Designing microgrids for military bases: an internship perspective

This summer, I was fortunate to be selected as an ORISE scholar to work at NPS. The internship helped me kickstart a digital twin software framework to support microgrid design for military bases. It was a fascinating experience that deepened my understanding of the distinct electrical load requirements of military installations – needs that are mission-critical, highly specialized, and frequently different from those of typical commercial facilities.

With the increasing demand for energy resilience across the electric grid, having domain-specific knowledge of load types and their operational flexibility is essential for designing robust microgrids. Selecting the appropriate generation, storage, and control technologies is key to ensuring that mission-critical infrastructure remains operational even during grid disruptions. During my time at NPS, I benefited greatly from Professor Giachetti’s expertise in military systems engineering, which I integrated with the power systems and microgrid modeling expertise of my advisor’s group, the Stanford Sustainable Systems Lab (S3L), led by Ram Rajagopal, an associate professor of Civil and Environmental Engineering.

The internship provided foundational experience for my dissertation, which focuses on artificial intelligence applied to energy systems, and it also strengthened the groundwork for our team’s project in the Stanford Sustainability Accelerator, based in the Stanford Doerr School of Sustainability: Hierarchical Microgrid for Advanced Power System Resilience and Reliability. I am excited to continue my graduate studies and look forward to seeing our software evolve into a practical tool that facilitates the design of resilient, hierarchical microgrids in a world with growing demands for power, security, and energy independence.