I suspect this effort will keep pushing to the left as it can't happen until the DoD microgrid projects produce working equipment and until enough can be fielded to make this work.

If they can make it work, it will have clear civilian application.


As Army begins electrification push, C5ISR office aims to smooth bumps in the road - Breaking Defense

As the Army seeks to be more energy efficient between fiscal 2023 and 2027, officials with the service’s C5ISR Center told Breaking Defense they’re working on a plan to make the transition, whether its to installation microgrids or the planned electrified vehicle fleet, smoother and smarter.


The Army’s ambitious climate strategy, which it estimates will cost upwards of $6.8 billion over five years, follows three lines of efforts: installations, acquisition and logistics and training.


According to the strategy’s implementation plan, released Oct. 5, $5.2 billion of that will go to the installation line of effort, wherein the service wants to field fully electric non-tactical vehicles and reduce greenhouse gasses. The Army also wants to operationalize 55 microgrids on its installations (20 microgrids by fiscal 2024, 15 more by FY26 and then 20 more in FY27) with a total cost of $1.6 billion. (The training portion is expected to cost far less.)


The service is currently working on implementing the first set of those tactical microgrids, which will allow the service to “interconnect” power equipment in an “interoperable and smart way,” Marnie Bailey, power division chief at the Army’s C5ISR Center, told Breaking Defense in an interview this week.


“You’ll have things like generators and power distribution boxes, which are kind of like your breaker boxes at your house, and then your loads,” Bailey said. “And you want to be able to connect those together in a way that’s simple for the users and that you can optimize the use of your energy, your available power to meet your loads. So that’s things like being able to turn on and off your generators or connecting kind of energy storage systems to maximize your power.”


She added that the development of the tactical microgrid standard (TMS) has underpinned a lot of the research the Army has been doing in that area. TMS is an interoperability standard that allows devices to plug and play together, and that’s what the Army wants to do with its power systems, Mike Gonzalez, expeditionary power and environmental controls branch chief at the C5ISR Center, added.