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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. 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. 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. 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. 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. 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. To save energy & cost for your business, contact me at https://buff.ly/2EjAMbu. #Reliability #EnergyStorage #EnergyEfficiency #Renewables #EnergyAudit #Procurement #Resilience https://buff.ly/4f6A1jU
