DOD installations risk increasing blackouts threatening national security, experts say

The U.S. electricity grid's reliability challenges pose a national security threat, according to experts on a panel hosted by the American Council on Renewable Energy.

Jonathan Monken, a principal at Converge Strategies, a consulting firm that works with the Defense Department on renewable energy goals, said on Tuesday’s panel the DOD installations across the country experienced 6,000 energy outages in fiscal 2021.

“It’s a massive number," he said. "We’re talking about more than 3,000 days of lost power across all of the installations." Monken said.

During Winter Storm Uri, in February 2021, Monken said, 12 out of 15 primary defense installations in Texas lost power for some amount of time.

He called the number "huge."

Short- and long-term assessments produced by the North American Reliability Corporation (NERC) over the past few years have warned of increasing reliability issues in most regions of the U.S. as a result of increasing amounts of wind and solar power and decreasing amounts of on-demand generation, such as coal-fired generation. The risk exists during extreme weather events when demand is unusually high.

NERC is expected to release its annual long-term assessment next week.

Monken said that energy costs are also rising. Fort Cavazos in Central Texas, for example, saw its monthly electricity bill hit $30 million, a nearly 8-fold increase over previous years’ average.

As a result of the risks to the power supply, DOD installations are looking at ways to generate electricity internally to reduce reliance on power from the grid, Monken said.