Des Moines Advances Resilience Hub Plan With Pilot Site and Emergency Exercises
Des Moines and the Iowa Environmental Council are advancing a resilience hub program that will test a pilot neighborhood site and develop guidance for providing electricity, water and emergency services during disasters.
Published · 4 min read
Des Moines and the Iowa Environmental Council are advancing plans for a neighborhood resilience-hub network in Iowa’s capital, with the partners preparing to select a pilot location and run emergency exercises before delivering program guidance to the city by the end of 2026. The Des Moines resilience hub plan is intended to give residents known places to access reliable electricity, drinking water and other critical services during extreme weather, prolonged outages and other disasters.
The current planning contract is worth about $31,000, according to Axios Des Moines. The pilot phase will focus on testing how a hub would function during simulated emergencies, identifying service gaps and determining which city departments and community partners would need to participate.
The city is moving from resilience policy toward a test site
Des Moines formally announced its resilience partnership with the Iowa Environmental Council earlier this year. The Iowa Environmental Council said in March that one of the partnership’s principal assignments is developing guidance for a citywide resilience-hub program.
The August update adds a more concrete implementation step: IEC and the city expect to identify at least one location where they can test emergency scenarios and evaluate how a hub could operate before broader deployment.
Potential locations could include libraries, schools, recreation centers, nonprofit facilities or other community spaces already familiar to residents. No specific Des Moines building has yet been announced as the pilot site.
Reliable electricity is a core resilience-hub function
Resilience hubs are designed to remain useful when ordinary infrastructure is disrupted. At a basic level, that means residents need access to electricity, temperature-controlled space, communications and drinking water even if the surrounding grid or other services are impaired.
The Des Moines resilience hub plan has not yet committed to a particular backup-power architecture. Possible future infrastructure costs — including backup power or microgrid technology — are outside the current planning contract, Axios reported.
That distinction is important. Solar arrays, batteries and islandable microgrids are common tools for making resilience hubs electrically independent during outages, but Des Moines has not yet announced that the pilot will contain any specific combination of those technologies.
The Iowa Environmental Council has previously described resilience hubs as locations that provide reliable electricity, clean drinking water, cooling and other services during emergencies. In a May discussion of its resilience work, IEC said community hubs can augment local preparedness when prolonged outages and extreme weather disrupt conventional services.
The concept is part of Des Moines’ existing resilience strategy
Community resilience hubs are already contemplated in Des Moines’ broader climate and emergency-preparedness planning. The city’s ADAPT DSM framework includes creating resilience hubs or shelters among its climate-preparedness objectives.
The current work is intended to translate that broad objective into practical guidance covering what qualifies as a hub, where sites should be located, when they should activate and how residents will know where to go during an emergency.
Depending on individual facilities, future hubs could also support emergency medical or prescription access, temporary shelter, public-health programs or housing assistance. Those services remain part of the planning discussion rather than final commitments.
Microgrids could become part of the infrastructure decision
For the distributed-energy sector, the next stage will be whether Des Moines determines that individual hub locations require permanent resilient-power systems.
A solar-plus-storage microgrid can allow a community building to maintain selected critical loads when the wider grid fails. Other sites may rely on batteries, generators or combinations of technologies depending on load requirements, building characteristics, outage duration and available funding.
Because the city is still developing operating guidance, technology procurement would come later. The current process is first determining what services a Des Moines resilience hub should provide and how those services should be coordinated during real emergencies.
What happens next
IEC and the city plan to choose a pilot site and conduct simulated extreme-weather exercises to identify operational gaps. IEC expects to deliver formal program guidance to the Des Moines city manager’s office by the end of the year.
Future implementation would require separate decisions about sites, capital spending and resilient-power equipment. IEC has said it hopes the concept eventually develops into a network in which residents across Des Moines know which nearby facility they can use when normal services are disrupted.
For microgrid and distributed-energy developers, the pilot could eventually provide a pathway into a broader municipal resilience program, but no equipment solicitation or microgrid procurement has been announced.
Jonas Muthoni is Editor-in-Chief of Microgrid Media, where he oversees reporting and analysis on microgrids, energy storage, distributed energy resources, data center power demand, grid modernization, resilience, renewable energy, and electricity policy and markets. His work focuses on the infrastructure, technologies, and regulatory developments reshaping the power system.
As Editor-in-Chief, Jonas leads Microgrid Media’s editorial strategy and standards, including story selection, source verification, technical accuracy, and the development of original reporting and analysis. His coverage draws on regulatory filings, government records, utility and company disclosures, technical documentation, and independent industry sources to explain significant developments across the evolving energy system.
