Analyzing Mission Impact of Military Installations Microgrid for Resilience

Abstract

This article develops a method to model, analyze, and design military microgrids with the objective to improve their resilience in the face of disconnections from the larger electrical grid. Military microgrids provide power to installation and base facilities to enable base mission objective accomplishments that are related to national security. Previous research, tools, and methods for microgrid design and assessment do not adequately address resilience in terms of accomplishing mission objectives and instead primarily focus on economic outcomes. This article proposes a novel metric to quantify microgrid resilience in terms of its ability to minimize the impact of power disruption on missions supported by the microgrid. The metric is used in a novel design method to ensure an islanded military microgrid can continue operations while disconnected for a two-week duration. Our model examines the ability to continue mission operations subject to various microgrid disruptions as well as equipment reliability.

Energy Resilience Impact of Supply Chain Network Disruption to Military Microgrids

“…While operating in island mode, local generation sources (e.g., diesel generators, photovoltaics (PVs), etc.) provide power to critical loads and may be supplemented via energy storage systems (ESSs) [13,14]. • INTELLIGENT.…”

“…Threats to microgrids include component reliability, natural weather phenomena (e.g., hurricanes, floods, climate change, etc. ), environmental changes, and other forces capable of disrupting power flow from the utility grid [14,28]. Microgrids designed for military use are particularly susceptible to various forms of deliberate attack (physical [29], human, and cyber [30]).…”

“…DoD Instruction 3020.45 [32] recognizes that energy resilience efforts addressing risks to critical infrastructure directly support the "Mission Assurance Construct", a DoD-wide process to identify, assess, and monitor the risks to strategic missions. As such, a holistic approach based on risk and associated impact is required to effectively design a military microgrid [14,33].…”

“…Some researchers have adapted MDI into an overarching resilience metric or methodology. In Peterson et al's [14] approach, energy resilience is quantified by expected electrical disruption mission impact (EEDMI), wherein MDI provides the input to mission impact per unit time [86]. Moreover, Beaton [87] and Kain et al [36] incorporated EEDMI in their investigation of resilient microgrid configurations (ESSs and nanogrids).…”

“…Existing research [10,14,22,25,36,79,80,86,87,143,144] has repeatedly identified SCN disruption as a significant threat to military microgrids. However, to our knowledge, the downstream impact has yet to be quantified.…”