Navy Energy Program

Naval aviation must operate independently worldwide often with limited logistics support. Additionally, legacy and emerging aircraft continually add capabilities to enhance their lethality and survivability. Improving an aircraft's utilization and management of energy has a direct relationship to enhanced combat capability to meet the challenges of emerging threats. This program engages technical experts from across Naval aviation, industry, and academia to identify best practices and technologies for development, testing and validation to determine technical viability and assess benefit to mission capability.

Shore Energy Technology (SET) researches, develops, and validates energy technologies that improve the resilience, security, and efficiency of naval installations. Key research areas include resilient power generation and distribution, grid and microgrid technologies, and the energy-water nexus. By reducing energy demand and boosting resilience, SET's work directly enhances military readiness and the lethality of the fleet. The program coordinates its efforts across the Department of War and with other agencies. $17.000 million in Reconciliation funding will be used to modernize shore power infrastructure and establish shore energy technology office to coordinate congressionally appropriated pilot programs for small modular reactor demonstrations at key strategic naval installations.

This project is designed to enhance lethality, resilience, reach, and sustainment of warfare systems through more effective generation, use and distribution of energy on existing and future surface fleet assets, including Unmanned Surface Vessels (USVs), by developing and transitioning energy and maintenance improvements. This project, managed through NAVSEA 05T, identifies, promising energy related technologies through involvement with Fleet representatives, Life-Cycle Managers (LCMs), NAVSEA Technical Warrant Holders, In-Service Engineering Agents (ISEAs), the Navy Shipbuilding Research Program (NSRP), PEOs, Industry, and Academia. The project directly supports Department of Navy goals for agility, resilient force posture, and innovation by maximizing energy to increase operational capability (e.g., extend range, increase time on station, reduce energy demand on fuel logistics forces, enable high power combat systems). Potential technology areas include Power Generation and Storage (PG&S), Hull Hydrodynamics (HH), Underwater Hull Husbandry (UHH), Heating, Ventilation & Air Conditioning (HVAC) Systems, Thermal Management (TM), Main Propulsion Systems (MP), Electrical Systems (EL), Auxiliary Systems (AUX) and Energy Monitoring, Planning, and Assessment (EMP&A). Promising energy related projects that improve the effective use, conversion, storage, distribution, and control of energy to enable the integration with future weapons and sensors onto platforms are proposed each FY for evaluation. Projects are selected based on technical review and business case analysis. Not all proposals are pursued, and funding changes between functional categories or fiscal years may occur based on fleet needs, technology maturity level, ship schedule changes, or other factors. FY2026 includes $34.151 million in reconciliation funding. FY2026 total funding supports the overall program's mission to enhance lethality, resilience, reach, and sustainment of warfare systems through more effective generation, use and distribution of energy on existing and future surface fleet assets, including Unmanned Surface Vessels (USVs), by developing and transitioning energy and maintenance improvements.

This program represents the Navy's only RDTE investment designed to maintain and enhance its capability to operate as a "smart" customer for aviation and ship tactical fuels that are an operationally critical, single point of failure, $4.0+ billion per year consumable requiring worldwide availability and interoperability. Recent field problems have demonstrated the adverse effects that fuel-related problems can have on ship and aircraft performance, durability, and readiness. The potential risk and adverse operational impacts from fuel-related problems over the next decade, given the evolving production technologies, changing feedstocks, more stringent environmental regulations and the introduction of new operational requirements and platforms will continue to increase. This program provides data and enables technology through laboratory, component, fuel system, engine, and platform tests. These evaluations relate the effects of changes in the Navy fuel properties and chemistry to the performance and durability of Naval ship, aircraft, ground and fuel distribution systems. The information is required by technical authorities and decision makers to: (a) assure interoperability with fuel procured from commercial/ international specifications, (b) determine the extent to which unnecessarily restrictive military specification requirements can be relaxed to reduce cost and increase availability worldwide, (c) provide guidance to fleet operators for the safe use of off-specification fuels or emerging CONOPS requiring the use of non-traditional fuels, (d) assure operational interoperability with evolving changes in fuel production technology, feedstocks, environmental regulations and tactical system demands, (e) improve the capability and reduce the cost of field fuel quality surveillance, and (f) facilitate rapid identification and resolution of field identified fuel deficiencies.

1) Provide an advanced battery database with standard battery families for program offices to use to allow for selection of batteries early in the design process increasing the likelihood of design and fielding success, 2) leverage the battery database to begin common battery design efforts to save cost, 3) establish common battery standards and design requirements (e.g., propagation resistant designs, standard battery monitoring and casualty detection systems, etc.) to make advanced batteries safer and therefore deployable, 4) develop and test standard battery storage/container systems that can safely house batteries and withstand catastrophic failure (thermal runaway) of the batteries within the container while minimizing damage to surrounding equipment and platforms, 5) streamline the battery safety certification process especially for high energy storage magazines and other large battery designs (lasers) to allow battery based weapon systems to be fielded in time to support strategic needs, 6) develop hazard mitigation technologies to support rapid safe deployment of advanced batteries to support weapon systems, 7) generate analytics that characterize the Department's current and projected energy/advanced battery needs, 8) establish the Navy's contribution to DoW and cross-service advanced battery supply chain efforts. The FY 2026 request for Battery Development Safety & Transition Program includes $8,074,000 of discretionary and $47,221,000 of mandatory (reconciliation) for a total of $55,295,000. FY 2026 total funding supports the overall programs mission to increase the safety and speed of capability deployment by establishing common standards, streamlining safety certification, and leading the Navy's contribution to the battery industrial base, ensuring warfighters have certified and reliable power for any mission. The discretionary funds provide for Certification Acceleration, Safety and Abuse testing, Platform Hazard Reduction, Specification and Standards and Analytics. The mandatory funds are allocated to enhance military capabilities by investing in next-generation energy storage, advanced materials development, the integration of energy-dense batteries, advanced manufacturing techniques, and the security of supply chains.

Department of Navy Operational Energy Portfolio. These funds are one-year monies available for use to the Navy and Marine Corps strictly for the implementation of non-program of record needs in support of operational energy resilience, efficiencies, mission assurance, energy conservation, training, or energy security initiatives.

Project C391: Cargo drone advanced batteries. Project CA31: Modernizing Shore Power Infrastructure The Naval Air Warfare Center Aircraft Division is responsible for the research, development and Test and Evaluation (RDTE) of Unmanned Air Systems and all the subsystems that are needed for them to operate successfully. Group 3 Logistics UAS's are a critical focus area and heavily dependent on lithium-Ion Battery packs currently manufactured outside the US. These battery solutions do not meet the quality, reliability and safety needed to meet emerging mission requirements safely in a maritime environment. Design, develop, fabricate, test and integrate ultra-high-capacity batteries into emerging logistics UAS platforms is a critical enabler to meeting emerging operational requirements in a contested environment. This program coordinates battery developers and fabricators, technical SMEs across the DON and UAS designers/builders to produce a cost and time effective common solution applicable to multiple systems to meet operational and safety requirements. This funding provides a program increase dedicated to modernizing shore power infrastructure.