The pursuit of energy independence on military bases has been a priority across the Defense Department for several years. This week, Fort Knox became the first installation to actually pull it off.

Using newly constructed generators, a recently-discovered supply of natural gas deposits on land beneath the base and a new microgrid system, the fort can now operate all of its facilities, including its most famous one — the Treasury Department’s massive gold repository — even while completely disconnected from the outside electric grid. As a side benefit, the project will cut the base’s energy costs roughly in half.

The Army is urging all of its bases to move toward “net zero” status for energy, water and wastewater, but the specific motivation for Fort Knox was a devastating 2009 ice storm that left parts of the base without power for a full week. The same storm served as a wake-up call for the rest of the Army: In the aftermath, it ordered all of its installations to draw up 90-day contingency plans in case of a similar incident.

“For us, the bottom line was that we had a big flaw in getting our utilities onto the installation,” R.J. Dyrdek, the energy manager at Fort Knox said in an interview with Federal News Radio. “Since then, we’ve built out 44 megawatts of decentralized power generation at our substations. And at three of those locations, we use that excess heat from the power generation to create combined power and heat where we run boilers and absorption chillers to create steam, hot water and air conditioning where it’s needed.”

Saving $8 million a year

The discovery of the gas deposits underneath the fort happened at about the same time the base was looking to solve its energy security problem. By 2012, Knox officials had entered into an agreement with a contractor to develop the wells and build the gas distribution system. The capital costs, financed through a utility energy service contract (UESC), came from the savings the fort realized through replacing gas transported from nearby utilities with the new local supply, whose mineral rights the Army already owned. Within the next 18 months, the gas wells also will be entirely paid off and owned by the government.

Initial geological studies indicate there is enough natural gas in the shale formations under Fort Knox to keep the lights on for at least 30 years, assuming the base used its own gas as its only source of electricity 24 hours a day, seven days a week.

But Dyrdek said that’s not the intention. The generators will be available for emergencies, but on normal days, they will operate only as “peak shavers,” spinning up during the parts of the day when the local electric utility charges its customers higher prices because of excessive demand on the public utility grid. About half of Fort Knox’s overall electric costs come solely from those premium prices, so using its own energy during just those portions of the day will save the base at least $8 million per year.

“The local utility company likes that a lot too, because it basically allows them to supply a constant, flat, efficient power curve to the rest of their customers where their supply matches their demand,” Dyrdek said. “They don’t have to worry about a bunch of spikes coming from Fort Knox.”

It’s unclear how long Fort Knox’s current gas supply will last even at that lower level of usage: natural gas is a renewable resource only when measured over millions of years. But Dyrdek said the base was only able to leverage natural gas in the way it has by also making use of true renewables like geothermal energy and finding ways to conserve the energy it was using before.

Creative uses of energy

Prior to the natural gas project, the base had installed enough geothermal infrastructure to heat and cool 6 million square feet of its interior facility space, meaning it no longer needed natural gas to accomplish the same task.

“It allowed us to almost eliminate the need for old-fashioned boilers and steam operations, so our usage was considerably cut over the last 10 years,” Dyrdek said. “It let us get in a position where we could use the natural gas we had to easily generate electricity for the entire installation. If we hadn’t done our conservation piece first, we wouldn’t be able to determine how to use our generators because our power consumption would be all over the place. We also have about 3.5 megawatts of solar, and even though Kentucky’s not the greatest place in the world for that, it’s a nice complement.”

The base has also found creative ways to reuse the energy that it must continue to consume no matter what.

The Army’s Human Resources Command operates a large data center on Fort Knox; those facilities are famously energy-hungry, and their rows-after-rows of servers also generate massive amounts of heat. Dyrdek said Knox has found ways to turn that heat into an energy asset rather than pumping it out into the open air. Water pipes in the data center collect heat from the servers, and on cold days, heat the workspace of the HRC staff.

“It’s actually one 900,000 square foot building. When you harvest that heat from the data center, you can use it in the rest of the building, which is 760,000 square feet. From the time we opened that building up to today, our heating costs are down by almost 50 percent,” he said. “This is basically what we’re trying to do here: conserve first, and then generate new power second.”

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