Electrical engineering program ensures power system resilience
But for a military operations center, a global cybersecurity hub, or a command-and-control network, a microsecond disruption in clean power can corrupt vital data sets, force hard system resets, and compromise national defense operations.
Preventing these catastrophic system interruptions is the mandate of the U.S. Army Engineering and Support Center, Huntsville’s Power Reliability Enhancement Program, or PREP.
Huntsville Center’s PREP serves as the Department of War’s premier authority on continuous, high-availability power infrastructure, ensuring that the electrical systems backing America's critical national security sites achieve maximum uptime and fault tolerance.
While traditional utility companies design grids for bulk distribution and standard residential reliability, PREP engineers specialize in mission-critical power engineering.
They design, assess, and fortify facilities where the standard is nothing short of continuous, uninterruptible power. Their focus ensures that if an extreme weather event, a sophisticated cyberattack, or a kinetic strike compromises the local civilian grid, localized high-reliability systems seamlessly sustain operations.
To optimize these specialized technical resources, USACE recently transitioned PREP’s core team of subject matter experts directly under the Huntsville Center Engineering Directorate. Historically, the program operated under Headquarters, U.S. Army Corps of Engineers (USACE), which primarily focuses on broad administrative policy and enterprise oversight.
The structural shift leverages Huntsville Center’s unique operational charter. While standard USACE districts are constrained by strict geographic boundaries—focusing on regional civil works like dams, waterways, and local military construction—Huntsville Center is a specialized, boundaryless command executing on a global scale.
To maintain proximity to major defense networks, the PREP team continues to operate out of its strategic satellite office at Fort Belvoir, Virginia.
However, Hank Thomsen, Huntsville Center engineering director, said it only makes sense to align PREP under the Huntsville Center footprint.
“Because PREP’s technical mission spans international installations and crosses agency lines, integrating it into Huntsville Center consolidates its engineering talent under a unified, globally deployed framework,” Thomsen said.
In practice, PREP functions as both predictive data analyst and highly specialized consulting. Rather than operating responsively, the team utilizes a proprietary, world-class reliability database containing decades of performance data on power generation equipment, industrial-grade HVAC cooling systems, and uninterruptible power supply (UPS) topologies.
The 20 – plus person team of mostly electrical engineers supports primary and backup power systems for the Department of War, the National Military Command System (NMCS), and C5ISR (Command, Control, Computers, Cyber, Intelligence, Surveillance, and Reconnaissance) facilities.
As a technical center of expertise within USACE, PREP operates as the technical lead for validating that critical defense facilities meet specific high-availability, utility-redundancy, and power-resilience standards.
Martha Kiene, PREP program director, said the goal of PREP is to optimize a facility’s uptime by determining the ‘Number of 9s.’
She said they validate that the electrical and mechanical infrastructure can achieve 99.9 (Three 9s) to 99.9999% (“Six Nines”) of power availability, limiting unplanned downtime to less than five minutes per year.
However, Kiene said her PREP team shoots for six 9s, of reliability of the most critical infrastructure.
“Six 9s provides an unplanned downtime of less than 32 seconds before power is restored.”
PREP also relies on system redundancy paths for critical components like backup generators, uninterruptible power supplies (UPS), and facility cooling chillers.
Using this data, PREP conducts rigorous Reliability, Availability, and Maintainability (RAM) analyses to mathematically model a facility's power infrastructure to identify single points of failure and predict component degradation before a hardware failure triggers an outage.
Furthermore, PREP’s engineers provide critical design reviews for upcoming Department of War and federal agency capital projects.
They ensure blueprints feature robust "N+1" or “N+2" redundancy configurations—meaning that if a primary utility feed or critical transformer drops offline, parallel backup lines, battery banks, automatic transfer switches and emergency diesel generators are systematically engineered to assume the critical load instantly and without phase disruption.
The PREP team is also the proponent for Black Start Exercises (BSE) – real-world operational drills where Army installations and Air Force bases intentionally disconnect from commercial utility power to test whether backup power generation can independently start and sustain critical base infrastructure, Kiene said.
“This year we conducted seven BSEs for the Army, four for the Air Force and one for the Navy” she said.
“We will disconnect power for a minimum of eight hours and will work with the installation and utility company to pinpoint any single points of failure so we then can make recommendations for improvement.”
Kiene said she’s extremely proud of the work PREP does as it comes down to improving DOW readiness.
“We have a worldwide mission, and this team of well-trained engineers perform an extremely valuable mission confidently and competently.”
Through meticulous data modeling, rigorous system diagnostics, and cutting-edge power engineering, PREP ensures the invisible, foundational asset of national defense—electrical infrastructure—remains completely resilient against any threat.
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