New Analysis Details How Air Traffic Control Towers Can Maintain Operations During Grid Outages
National Laboratory of the Rockies Tools, Metrics, and Guidebook Help Federal Aviation Administration Plan for Reliability-Increasing Technologies
Every day, more than 44,000 flights overseen by the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) take off and land nationwide, coordinated by people working out of airport traffic control towers (ATCTs).
ATCTs are critical infrastructure for the American economy and transportation, guiding the transit of many tons of air cargo annually and millions of people, too. Without ATCTs, air travel could be less safe—or even grind to a halt. Their failure, whether due to grid overloads or natural disasters, would be catastrophic.
That is why the FAA and the National Laboratory of the Rockies (NLR) partnered to identify how FAA staff might make ATCTs energy self-sustaining: capable of generating or storing the energy they need for a long period of time without support from the grid.
“The electric grid is under severe stress today from increased demand and intensifying wildfires and storms,” said Bhavesh Rathod, an NLR analysis researcher and the project’s principal investigator. “Grid outages could be on the scale of hours or days. This project helps the FAA identify towers that can be good candidates for further study to understand how they could continue operations even during times of multihour grid outages.”
NLR Simplifies Decision-Making
The FAA owns and oversees more than 250 ATCTs, which are located across America’s wide-ranging climates, from fire-risk deserts to coastal areas prone to flooding. Some are situated in areas where the electric grid is already overloaded and suffers from repeated outages. Such variety offers a challenge for the FAA to determine what technologies and practices might best enhance their reliability and to downselect which towers might be viable candidates for them.
“The agency also has to direct significant efforts into their core mission of daily safety and efficiency of the aerospace system,” said David Sickinger, an NLR researcher on the project.
So, the FAA tapped NLR to use the laboratory’s analytical capabilities and tools to smooth the way by developing and validating a framework the FAA can use to make critical equipment decisions.
The laboratory has an ongoing relationship with the FAA and has previously partnered with the agency to assess energy infrastructure and cybersecurity needs for advanced aircraft. On this ATCT project, NLR had the opportunity to study FAA internal reports on the state of ATCTs nationwide to gain a baseline understanding of their existing levels of power availability and reliability. To validate their framework, project researchers also conducted deep-dive analyses during site visits to two airports.
This access helped ensure that NLR’s framework was feasible and realistic, giving airports a clear, real-world pathway to strengthen their operations.
Many-Pronged Approach
ATCTs typically rely on the electric grid for power and use diesel or natural gas generators as backup systems. This existing equipment is usually oversized, allowing it to support critical ATCT loads during an outage. But the addition of on-site distributed energy resources (DERs) and battery storage could offer benefits including increased outage-survival duration in case of a major widespread grid blackout and support in case of a generator mechanical fault or loss of fuel supply.
And their benefits go beyond outages—even saving money.
“Generators are not typically used during routine operations when the grid is online, making them a largely idle asset most of the time,” Rathod said. “But, during normal operations, on-site generation and energy storage can still contribute, reducing the amount of energy drawn from the grid, which could be subject to peak rates at times of high demand.”
To increase reliability, multiple approaches are needed. The research team combined expertise in modeling, grid analysis, and engineering to achieve two goals:
- Describe solutions to enhance ATCT energy efficiency, ranging from energy-saving strategies for existing infrastructure to out-of-the-box solutions including microgrids and mobile power sources
- Detail steps to assess whether an ATCT’s reliability could be increased from using behind-the-meter DERs, including battery storage.
The NLR team explored more than just the viability of incorporating new and advanced technologies to support ATCTs operating off grid if needed. They also identified where ATCTs could reduce how much energy they needed overall through solutions like selecting more efficient lightbulbs, centralizing heating and cooling, installing advanced thermal systems, and improving insulation. This might seem simple, but it was a logical first opportunity not just for that reason.
“Energy reduction strategies can help ATCTs reduce their vulnerability and equipment costs by decreasing how much backup energy they need in the first place,” Rathod said.
To assess the feasibility of adding DERs and battery storage to ATCTs, the team created a set of metrics and questions for FAA staff to use, including site considerations, electricity rates, variations in electric loads, historical outage data, and more.
Demonstrating a Feasibility Analysis at Airports Across the Country
NLR’s REopt® techno-economic decision support platform was core to this project, used by the research team to model how to cost-effectively serve a site’s electrical load using local energy assets. However, Sickinger noted that with ATCTs being critical infrastructure, cost may not be the primary decision factor.
“On-site generation supporting grid operations may provide life-cycle cost savings compared to relying on the grid and emergency backup alone,” he said. “But that is a perk on top of providing a layer of reliability if the grid is overloaded or can’t function to support the tower.”
The team validated their modeling by applying it to seven selected airports in the United States, including several medium-to-large international airports and one small regional airport. The results showed that not all locations could support or economically benefit from on-site energy assets.
Two of the airports had low enough existing energy rates that generating energy through DERs would not provide any additional financial value. One airport did not have available space near the ATCT available to DERs. Several towers would benefit from just battery storage and some from both battery storage and DERs.
“This modeling highlighted two things,” Rathod said. “One, that the reality is airports have to live with their infrastructure for a long time, and they have to calibrate their efforts around the existing state of that facility and having to prioritize limited funds. Two, there is absolutely not one solution that fits all.”
During site visits to two of the selected airports, the research team had the opportunity to speak directly with FAA operational staff and learn some on-the-ground details that helped NLR tune their analysis.
“I enjoyed learning about the challenges the staff face and hearing from them what they wanted to see at their ATCTs,” Sickinger said. “A lot of the suggestions we arrived at in our analysis came through our interactions at these ATCT tours.”
Next Steps for Airports
The team presented their findings to the FAA through a guidebook that FAA staff can use to replicate NLR’s analysis—a set of tools to help prioritize site upgrade decision-making. NLR also developed a visualization tool built upon the NLR Scenario Viewer, used for many years to publish datasets in a powerful and flexible visualization dashboard format.
FAA staff at all levels can use the guidebook, REopt tool, and visualization tool to conduct in-depth analyses of any airports in the country. REopt has a free web-based version with robust capabilities to assess financial outcomes and reliability of technologies over time.
“These resources provide the layers of information the FAA can use to evaluate their decision-making process,” Rathod said. “This is a way to scale up our capabilities to reduce operational costs and increase ATCT safety and reliability nationwide.”
Learn more about NLR aviation energy futures, as well as the laboratory’s energy systems analysis and energy security and resilience research.
Last Updated Jan. 22, 2026