Let me set the scene for this post. A year ago I wrote about Naval Station Norfolk’s deal to purchase enough solar electricity through Dominion Virginia Power to meet 6% of its electricity needs over the next ten years. The transaction advanced the U.S. Navy’s goal of deriving at least 50% of shore-based energy from alternative sources by 2020. The terms of the deal were murky, however, and I could not elicit from the Navy what it was paying for the electricity other than a vague statement that the tariff was “consistent with the current rate structure.”
The Navy justifies the move to renewable energy nationally on the grounds that it “promotes more secure and resilient installation operations.” However, the solar farm is not located on the Naval base. Developed by a third party enterprise, Invenergy, and acquired by Dominion in order to fulfill the Navy’s needs, the 20-megawatt facility lies far to the south in Morgans Corner, N.C.
How did buying solar energy from North Carolina, as opposed to building the facility on the base itself, promote the security and resiliency of Naval Station Norfolk? If Dominion’s electric grid went down in a hurricane, cyber-attack, act of war, or whatever, the solar electricity generated at Morgans Corner could not miraculously leap over 30 or 40 miles of swamp and farmland to Norfolk. The Navy’s non-responsive response to my question: “Signing long-term contracts for renewable energy helps to increase the DON’s energy security by providing long-term cost stability and diversifying our resources.”
The Navy roped Dominion and Invenergy into the deal because it needed private-sector partners to utilize the state and federal tax credits that would bring down the cost of the project to the Navy (even though it transferred costs to the treasuries of the United States and North Carolina.) It seemed obvious to me that the deal was designed to meet the Obama administration’s renewable energy goals, not to create a secure energy source for the Navy base — at least not secure in any military sense.
Nothing came of my article. No one else seemed to care.
Then, in September 2016, the federal Government Accounting Office (GAO), published a study, “DOD Renewable Energy Projects,” of which I have only now become aware. That report examined 17 Department of Defense renewable-energy projects. Unfortunately, Naval Station Norfolk was not one of them. But I am not the only one, it turns out, who wonders if the renewable projects contribute anything to military base energy security.
While some of the renewable projects advanced DoD’s energy goals, states the report, “project documentation was not always clear about how each project was expected to … advance the department’s energy security objective or estimate the value of energy security provided.”
We found that only 2 of the projects were specifically designed to provide power to the installations in the event of a disruption to the commercial grid without additional investments. DOD officials told us that they believed all 17 of the projects in our sample provided an energy security benefit because the officials defined energy security broadly to encompass the diversification of fuel sources, among other things.
Dominion is a secure and reliable provider of electricity under normal circumstances, so DoD clearly was looking for something more. Arguably, the solar deal allows the naval station to lock in stable rates for the next 25 years or so (however long the solar panels last). But that’s budgetary security — not the kind of security that would allow the naval station to continue functioning in a national emergency when the grid goes down.
In theory, a solar facility feeding into a microgrid could seal itself off from the troubles in the larger grid. But only two military facilities appeared to have followed that path. One likely reason is that solar panels take up a lot of room. To supply Naval Station Norfolk would require thousands of panels on hundreds of acres of land, and the naval base does not have hundreds of acres available. By necessity, utility-scale solar projects are located in the boonies — away from military facilities.
Bacon’s bottom line: Relying upon solar energy to create a secure electricity supply for a military base is, except in rare cases, a hopeless task. That’s not to say that the policy was a bad one. One can come up with all sorts of reasons to install more solar capacity. They just aren’t the reasons the U.S. Navy gave us.
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