News and Insights

The Association of Defense Communities (ADC) produces the video series Homefront: Stories from America’s Defense Communities, which takes you inside the communities and regions our military calls home.

Episode 4: “Powering the Homefront” asks what happens to national security when the military is no longer the biggest customer on America’s power grid.

Virginia’s importance to U.S. national defense is unmatched. And today, it is at the epicenter of both U.S. defense priorities and the country’s most dramatic surge in electricity demand.

Press play to join Host Tim Ford on his journey to Hampton Roads, Virginia, where a Navy base, a utility, and the shipyard that builds the fleet are finding that keeping the lights on takes more than any one organization can do alone.

Power Makes The Mission Possible

98% of military installations depend on the civilian grid. More than 3,000 utilities serve those installations, each with its own process for prioritizing loads and customers. Yet no formal process brings national security energy needs into grid planning.

Power makes the mission possible. Host Tim Ford travels to Hampton Roads, Virginia, to show what that means:

1. At Naval Weapons Station Yorktown, it keeps munitions moving onto Atlantic Fleet ships before they deploy.

2. At Newport News Shipbuilding, it runs the welders and furnaces that build the Navy’s nuclear-powered aircraft carriers, the only place in the country where that work happens.

3. Across the region, it supports the 19 military installations and the defense communities that call “America’s military metro” home.

Path Forward. Naval Weapons Station Yorktown and Dominion Energy signed an agreement to explore on-base power that serves the installation and the surrounding community. Across every conversation, the path forward includes: prioritizing national security in grid planning, building infrastructure through partnerships, and improving policy and communication.

How We Get There. We built unleashthegrid.org as a shared starting point for that collaboration. Each report addresses a different aspect of the same question: Can the grid deliver what national defense needs? Together, they outline a path forward for the partners who will have to answer it.