The military has begun a transition to efficient and renewable energy. The Army is proceeding with its “Net Zero Energy” initiative, which means that they will aim to produce as much energy (and water, and waste) as they use. Cost and reliability are the primary reasons, but cutting carbon pollution is one of the outcomes.
Last month, the head of U.S. forces in the Pacific said that climate change was the most likely issue to concern the military. Two recent discussions shed some light on the efforts currently underway to allow the military to use less carbon-based fuels, and the explicit and implicit reasons behind those efforts.
Fueling the combat theater
Yesterday afternoon, Mike Breen, Executive Director of the Truman Project, hosted a conversation with Sharon E. Burke, Assistant Secretary of Defense for Operational Energy Plans and Programs at the Department of Defense. Entitled “Clean and Mean: DoD’s Tactical and Operational Energy Innovations,” it covered some of the tactics the military uses to more efficiently carry out its mission on the front lines.
Breen, a former U.S. Army infantry officer who served in Iraq, recalled the status quo at forward operating bases dependent on fossil fuel. Loud, inefficient generators burning gasoline. Unsealed tents that allowed air conditioning systems to cool the desert (racking up a $20 billion a year utility bill). Transmission and supply lines that began to feel more like a ball and chain weighing down mission-ready units.
The U.S. military is the largest single consumer of energy and oil on the planet. Assistant Secretary Burke explained how the DoD is dealing with a different frame of war with distributed operations all over the globe, from disaster relief to deterrence, fighting terrorism to peacekeeping. The military has to move fuel through long supply lines and sometimes contested areas. “It’s a challenge for us,” she said.
Burke has noted that “a $1 rise in the price of a barrel of oil translates to approximately $130 million over the course of a year.” It’s not just money at stake — fuel resupply endangers the lives of our men and women in uniform. Delivering fuel via truck over dangerous roads has led to heavy-lift helicopters often being used to deliver fuel to bases in Afghanistan.
To cut inefficient use of, and therefore dependence on, fossil fuels in the combat theater, the military has been doing things like adding solar panels to tents and backpacks and sealing tents with an insulating coating so cooled air does not leak. Mortar pits can be powered by the sun instead of an idling Humvee. Radio towers are getting electricity from solar panels instead of a generator that drinks gasoline, requiring resupply. The DoD now dispatches energy teams to these forward operating bases with deep policy knowledge of how renewable energy systems can be used, and they can work with soldiers on the ground to ascertain the best practical implementation. This leaves an experienced Chief Warrant Officer behind who can support the unit with these systems. As Ms. Burke said, it “doesn’t sound very exotic, but it adds up.”
This is about “mission capability,” she said, and “what energy innovation can bring to the mission.” Though some scoffed at the idea of solar panels at first, many grew to love the fact that they ran “without a hitch” and made no noise. Others loved the fact that flexible solar panels could recharge batteries, making it less necessary to carry the 18 pounds of batteries usually required to power things like night vision scopes. As with the rest of the solar industry, Burke said efficiency was the ultimate goal:
“What we do, we do to meet military needs…. With those solar panels, we are very interested in getting higher and higher efficiencies.”
Renewable energy could allow the American military in combat zones to go farther, longer, and more quietly. Climate change was not a first or second reason given for the embrace of any of these renewable energy innovations, but they still reduce CO2 emissions
Electric vehicles on domestic military bases
Last month, the Pew Project on National Security, Energy, and Climate hosted an event focused on efforts by the U.S. military to deploy clean energy technologies that enhance security and improve operational effectiveness.
The panelists all said that the impetus for these renewable energy efforts started with statutory requirements, including “specific Executive Orders” and legislation. The goal, however, reflected a different kind of sustainability: As Dr. Camron Gorguinpour put it, “ultimately we’re looking for things that make good financial sense.”
Dr. Gorguinpour is the Director of Strategic Initiatives in the Office of the Assistant Secretary of the Air Force for Installations, Environment, and Logistics. He detailed the many reasons that the DoD began a plug-in electric vehicle initiative two years ago. This concerns a non-tactical fleet of 200,000, meaning support cars and trucks on domestic bases. When looking at transitioning the fleet to efficient hybrid or electric vehicles, and installing charging stations, the DoD considered many options. There is currently a pilot program underway to try out all-electric vehicles on six bases in five different states:
“What is vehicle-to-grid? It’s the idea that the battery is now an asset that is really primarily for energy. So if you consider the car you normally drive throughout your day, it’s really a poorly-used asset. You’re talking about maybe something that is functioning 3–5 percent of its useful life. The rest of the time it’s parked in the parking lot while you’re at work or at home. You only really drive your vehicle maybe a couple hours a day. So if you have a vehicle that can plug into the grid and provide services back to the grid, then all of a sudden your asset utilization rate is now 95 to 97 percent. It’s really only not being used either as an energy source or a mobility resource when you’re getting it fixed for repairs or maintenance. So the different types of things you can do with these batteries are significant.”
Vehicle-to-grid resources also allow utilities to draw on and dump on a network of batteries to help address frequency regulation. This is when the grid needs help smoothing the minute-to-minute demand variations caused by thousands of consumers flipping switches on and off. When a network of electric vehicles provides this service, it earns valuable revenue. “How much value?” says Dr. Gorguinpour. “Kind of a lot.” Enough to earn far more each month than a monthly lease for an all-electric Nissan Leaf. This is important because he said that cost concerns were the main priority with this program, with mission concerns a very close second.
The Army goes net zero energy
The Army’s “Net Zero Energy” initiative, which started in 2010, is not imposed on individual bases from the top down. One hundred installations responded that they wanted to be net-zero, and the Department of Defense selected 17 for a nationwide pilot program. A site specific assessment helps to tailor any changes to current processes, while ensuring that mission requirements are not compromised while reducing cost. Geothermal electric and solar PV can be expected to start coming online in 2014, along with heat pumps. As Director of the Army Sustainability Office Kristine Kingrey put it:
“One of the things we tried to do with our program was look at the endpoint, look at the goals…. But again, as with the other services, it’s got to be cost-effective.”
Captain Kerry Gilpin, the Director of the 1 Gigawatt Task Force and Assistant Secretary of the Navy for Energy, Installations, and Government, asked why the military was pursuing net-zero energy initiatives in the first place:
“The real reason we’re doing this is very simple. Secretary Mabus has set two priorities: energy security and energy independence. … Basically we don’t like having vulnerable supply lines … that are not difficult to disrupt. All threats, right? Natural disasters, manmade — anything that could threaten our ability to do our critical missions presents a problem for us.
He said that military bases used to have their own traditional power plants in the middle of last century, and then switched to being dependent on the civilian grid. Now, through solar arrays, wind farms, and waste-to-energy generating turbines, “the pendulum is swinging the other way.” Captain Gilpin also made the case that a smart microgrid would help integrate renewable energy into a full electric grid:
“That’s really where we’re going. It matters because … a lot of the things that cause the commercial grid to be unreliable are things that we can’t predict: natural disasters, manmade events. Thankfully we haven’t had any of the latter, but certainly we’ve had many of the former and they appear to be increasing in frequency and duration and so on.”
Climate Change
Former Senator John Warner Senator said that when he was Secretary of the Navy, “we never gave a moment’s thought to the question of energy, and if anyone had said ‘are you a Gigawatt Captain,’ he’d have been court-martialed.”
While some of those in the military do explicitly support directly addressing climate change through legislation, it wasn’t clear exactly how these experts considered climate change in the context of all their renewable energy efforts. During the Q&A;, one brave soul asked the panel how climate change factors into the decisions they all were making. The responses were hesitant:
Captain Gilpin: “Speaking for the Department, as I must, that’s not really the main purpose we’re doing this. We do have greenhouse gas legislated goals that they certainly will help to attain. So in that regard, they’re absolutely a part of our planning and a part of our calculations on the projects we’re trying to develop. So, it’s legislated, it is important to us, it has meaning and merit. Still, I would say it’s not the primary reason for doing these projects.”
Dr. Gorguinpour: “I think part of the challenge with those types of challenges is it’s hard to quantify. So you’re trying to build a business case, an operational case, you can’t really put it in numbers when people compare one against another.”
Despite pushback from GOP members in Congress, many in the military are transitioning to renewable fuels that do not burn carbon dioxide. Although some aren’t doing it explicitly because of climate change, ultimately the U.S. military will have to deal with climate migration, energy resource conflicts, and extreme weather disaster response.