The U.S. military is getting serious about energy change

One thing the military is getting right these days: Making the connection between fossil fuel dependence and insecurity. I did a lot of research in the past year on efforts throughout the Department of Defense as a whole, and especially within the Navy and Air Force, to improve energy efficiency on military bases in the United States. For instance, Jacksonville Naval Air Station, in Jacksonville, Florida, has put young officers in charge of changing the culture of energy use from within their own units. They've convinced their fellow soldiers to make small changes, like turning off lights that aren't being used or sharing a single coffeemaker among several people. More importantly, they've got soldiers thinking in broad ways about energy, waste, and future security—What else could be done with the money spent on unnecessary energy use? What happens in a fuel-related crisis if this base can't be more self-sufficient?

These changes in culture and ways of thinking are making a difference. Last summer, officers at Jacksonville Naval Air Station told me that, thanks to several different energy efficiency campaigns and improvements, they've watch activity on the base increase over the last three years while energy use on the base has fallen.

There are some interesting and important changes afoot in the way the military handles energy. And not just at home. David Biello of Scientific American has a really fascinating story about the Department of Defense getting involved with ARPA-e—a Department of Energy program for developing cutting-edge energy technology. Among the collaborations: Energy storage systems for the front lines of war.

That's why the U.S. Defense (DoD) and Energy (DoE) departments are partnering on initiatives to further develop and test energy-storage technologies first developed by ARPA-e. Secretary of the Navy Ray Mabus announced two such development and deployment partnerships on March 2 for power electronics modules and batteries capable of storing megawatts of power--both to be funded by a requested $25 million each from DoD and ARPA-e in the fiscal year 2012 budget.

"Twenty-five million dollars is the cost of one H-1 helicopter," Mabus said. "The change that $25 million from DoD and ARPA-e can generate, can multiply that one helicopter hundreds and thousands of times."

Mabus was referring to saving both lives--for every 24 fuel convoys in Afghanistan and Iraq, one soldier or Marine is killed or wounded, according to a U.S. Army study--and money. The DoD fuel bill came to some $14 billion in 2010. "For every dollar the price of a barrel of oil goes up, the Navy spends $31 million more for fuel," Mabus noted. "Our dependence on fossil fuels creates strategic, operational and tactical vulnerabilities for our forces."

The Navy has taken a lead in attempting to change that, setting a goal of deriving half its energy needs from non-fossil fuel sources by 2020 as well as making half of its bases energy self-sufficient.

Scientific American: U.S. Military links energy research to lives and dollars saved

• [hadlock]

  Last June/July the airlines announced some serious research dollars in to developing biofuel, particularly bio-jet fuel to stave off the cost of price shocks on their biggest expense – fuel. I’m not sure which has greater fuel consumption needs; the US army or the global airline business. Either way together they represent a huge chunk of biofuel R&D.

• [rhinoman]

  What the military can accomplish internally can be impressive.
  Unfortunately, they have the luxury of being able to give orders down the command chain, and force people to obey them. It works, but it’s hard to transfer outside of the military.

  • [airshowfan]

    …they have the luxury of being able to give orders down the command chain, and force people to obey them. It works, but it’s hard to transfer outside of the military.

    That second part is not true. Once the benefits become self-evident, it becomes easier to sell the idea to organizations that are run more democratically and that are driven by results rather than by orders. “Hey, the military did this, it had such and such benefits, maybe we ought to do it too!”.

• [rebdav]

  Creating a conservation probably only saves a few million dollars at big military bases, a drop in the bucket of the giant budget, but that culture carries over to places like Afghanistan where every kilowatt of power is trucked in through ambush zones aboard tanker trucks as diesel fuel.
  Conservation culture serves the military geo-strategically even if they are only trying to tackle a tactical fuels issue.

• [flink]

  Actually, I don’t think that those young officers changed the minds of any fellow “soldiers.”

  NAS Jacksonville is a Navy base.

• [Anonymous]

  The US trade deficit is about $60B per month.

  $40B per month of that is the direct cost of oil imports.

  We spend over 2x as much on oil imports as we do on the payments for the national debt.

  To fix the US economy we MUST get off oil.

• [Anonymous]

  I actually work for a renewable company that has received over 40 contracts with the military for solar (over the last 13 years). There’s actually competition between bases and they see it as a ‘security threat’ to be reliant on non-renewable resources. Granted, solar, for the most part, goes down when the grid goes down, but it can be retrofitted to work off-grid. The movement IS actually a good thing because it has helped in 3 ways (and more):

  1. It has helped bring down pricing for regular consumers by allowing contractors to get volume pricing and pass it on. It has helped new manufacturers enter and get volume across the chain of equipment (other than modules), creating competition among manufacturers — pushing prices down and efficiencies up.

  2. There’s enough of it going on that it has generated some extremely stiff competition among contractors, pushing labor prices down for labor, and installation times down as well (but be careful, people are BUYING jobs) and

  3. The military has various version of a “Buy America” requirement that requires materials to be sourced from the US. I count at least 5 manufacturing facilities that have been opened in the last 3 years in order to qualify for the projects. Universities and Cities have caught on and many are now requiring Buy America as well.

  If they’re going to spend money anyways, I think it’s good they’re spending it in renewable. Now if I had my choice for all of it, that would be a different story.

• [Dewi Morgan]

  Military research money, and military funding for real-life applications, is probably going to mean dropping prices for the technology for the consumer. Sounds good to me! :)

  This kind of effort is where I am most happy for the military to be spending. Or at least, fossil fuels is where I want them to be trying not to spend. Or… something like that yeah.

• [holtt]

  rebdav, it’s true that the direct savings are small. Educating people to the bigger picture that energy is something not to be taken for granted is big though. That’s part of the mindset that’s going to lead people to a non-petroleum energy base.

• [Anonymous]

  I did some IT work for the Jacksonville Naval Air Station back in the early 90′s, and even back then they used bikes to get around from hangar to hangar where they were retrofitting sub hunter planes. You can’t beat a bike when you a) don’t want to use any external energy source (besides food, which is already required), b) that you want/need the person riding the bike to be as fit as possible, and c) the distances are reasonable.

• [pjk]

  You know what else saves energy? Shutting down military bases. Saves tons of the stuff.

  • [Cowicide]

    You know what else saves energy? Shutting down military bases. Saves tons of the stuff.

    I was thinking basically the same thing. Reining in the massive, extremely corrupt, industrial-military complex needs to be the priority.

    It’s Why we fight.

• [gibson5string]

  Is it just me or is that image a little homoerotic? One guy proudly hoisting another man on his shoulders in some sort of kinky piggy back ride. The cigarette dangling from his lips, just shouting BJ! The fleshly looking leggings on the soldier being carried. Just tell me those don’t look like a scrotum. If I’m not mistaken, the right boot appears to be circumsized. I think this image is the Norman Rockwell of “Don’t Ask Don’t Tell”!

  • [Antinous / Moderator]

    Vintage military stuff almost always looks homoerotic.

• [JVP]

  Now if only we could get them to stop training people to kill other people. That’d really be progressive!

• [drukqs]

  Maybe the military can send some people to Capitol Hill, now that Pelosi’s “Green the Capitol” initiative got squashed.

  Hurray for Styrofoam and incandescent light bulbs!

• [vmaldia]

  The US military has been doing this for a long time. When I was a kid in the 1970′s, there were only a few TV stations in the Philippines and we thanked our lucky stars that we were within range of the UHF TV signal from Clark Air base.

  Their commercials about safety (e.g. always use the seatbelt) and energy/water conservation stuck in my young mind and i’m now brainwashed

• [airshowfan]

  I work in aviation and I am amazed that this article did not really go into what to me is the biggest facet of the military’s new energy mindset, the one that will probably have the biggest immediate impact in the world: Certifying jets to run on synthetic fuel. Sure, the article says that the Navy is taking delivery of some synthetic biofuel (and I love the Schwarzenegger quote about this) but it goes much deeper. Over the past couple of years, the USAF has certified the B-52, the C-17, and the B-1 (all of them enormous airplanes that burn hundreds of tons of fuel every time they fly) to run on synthetic biofuels, and aims to have all their other jets certified over the next few years. The Navy is not far behind, currently running some F/A-18s on biofuels (the “green Hornets”) and aiming to expand that. The US military is taking really solid steps towards a goal of drastically reducing how much fossil fuels they need. They will probably succeed.

  And then think of the impact that this will have on the airlines. Boeing and Airbus, with the cooperation of a couple of airlines, have already made flights with airplanes powered in part by synthetic biofuels. Especially with the fuel crisis three years ago, they want to remove themselves from the wild fluctuations of oil prices. And once the military shows that it can be done and gets some of the infrastructure in place, I can imagine airlines (and, after that, maybe local public-transport services, and eventually gas stations) switching to less economically volatile fuel.

• [Neural Kernel]

  Can’t pretty much any vehicle used by the US military already run on plain vegetable oil? Even the dirtbikes are diesels and jet fuel is just fancy diesel. A bit of processing to turn it into “proper” biodiesel can work with just about any vegetable oil but except for some tempermental machines you can pretty much pour in whatever oil you think will make the exhaust smell nicest. I wouldn’t try sunflower oil in an F-22… but I doubt a humvee would have any problems.

• [millrick]

  given that the U.S. military “is believed to be the biggest single user of petrol in the world”, i, for one, applaud any reduction in their consumption.

  http://www.guardian.co.uk/business/2010/apr/11/peak-oil-production-supply
  http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=16281892

• [mdh]

  first they laugh at you….

• [zandar]

  Good. Americans can only agree on one priority: security. Tea Partiers and free-thinkers alike can shake hands on that one.

  Preservation of the world’s ecosystem is apparently too “gay” or “socialist” or something.

• [holtt]

  Interestingly, this “indoctrination” is going to push a lot of energy-minded people out into the real world, which could have a pretty big impact.

• [Zoman]

  I put it to two work colleagues a few days ago that in my opinon none of us would be driving a vehicle with an internal combusion engine in 10 years. That it would be the preserve of the rich and the odd die hard enthusiast. They just laughed, and said they didn’t believe oil was ever going to run out.

  Back in the late 80′s I used to think survivalists were nut jobs. Now, I simply think the early ones had poor timing.