Planning for the Next Blackout: Optimizing the Use of Distributed Energy Resources

Given recent blackouts and concerns of terrorist attacks, some public and private organizations are taking steps to produce their own heating, cooling, and power in the event of future, potentially prolonged, outages. For example, military installations, such as Fort Bragg in North Carolina, and the Marine Task Force Training Command in Twentynine Palms, California, turned to combined heat and power and other distributed energy technologies to reduce costs and simultaneously manage their energy and reliability needs. While these individual efforts can help ensure reliability for these facilities, public policies continue to discourage most individual public and private entities from making such investments. As a result, communities across the country are not adequately prepared to protect human health and ensure safety in the event of a prolonged emergency. Significant cost savings and social benefits can accrue if parties interested in emergency preparedness, energy efficiency, and environmentally preferred technologies, come together to identify and implement win-win solutions. This paper offers recommendations to help federal, state, and local governments, along with utilities, jointly plan and invest in cleaner distributed energy technologies to address growing reliability needs as well as environmental and emergency preparedness concerns.