Energy Security for Naval Station Rota, Spain: Three-year NSETTI-funded Project Concludes with Strong Results for the Navy

By Douglas Van Bossuyt, PhD, NPS Systems Engineering Department 
and
Giovanna Oriti, PhD, NPS Electrical and Computer EngineerIng Department

Three years ago, a multi-disciplinary team at the Naval Postgraduate School (NPS) including Dr. Giovanna Oriti, Electrical and Computer Engineering Department; Dr. Douglas L. Van Bossuyt, Dr. Ron Giachetti, and Dr. Andy Hernandez, Systems Engineering Department; Dr. Dan Nussbaum, Chair, Energy Academic Group; Dr. Daniel Reich, Graduate School of Defense Management; and Dr. Anthony Gannon, Mechanical and Aerospace Engineering Department embarked on a Navy Shore Energy Technology Transition and Integration (NSETTI)-funded project with colleagues at the Naval Facilities Engineering and Expeditionary Warfare Center (NAVFAC EXWC), Port Hueneme, CA; Naval Station Rota (NS Rota), Spain; and Naval Air Station Sigonella, Italy. The original mandate was to investigate appropriate energy storage system (ESS) design to operate with the new photovoltaic farm that is coming online at the Rota base, with the goal to make the naval base more resilient to electric power disruptions. The results of the three-year effort included determining ESS sizing plus many other developments to support NAVFAC energy security efforts at NS Rota and across the Navy.

The close and ongoing relationship between NPS and NAVFAC EXWC has increased the capacity and talent of both groups to better address Navy facility energy security needs in the coming years. A unique aspect of NAVFAC EXWC working with NPS is that several personnel at NAVFAC EXWC have benefited from completing certificates, master’s degrees, and PhDs with NPS in a variety of relevant fields. For instance, Dr. William Anderson earned his doctorate in systems engineering last year and contributed to the NS Rota project both as a doctoral student and as an employee of NAVFAC EXWC. Many other students including uniformed naval officers and civilian Navy employees participated in the project and have taken their newfound understanding of energy security and microgrids back to their Navy commands.

NPS augmented available skillsets through a unique collaboration with an electrical engineering group at the University of Wisconsin Milwaukee (UWM) headed by Dr. Rob Cuzner who brought to the project his 24 years of industry experience developing power generation and power conversion systems for the Navy’s new shipboard power distribution systems. The UWM team, particularly graduate student Mark Vygoder, developed models and simulated parts of Rota’s power system to evaluate the performance of candidate distribution architectures and provided recommendations for protection equipment.

Working with NS Rota has been a fruitful partnership where energy managers David Barbosa and Bryan Long have provided a wealth of knowledge on how a Navy facility operates today and where the NPS-led team has conducted targeted analysis of various parts of the NS Rota microgrid to identify areas for further resilience improvement. The NPS-led team has thoroughly answered NS Rota’s need to identify appropriate ESS sizing for their microgrid. This includes detailed analysis of the current power system configuration and valuable recommendations for new protection equipment settings which will help to improve NS Rota’s energy security over the next several years. Further, the work has resulted in a variety of tools and procedures that NAVFAC EXWC and individual base energy managers have begun to use to analyze energy security across the Navy’s bases globally. Some of the tools are available at: https://microgrid.nsetti.nps.edu/, and further information is available upon request on all of the work that has been performed.

The team was selected for a new NSETTI-funded project starting in FY22 which will enhance Naval Air Station Sigonella’s energy security through microgrid design and deployment for critical load support.