U.S. Army Corps of Engineers Awards $54.3 Million Contract for Fort Stewart Airfield Microgrid

The U.S. Army Corps of Engineers (USACE) has awarded David Boland, Inc. (Boland), a $54.3 million contract for the construction of a new power plant and microgrid at Fort Stewart-Hunter Army Airfield in Georgia. Boland is a Florida-based general contractor.

The firm-fixed-price contract includes the construction of a 10-MW natural gas power station, including the installation of underground natural gas pipelines, and integrating it with Fort Stewart’s existing substation. With a firm-fixed price contract, the price cannot be adjusted regardless of the contractor’s actual costs or efforts.

The project also includes upgrading existing relays and feeder breakers at the substation and the installation of advanced microgrid controls to improve energy resilience and reduce emissions.

The microgrid controls will coordinate the new power plant as well as existing natural gas generation assets and the Fort’s approximately 10 MW solar array. The microgrid is designed to integrate future solar capacity and battery energy storage systems as they are added to meet increasing demand.

“The new microgrid control system will match mission-critical facility loads with available supply, operating both in parallel and islanded modes,” Boland said in a statement. “It will include transfer switches, interface relays, microgrid controllers, and fiber optic communication connections.”

The project is expected to be operational in three years.

In 2024, the USACE selected Boland to construct a $42.5 million microgrid for the Joint Special Operations Command (JSOC) compound at Fort Liberty, North Carolina.

A key East Coast training and force projection facility

Fort Stewart, located roughly 40 miles southwest of Savannah, Georgia, is the Army’s premiere power projection platform on the Eastern seaboard. Spanning more than 280,000 acres, it is the largest Army base east of the Mississippi and a critical training center for large-scale operations.

Home to the U.S. Army’s 3^rd Infantry Division, the 1^st and 2^nd Armored Brigade Combat Teams and the 3^rd Combat Aviation Brigade, the garrison trains, equips and deploys active and reserve Army units in defense of the nation.

More than 10,000 soldiers and their family members live on the garrison, which employs more than 25,000 soldiers, civilian workers and contractors.

Military microgrid deployments continue

In its effort to improve energy security at its installations, the U.S. military is investing in microgrids of all sizes across the globe.

Last year, the Navy awarded $1 million contracts for the construction of a distributed energy microgrid at Naval Air Station Sigonella, in Sicily, and a battery storage microgrid on its base in Guam.

The Army aims to have a microgrid at every installation by 2034, according to its 2023 climate strategy. In September, the USACE announced it was nearing completion on a 12-MW natural gas-powered microgrid at Fort Campbell, Kentucky and new microgrids have recently come online at Fort Hunter-Ligget in California and Fort Riley in Kansas.

Mobile microgrids are also on the military’s radar. In 2023, the Army successfully powered a field hospital with a 120-kW microgrid system during a training exercise at Fort Stewart.

The Army hopes these smaller microgrids, Advanced Medium Power Sources (AMMPS) in military vernacular, will replace the 100-kW diesel generators currently used to power the temporary hospitals or mobile modular medical units that care for injured troops in the field. Field hospitals can vary in size and typically include power-dense equipment like CT machines.