and Applications of Distributed Energy Resources technical session will highlight the role of Distributed Energy Resources (DER) in enabling installations to prepare for and recover from energy disruptions that could impact mission assurance. This session will include a panel of subject matter experts from the industry and within DoD to discuss and explore the policy surrounding DERs, its outlook and applications and solutions and challenges in microgrid implementations. In addition to the panel, there will be presentation on results from the techno-economic analysis of large-scale energy storage modeling projects, which assessed the ability of energy storage within a microgrid to provide improved energy security performance as a function of cost relative to an otherwise identical microgrid without energy storage. And, a presentation on results from the DoD’s pull-the-plug exercise, which investigated the installation site’s islanding capabilities in the event of grid outage. This session is scheduled for Tuesday, December 3, 2019, 1:45 - 5:00 PM.

Figure 3: Hygroscopic Cooling Tower

The second technical session, Energy Resilience Session 2: Building Energy and Water Efficiency Solutions, is scheduled for Wednesday, December 4, 2019, 8:30 - 11:45 AM. There are many barriers that new technologies need to overcome, especially in the energy sector, to make it to market adoption. There are many “valleys of death” that a technology/company encounter as they develop and commercialize new technology. In addition to performing field demonstrations, ESTCP is working to leverage a variety of established incubator and accelerator programs to better enable technology transfer and solution scaling. The keynote speaker of this session, Mr. Jim Saber from Next Energy, will share his experience with developing strategies and programs designed to facilitate innovation and enable transfer and commercialization of impactful energy technologies. In addition, the session will take a deep dive into the energy and water needs of the installations and present results from energy and water efficiency ESTCP demonstrations.

In addition to the technical sessions, there will be two short courses, both on cybersecurity of facility-related control systems (FRCS). The first short course is scheduled for Thursday, December 5, 2019, 8:30 - 10: AM. This course will take an in depth look into the DoD’s Risk Management Framework (RMF) requirements and the process to attain the Authority to Operate (ATO). The second short course, scheduled for Thursday, December 5, 2019, 10:15 – 11:45 AM will have a hands-on demonstration of an excel-based tool developed by an ESTCP project team to reduce the time and cost of the RMF process. The technology demonstrated is an end-to-end framework focused on FRCS Owner's in-practice RMF Self-Assessment activities. The FRCS RMF tool automates and streamlines activities where possible in RMF steps 1-3.

We invite you to join us at the symposium in December. For more information and to register please visit the symposium website.