NJ Spotlight published the following article on 7/9/2014. To read the full article, click here.

State Banks on Energy Resiliency to Keep Critical Facilities Up and Running

Tom Johnson | July 9, 2014

With $200 million in hand from the federal government, the state is beginning to frame the outlines of a new program to help critical facilities remain up and running in the wake of extreme storms, like Hurricane Sandy.

The program, dubbed the Energy Resiliency Bank, is designed to keep water and wastewater treatment plants, and many other facilities, running on their own power sources — even if the traditional power grid suffers widespread outages, which occurred during Sandy.

When the superstorm hit New Jersey in the fall of 2012, the outages caused enormous problems for many services that rely on power to keep running. With drinking-water facilities knocked offline, for example, customers had to boil water before using it. And when wastewater treatment plants lost power, they dumped hundreds of millions of gallons of untreated sewage into the state’s waterways.

The storm also left long-term care facilities, state and county colleges/universities, and New Jersey’s correctional institutions without power, threatening the health of patients and inmates. These organizations would also be eligible for funding from the Energy Resiliency Bank, in later rounds of the proposal.

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