West River Electric Association serves just a sliver of Ellsworth Air Force Base. But its role in integrating a battery energy storage system at the facility—among the first of its kind in South Dakota—is bringing outsized impact to the base, the cooperative and the community.

One of three projects funded through NRECA's Rural Energy Storage Deployment Program (RESDP), the award-winning storage installation has raised the 20,000-member co-op's profile as a community ally and a pioneer of emerging technologies. The project began in 2019 and is nearing completion.

While supporting rural energy resilience, the upgrade at the home of the B-21 Raider strategic bomber program also highlights the mutual benefits of collaboration, says Lauren Khair, NRECA's senior director of energy research and resilience.

“There's an ability to do anything if you have the right team and the right group to help you," she says. “The co-op had never done this before, but they put their faith and trust in us and the national labs that we would help them through it. And on the other side of this will come a great project that will have a lot of best practices and opportunities for cooperatives to learn from."

Based in Wall, WREA has been part of a continuing effort to keep Ellsworth AFB open since it was targeted for closure in 2005. Fearing the loss of its economic impact, estimated at $800 million today, co-op leaders rallied with state and local elected officials to save the base.

“We played a large role, making sure we could secure its future," said CEO/General Manager Robert Raker. “And that mentality has stayed with us. … What can we do to make sure we're good community partners?"

Other collaborators in the 75-kilowatt/277-kilowatt-hour lithium-ion phosphate battery installation have included:

• The Pacific Northwest National Laboratory and Sandia National Laboratories, which advised on best practices in safety and project design.
• The South Dakota School of Mines and Technology, which coordinated the final site location to accommodate placement challenges during the project's earlier stages.
• Rapid City-based Rushmore Electric Power Cooperative, a generation and transmission co-op, which is drawing power from the battery's stored energy during high demand periods.

“It's important that co-ops have places to go to ask good questions," Khair says. “We rely on the expertise of the national labs to help our co-ops do innovative things and deploy novel technologies."

Working off WREA's knowledge of local conditions, the labs provided guidance on system design, safety protocols, operational resilience and integration with existing infrastructure.

“In western South Dakota, we can have 100-degree temperature fluctuations," Raker says. “Researchers wanted to see how well batteries perform when you have extreme weather."

One important takeaway, says Khair, is that load size needn't limit a co-op's desire to bring innovation. WREA, for example, serves only two meters on Ellsworth. But in 2019, NRECA approached then-CEO/ GM Dick Johnson to sign up with the project just as the base was expanding its mission to serve the B-21 bombers.

“I thought, 'Let's do something to help ensure the co-op is still the trusted energy adviser on that base and to show how they can innovate,'" Khair says.

Last year, the Air Force recognized Ellsworth AFB with a 2024 Air Force Community Partnership Award for enhancing mission effectiveness. The annual award honors four military bases that “develop mutually beneficial partnerships" with their local communities for a variety of improvements.

Because batteries can be deployed in a variety of settings, Raker hesitates to describe the co-op as an “expert" in battery technology.

“But we are gaining quite a bit of knowledge. We have a very good idea on what to look for," he says. “It's important to tell this story, because if had we had somebody who knew this, it would've been nice to rely on them. So if there's somebody else that's going down this road … it goes back to cooperation among co-ops."