The Washington Energy Resilience Technical Assistance Program provides direct technical assistance to communities as they explore improving community resilience with energy system solutions. We help communities define their goals around energy resilience, identify workable solutions to meet those goals, assist in finding funding, and then apply to potential funding sources. We offer this assistance for free, and there is no application period.
Who is eligible?
- Local governments
- State agencies
- Tribal governments
- Tribal affiliates
- Nonprofit organizations
- K-12 education providers
- Higher education institutions
- Retail electric utilities
- For-profit organizations
The Washington Energy Resilience Technical Assistance Program only serves communities located within Washington state. We are unable to assist individual households.
What we offer
We take a whole-community approach to energy resilience. This means that we will encourage you to conduct meaningful community outreach and engage your whole community in this work. But rest assured, you are not alone in this effort. We will stick with you and help every step of the way.
Some assistance activities we offer for planning and predevelopment work are:
- Develop scope of work
- Identify work site(s)
- Conduct community outreach and develop engagement strategy/activities
- Educate communities, including developing materials and hosting educational meetings
- Community meeting assistance
- We ensure all public meetings are ADA-compliant and offer translation in the languages spoken by local communities. We pay for any additional services that are necessary to meet this requirement. At a minimum, we provide live captioning for all public meetings and have equipment available to support individuals with hearing loss so they can fully participate.
Some system types require a feasibility study to move forward. A feasibility study is a technical document used for sizing, pricing, and designing a complex energy resilience system. Our team will help you determine whether a study is necessary and assist with navigating next steps.
We won’t write or manage a grant for you, but we will help you strategize which grants to apply for, how to put your best foot forward through collaborative writing, editing and reviewing your grant application — and help you develop tools for post-award reporting.
We strive to create a seamless experience with no wrong doors. What this means is that regardless of where your project goes, we will do our best to either assist you to the end or find a more suitable entity to help you reach your goals. There is no pre-determined time limit to our assistance, and we will meet with you as often as you need. You determine when the project is complete, and your goals have been met.
Example process steps:
- Submit an intake form or contact energy resilience team.
- Conduct a welcome meeting for every community.
- Host a “What is resilience?” meeting to define what energy resilience means to you and your community.
- Develop a scope of work.
- Determine the need for a feasibility study.
- Find funding source(s).
- Apply for funding.
- Finalize the “closeout” meeting with next steps and a discussion about the program experience.
We recommend community engagement throughout the whole process. We are also available to come visit you onsite if an in-person meeting is preferred.
Keep in mind that this is your project, and you own it. We are here to support you in your energy resilience journey. This work takes time and a commitment to the process. We will move at your speed, and we can put the work on hold if you ever need to.
Additional resources
The Washington Energy Resilience Technical Assistance Program follows a framework developed by our team. This framework follows three ideals:
1. We meet you where you are.
Regardless of what stage your project is at, we’re here to help you. Some communities have approached us with a fully developed project that just needs to be funded. However, more often than not, we have communities engage with our program who know they need to do something, but they just don’t know what that is or where to start. We’ll start with a conversation about what you envision for your community and/or what energy challenge you are trying to address.
In a virtual world, meetings can happen quickly and often. However, we know that sometimes face-to-face is better. If you need us to come for an in-person meeting, let us know and we will do everything in our power to make it happen. Our team has driven multiple hours each way for a two-hour meeting because that was what was needed by the community.
2. We don’t have to agree on the why
Our approach to energy resilience is energy-system agnostic. This means that you’re not required to use a specific energy system (e.g. solar, wind, diesel generator, etc.) to be successful. We understand and embrace that every community is different and that your goals will require unique solutions that are tailored specifically to your needs and environment. We’re committed to providing honest feedback about the benefits and challenges each system type may encounter when seeking funding or navigating other parts of this process.
Furthermore, we start every project with an open discussion about what your day-to-day energy reality is; what do you do when the power goes off? Our team brings an unbiased, solution-focused approach to each project. You lead, and you make the decisions. We’re here to support you in getting the information you need to reach your goals.
3. We do government differently.
We are a team of emergency managers, and the most important thing in all successful work is building trusting relationships. We approach our work pragmatically and seek to find suitable solutions tailored to your specific community and challenge. If we have bad news, we will tell you honestly and directly. Then we will follow up with next steps and a new plan.
Resilience v. reliability
Energy resilience and reliability are two different things. Energy resilience solutions will typically work for reliability challenges. But not vice-versa. Here is a brief introduction to resilience and reliability:
- Resilience: The capacity to recover quickly from difficulties.
- Energy resilience is planning for unpredictable and more severe events. These are often, but not always, less frequent outages.
- Systems focused on resilience are robust and are designed for the worst-case scenarios.
- Reliability: The quality of being trustworthy or of performing consistently well.
- Energy reliability is focused on the day-to-day performance and operations of an energy system.
- Systems focused on improving reliability are geared towards short-term outages or for economic purposes.
Microgrids are some of the most common energy resilience solutions for Washington communities.
There are three requirements for a system to be considered a microgrid. The system:
- Must incorporate a variety of different energy sources and be contained within a predefined boundary.
- Example: Solar system with diesel generator and a battery backup system connected to a single building. All three components of this system can provide power to the connected building.
- Can connect and disconnect from the electric grid.
- Example: When the electric grid goes down, the backup system will disconnect automatically from the grid and switch over fully to the microgrid system.
- Sensitive to time, including the time it takes for backup energy system to turn on when the power goes out and the amount of time the system can run independently from the electric grid.
- Example: Some technologies are sensitive to power outages, so a system that limits the transition period from the electric grid to the microgrid should be prioritized. Additionally, energy resilience is focused on the worst-case scenario. If you anticipate that your power could be out for seven days, you need to ensure that the system is designed to provide support for the duration.