Background

• Natural disasters (hurricanes, wildfires, floods, wind/ice/snowstorms, etc.) cause electric power outages that many times can last several days or more.
• Power outages many times have cascading impacts on communities that disrupt their infrastructure (e.g., water, transportation, communications, fuel, etc.) and restrict access to essential services (e.g., sheltering/food, warming/cooling stations, public safety/security, health/medical, etc..).
• This lack of power is particularly acute in under-served or disadvantaged communities, which depend more on state and local government services.
• The FEMA Building Resilient Infrastructure and Communities Grant (BRIC) was created to support states, local communities, tribes, and territories undertaking hazard mitigation projects, reducing the risks they face from disasters and natural hazards.
• The BRIC program guiding principles are supporting communities through capability- and capacity-building; encouraging and enabling innovation; promoting partnerships; enabling large projects; maintaining flexibility; and providing consistency.

 
Challenges

• Many states do not have the available resources to participate in the FEMA BRIC grant program and meet its quantitative and qualitative requirements particularly for infrastructure projects with industry.
• Most rural, tribal, and disadvantaged communities don’t have the available resources (people, expertise, partnerships, etc..) to submit BRIC grant project applications which can take 12-18 months to develop.     
• Large-scale infrastructure-focused mitigation projects require industry participation and investments along with the technical, engineering, operational, legal, and regulatory resources that are very difficult to coordinate.

 
A New Solution

• The GPODS (Green Power On-Demand System) system leverages mobile energy storage technologies to power “pre-wired” facilities or infrastructure while the electric grid power is disrupted. 
• The GPODS system is governed by the state/local government and owned, operated, maintained, and managed by the utility.
• The GPODS system provides a dual-use capability all year round: it supports the community’s electric grid during normal days and provides backup power during disasters.
• The GPODS create a network of “pre-wired” locations that can accept a GPODS unit.

 
Benefits of GPODS

• Reduces the impacts of electric power outages and cascading impacts caused by storms, floods, etc. 
• Increases community’s access to schools, shelters/feeding, water, communications, transportation, and public safety/health services during disasters.
• Mobile battery units are scalable and can be deployed to address small and large applications without geographic limitations. 
• The GPODS project develops the FEMA BCA (Business Costs Analysis) with the state and leverages a cross-sector approach to meet or exceed FEMA BCA requirements.  
• The GPODS project partners provide all initial grant application resources to the state at no cost.