At the Miramar Marine Corps Air Station in San Diego, marines and sailors can prepare to deploy on missions – even during regional power outages.
For more than a decade, the facility has been developing on-site energy resources, including solar arrays and a power plant that generates electricity from landfill gas.
Ordinarily, the energy generated from these resources feeds the electricity grid.
But Mick Wasco, utilities and energy management director at the installation, says his team realized that they had an opportunityto build a microgrid system in order to provide complete energy resilience for the installation.
The system enables the Marine Corps Air Station to disconnect from the grid and power critical operations independently using the on-site energy sources and battery storage.
“And so at commander’s discretion, we would be able to isolate non-critical services on the base and prioritize the critical ones,” Wasco says, “to ensure that MCAS Miramar is the place that is relied upon in a contingency event, if the Marine Corps needs to carry out its mission without utility power.”
Reporting credit: Sarah Kennedy/ChavoBart Digital Media