Retrofitting Existing Solar with Emerging Technologies (RESET) focused on developing a repeatable project structure for retrofitting existing Department of Defense (DoD) renewable energy assets with resilience technologies. RESET assessed the cybersecurity, legal, engineering, and financial feasibility of retrofitting existing solar photovoltaic (PV) generation with resilience capabilities at Edwards Air Force Base (AFB) in California. RESET also assessed the current resilience retrofit landscape and identified lessons learned from the Edwards AFB process demonstration and from interviews with more than 40 energy resilience practitioners. RESET captured recommendations that are applicable across the DoD enterprise.

A resilience retrofit is an upgrade of existing independent energy assets with energy storage technologies (e.g., lithium-ion BESS, microgrid controllers) that is configured to allow DoD installations to “island” critical loads during grid power outages. The RESET approach is primarily focused on third party-owned systems, rather than DoD-owned systems.

The resilience retrofit project was not feasible at Edwards AFB due to financing, legal/contracting, engineering, and cyber limitations - as well as a lack of Project Champion at neither the installation level nor the program office. However, lessons learned from the RESET project can be applied to future resilience retrofit projects if adopted more broadly by the DoD energy resilience community.

Lessons learned from the RESET project are outlined in the final report, Lessons Learned from Retrofitting Existing Solar with Emerging Technologies. The final report provides a staged approach for DoD to consider how a resilience retrofit initiative would move from the enterprise-level, to the military services, to the installations.

(Project Completion-2023)