What Is Energy “Surety?
” Energy “surety” is a term that has been derived from defense applications and is being used here to characterize energy systems. It incorporates a variety of factors including security, reliability, safety, sustainability and cost effectiveness. An energy system is said to have high levels of “surety” if it delivers the energy product to the end user while meeting all of the surety elements. Sandia and ERDC-CERL are currently focusing much of their efforts on energy reliability and security, with a secondary consideration on the other three elements. These two elements are of primary concern to military facility operators and security teams. The traditional approach to protecting buildings from grid interruptions is based on back-up generators and Uninterruptible Power Supplies. That approach addresses only a subset of the surety elements. For example: they typically cannot be run full time; they depend on a supply of fossil fuel, a diminishing and increasingly costly resource locate
