Houston Seeks to Boost Resiliency in Neighborhoods, Beginning with a Microgrid for an Outage-Prone Community
With a major medical center, a thriving port and a growing population, Houston needs energy resilience, said Angela Blanchard, chief recovery and resilience officer for the city of Houston.
Creating resilience in 12 neighborhoods
The city has a goal of creating about 12 outage-proof resilience centers, beginning with a 500-kW microgrid at the Kashmere Multi-Service Center, located in an historically African American neighborhood.
The city got a taste for power challenges in 2008 when a wind event sparked “extreme” power outages, demonstrating the need for resilient public safety and city assets, Blanchard said. “Houston has to step up its game on the resiliency front. We need to be prepared for high wind and high water, heat and flooding,” she said.
This is especially important for Houston, home to the Texas Medical Center and the largest port in the country in terms of project tonnage, she said. It’s also near the top of the supply chain for oil and gas.
Houston can’t “go down”
“No one can afford for Houston to go down,” Blanchard said.
Although a number of community and service centers exist, they don’t have power protection.
That will begin to change with the deployment of a microgrid from Enchanted Rock at the Kashmere Multi-Service Center, located in a neighborhood that has been subjected to numerous power outages caused by storms such as the derecho that surprised the city in May and Hurricane Beryl. The existing service center hasn’t been able to serve as a cooling and warming center or been able to provide residents with access to Wi-Fi, food and water during storms.
In November, the city of Houston’s mayor’s office announced it had chosen Enchanted Rock to install the permanent 500-kW, gas-fired microgrid at the multiservice center.
Houston seeks speedy solutions
“This is a big deal,” said Blanchard. One of the goals of the project is to demonstrate resilience solutions that can be scaled easily. “Piecemeal and slow is not the answer,” she said.
The city chose an Enchanted Rock natural gas microgrid, in part because the city’s “most beloved grocery store chain” – H-E-B – has been protected by Enchanted Rock microgrids, she said. In fact, after Hurricane Beryl hit Houston, H-E-B stores became sanctuaries that provided food to residents, thanks to the microgrids.
“We want the infrastructure assets in the city to be as resilient as the grocery chain,” Blanchard said. “We saw the H-E-B microgrids as demonstrating to everyone how this could be done.”
"Our longstanding partnership with the city of Houston centers on identifying and addressing their priority reliability projects — big or small — and delivering precise solutions,” said Todd Price, senior vice president of North American market development at Enchanted Rock.
The city has identified about 12 neighborhoods that it could potentially outage-proof with microgrids. With these resilience hubs, people in neighborhoods can connect with one another and learn about the risks and vulnerabilities in their area. The hubs will also provide basic supplies needed for disasters.
Taking neighborhoods off the “critical care” list
The resilience hubs would best be located in areas that have a water pump station, a fire station and a community multiservice center. Once they have backup power, the city can take that neighborhood “off the critical care list,” Blanchard said.
Despite Houston’s reputation as a center for oil and gas companies, the city wants to find solutions that are environmentally friendly, she said. Houston is not looking for quick-fix diesel generators that are less reliable and less environmentally friendly.
Since 2008, Houston has added about 1.5 million more residents, she said.
“We’re looking at a Gulf Coast that keeps expanding its infrastructure, enlarging its port and adding residents and industries of all kinds from all over the world,” she said.
Baltimore and Sacramento also want to create resilience hubs
Other cities looking to create resilience hubs include the city of Baltimore, Maryland, where Baltimore Gas & Electric in November was awarded up to $50 million in grant funding from the Department of Energy’s Grid Resilience and Innovation Partnerships program. The utility will use the funds to advance its grid modernization efforts. A portion of the funds will be used to assess the broad adoption and effectiveness of small-scale microgrids that can serve as community resiliency hubs.
And in California, the Sacramento Metropolitan Air Quality Management District envisions pairing e-mobility hubs with resilience hubs in disadvantaged communities.
For people like Blanchard who are in charge of city resiliency efforts, microgrids play an important role in day-to-day life.
“Microgrids, generators and solar, oh my! That’s my life,” she said.
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