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 renewable energy assets (e.g., solar PV) 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.

Demonstration Site-Specific Issues. Implementation issues associated with the Edwards AFB RESET demonstration included a delayed project timeline between award and execution of the ESTCP contract. The installation experienced staff turnover and the loss of Project Champion which resulted in deprioritization of the project from the installation leadership. There was also a lack of overall transparency regarding the Air Force Power Purchase Agreement extension/modification negotiating process, including which parties should be included, who was the decision making authority, and source of data used in negotiations.

DoD Enterprise Issues. 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.