ECIS Strategic Plan
(pdf 5.2 MB)
The Energy Security program works to reduce the risks of transformative energy solutions that will enhance the nation’s security and economic prosperity. The Climate Security program works to understand and prepare the nation for the national security implications of climate change. The Infrastructure Security program develops and applies technologies/analytical approaches to secure the nation’s critical infrastructure against natural or malicious disruption. The Enabling Capabilities program is the capability base that supports ECIS and champions science at Sandia.
The Energy Security program area works to reduce the risks of transformative energy solutions that will enhance the nation’s security and economic prosperity. Energy security research at Sandia seeks to address key challenges facing our nation and the world. We work with the energy industry to improve current hardware and develop the next generation of technologies to extract or produce energy.
The Energy, Climate, and Infrastructure Security (ECIS) Strategic Management Unit (SMU) spearheads research into energy alternatives that will help the nation reduce its dependence on oil and coal and to combat the effects of climate change. Sandia’s long history with geothermal, solar, and wind energy research has seen a vast increase in effort and intensity over the past 15 years and has also been supplemented in recent years with efforts in biologically based fuels: biomass from nonfood plant sources and algae—both of which can be grown on land unsuitable for farming.
The Climate Security program works to understand and prepare the nation for the national security implications of climate change. National security is Sandia National Laboratories’ foundational mission. Our nation’s security can only be achieved in a stable international environment. Sandia maintains close working relationships within the many agencies of the intelligence community and the DoD. There is a growing recognition of the importance of the impact of climate change on emergent security dynamics and intervention capabilities as documented in a series of reports. The UK Ministry of Defense previously devoted more than one-third of its analysis on threats due to climate change. The climate instability we now anticipate will produce conditions that increase border tensions, reduce the abilities of allies to respond, and provide an environment ripe for breeding terrorism and extremism. Most importantly, the DoD report, “Impacts of Climate Change,” notes the critical need to substantiate climate concerns by developing analytical tools to ensure self consistency, realism, validation, and a concrete foundation for strategic/tactical and operational execution.
The Infrastructure Security program develops and applies technologies and analytical approaches to secure the nation’s critical infrastructure against natural or malicious disruption.Our nation’s energy infrastructure faces two foundational challenges as we seek our vision towards an energy independent and secure future. First, elements of the infrastructure, such as the electricity transmission and distribution network, have not significantly changed since their initial creation over a century ago. It is clear that new approaches are required for the grid to accommodate the integration of intermittent renewable energy sources such as solar and wind. Second, the reliability and resilience of our grid is central to our national security. For example, robust and secure power is essential to key infrastructure such as military installations. Economically, electricity outages presently cost our economy $150 billion annually.
The DOE Office of Science (SC) is the single largest supporter of basic research in the physical sciences in the U.S., providing more than 40 percent of total funding in this area. Sandia has active research programs funded by the SC Offices of Advanced Scientific Computing Research (ASCR), Basic Energy Sciences (BES), Biological & Environmental Research (BER), and Fusion Energy Sciences (FES). This work is foundational to many mission areas at Sandia, from energy, to nuclear weapons, to national security generally. The Office of Science is renowned for its ability to build and operate user facilities to enable fundamental research that are open to researchers from around the world on the basis of peer reviewed proposals.
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