Energy Security and Resiliency for the Texas National Guard

Abstract

The Texas Military Department (TMD) faces energy security issues due to the dependency of electricity from the grid that can be disrupted in case of a natural disaster like Hurricane Harvey hitting Texas. This motivates us to generate electricity at the location using locally available renewable sources, reducing TMDs dependency on the grid and giving a sense of energy security. The fall in the price of renewable energy over the last few years makes them a suitable candidate for harnessing greener energy and establishing an independent micro grid. Most of these renewable energy sources are intermittent in nature which takes our focus on storage options, along with greater reliance on more reliable energy sources such as biomass and natural gas. This study targets the electricity consumption of Camp Swift on an annual basis. From the optimization results we can learn that we can produce over 40% of the energy through renewable sources which is which is higher than the state average of 18%. This results in a total cost of about 2.7 million USD out of which about 62000 USD is kept for running costs while 2.33 million USD is the expected cost of setting up this grid. By using Biomass and Natural Gas, in conjunction with Solar and a Diesel Generator, the system is able to produce 5.5 million kWh of electricity against annual demand of less than 2 million kWh which can be used to sell electricity back to the grid in the event of a grid failure or via net metering enabled smart meters.