A joint venture based in Summerville has won a $51.6 million Army contract to keep the lights on at an Army depot in Alabama.
The Army Corps of Engineers’ Louisville District awarded HSGS-Ameresco LLC a $51,572,833 firm-fixed-price contract to build a power generation and microgrid project at Anniston Army Depot in Alabama, according to the Pentagon’s Sept. 18 contract announcement. Four companies bid. The work is due by April 27, 2029, and is paid for with fiscal 2025 defense-wide military construction funds.
The Corps limited the competition to small businesses owned by service-disabled veterans, according to its notice on SAM.gov, the federal contracting website.
The project calls for an installation-wide microgrid that can start itself after a blackout, with 10 megawatts of new natural gas generation at the depot’s Eulaton substation. It will tie that generation to solar arrays and gas generators already at the depot, expanding a microgrid built under an earlier energy resilience project. During a grid outage, automated controls will send power to mission-critical loads and shed large blocks of less critical ones, the Corps said.
HSGS stands for Hannah Solar Government Services, a service-disabled veteran-owned renewable energy company headquartered in Summerville, according to RV News, a trade publication that covered an award the company received from the U.S. Small Business Administration. It designs and builds solar, battery storage and microgrid systems.
HSGS and Ameresco formed the joint venture in August 2021 through the SBA’s mentor-protégé program, with Ameresco as the mentor, according to Ameresco. The venture’s first contract, announced in 2022, was a $7.9 million solar array at Tooele Army Depot in Utah. Dave McNeil, a retired colonel, was identified as HSGS’s president and CEO in a 2019 Solar Power World article and a 2021 S.C. Energy Office announcement.
HSGS has also built locally. In 2019, it completed a 592-kilowatt rooftop solar system at Scout Boats in Summerville, Solar Power World reported, and in 2021 the South Carolina Energy Office announced it had been selected for a 490-kilowatt system at Z-Man Fishing Products in Ladson.
