NAVSEA, under the leadership of Dr. John Heinzel, is working with our industry and academia partners to engineer the high-power energy systems required by Department of War platforms and weapons systems. With urgency.
Seeing what The University of Texas at Arlington has built in just 14 months reminds us that speed and technical rigor aren't mutually exclusive. I visited the new PEIR lab with House Rep. Jake Ellzey and Texas State Rep. Tony Tinderholt. Students, industry, academia, and Naval Sea Systems Command (NAVSEA) are working together on a roughly 18 MW test capability designed to tackle some very real fleet problems: dynamic power loads, energy storage, directed energy, and the integrated power architectures our future ships will demand. This is what a world-class foundation looks like. Not research isolated from the mission. Real infrastructure. Real hardware. Students working alongside engineers and industry partners. And enough scale to move ideas beyond the benchtop before we commit to much larger and more expensive test environments. We are asking future ships to generate, manage, store, and distribute extraordinary amounts of power. We should learn now where those architectures bend and where they break. The other thing I like about this model: it grows talent while solving the technical problem.
