As climate change continues to worsen, more frequent and severe weather events exacerbate threats to our energy security. One of the small, veteran-owned businesses working to strengthen the energy infrastructure is Converge Strategies. Converge Strategies is a consulting company founded in Boston, MA back in 2017. They mainly focused on the intersection of advanced energy, resilience, and national security. With the mission to work within three areas of opportunity to strengthen America’s prosperity and energy security, Converge Strategies helps build partnerships between private companies, state and local government, and the military to develop and deploy new energy resilience technologies, create policies and programs that support energy assurance, and assess and secure critical civilian infrastructure. Since 2017, they’ve expanded to the District of Colombia working closely with the Department of Defense (DoD) to assess its energy infrastructure and ways to make the energy systems more resilient to the effects of climate change.
The DoD established its Energy Resilient program back in 2012, where they collaborated with the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) Lincoln Laboratory (MITLL) for their energy assessment. They completed their first black start exercise in 2018 in collaboration with MITLL and Converge Strategies. The black start exercise is a, “Tabletop exercise that investigates responses and capabilities during an extended simulated outage,” which, “…provides awareness of actual system capabilities during a real outage”(Castillo, 2020). Ever since then, the DoD has been consistently conducting black start exercises on various military installations across the country. According to the DoD more than 30 energy resilience base assessments and exercises had been completed between 2012 and 2020.
David Sandalow (2012), the secretary of energy, delivered remarks at the Columbia University Energy Symposium back in 2012 after Hurricane Sandy caused detrimental effects along the East coast, “… modern society depends on energy services… without electricity, many grocers can’t sell food, traffic lights don’t work, hospitals can’t treat patients, refineries can’t operate, without a steady supply of petroleum, today’s transportation system cannot function.” (Sandalow, 2012). By conducting these black start exercises, the military will gain a better understanding of what the infrastructure weaknesses and capabilities are under an energy blackout event. With this better understanding and where possible, military installations can strengthen and reinforce energy infrastructure but also adapt to identified weaknesses or gaps through subsequent contingency planning. This will help support thousands of people residing and working in surrounding communities by making the community itself more energy resilient as a result of their adjacency to the military base and these capabilities.
Castillo, Ariel. “DoD Installation Energy Resilience.” Office of the Assistant Secretary of Defense for Sustainment. 6 Apr. 2022.https://www.acq.osd.mil/eie/Downloads/IE/MERC%2028%20Oct%20Panel%20IER%20v2.pdf
Black Start Exercise Train the Trainer T3_CSO_r1 – Opportunity.pdf https://www.ll.mit.edu/sites/default/files/2020-07/Black%20Start%20Exercise%20Train%20the%20Trainer%20%20T3_CSO_r1%20-%20Opportunity.pdf
David Sandalow’s remarks as delivered at the Columbia University Energy Symposium, Hurricane Sandy and Our Energy Infrastructure, Nov. 2012, https://www.energy.gov/articles/hurricane-sandy-and-our-energy-infrastructure.