Impacts of thermally efficient structures and photovoltaic sources in military microgrids

A reliable supply of electrical energy is critically important to the United States Armed Forces operating in deployed environments. Reducing energy requirements through utilizing renewable energy platforms, such as solar photovoltaics, can be effective at reducing the operational cost and risk. This work quantifies the impacts of high thermal efficiency structures with integrated solar photovoltaic sources (PV) on small to moderate size forward operating bases (FOBs). Representative demand profiles were developed and presented for FOBs with an emphasis on modeling the environmental control unit (ECU) demand. A detailed ECU model, based on real world data, is presented and corresponding FOB demand profiles are presented. An optimal selection of generation resources were determined via simulation and analyzed. The results presented here show that efficient dramatically reduce energy consumption, generation capacity and diesel fuel consumption. PV sources are also shown to be an economically viable generation resource in this application.