Bullet Points: U.S. Military Energy Strategies

CEBROWSKI INSTITUTE
U.S. MILITARY ENERGY STRATEGIES

WELCOME:
MITZI WERTHEIM,
FOUNDER, THE ENERGY CONVERSATION

MODERATOR:
MARV LANGSTON,
PRINCIPAL, LANGSTON ASSOCIATES

SPEAKERS:
AMANDA J. DORY,
DEPUTY ASSISTANT SECRETARY OF DEFENSE FOR STRATEGY,
OFFICE OF THE SECRETARY OF DEFENSE

REAR ADM. PHILIP HART CULLOM,
DIRECTOR, FLEET READINESS DIVISION, U.S. NAVY

KEVIN T. GEISS,
INSTALLATIONS AND ENVIRONMENT, U.S. ARMY

MICHAEL F. MCGHEE,
ACTING DEPUTY ASSISTANT SECRETARY; ENVIRONMENT, SAFETY AND OCCUPATIONAL HEALTH; U.S. AIR FORCE

CARLA E. LUCCHINO,
ASSISTANT DEPUTY COMMANDANT, INSTALLATIONS AND LOGISTICS, HEADQUARTERS, U.S. MARINE CORPS

JEFFERY G. ORNER,
DEPUTY ASSISTANT COMMANDANT FOR ENGINEERING & LOGISTICS, U.S. COAST GUARD

MONDAY, OCTOBER 19, 2009
5:30 P.M.

AMANDA DORY:  

Six items to highlight some areas of leadership:

• Long-term planning.  
• The imperative for operational energy efficiency - in terms of loss of life, loss of treasure based on inefficient energy-consumption approaches.    •    Adaptation is how we will begin to adjust, moving forward to address issues related to climate change.  
• Support of civil authorities and homeland-security efforts within the U.S. interagency in the domain of energy and climate change.
• Military-to-military engagement gives us an opportunity to introduce energy and climate considerations into military-to-military and also political-military dialogues with other civilian ministries of defense personnel.  
• Moral authority.

REAR ADM. PHILIP HART CULLOM: 

• 80 percent of the world’s fuel travels by ocean.  What if instabilities occur, are we prepared for that – we really do need to be prepared.
• The Navy spent 1.2 billion for fuel in 2007.  In 2008, when it went up to $147 a barrel, it cost the Navy 5.1 billion.  
• Navy energy snapshot:  75 percent of energy use is tactical, 25 percent of it is shore.   More than half is coming from petroleum.  
• 60% of petroleum consumed by the U.S. comes from overseas.  
• U.S. government consumes 2 percent of total petroleum consumed by the U.S.; DOD is 93 percent of that, and the Navy is about a quarter of the Department of Defense.  
• Navy petroleum consumption is roughly split between maritime and aviation, along with an expeditionary piece and a shore piece.
• The Navy has an energy coordination office and working groups – functional working groups as well as supporting working groups led by flag or senior executives – one- and two-stars and/or senior executives – SESs.  
• The Navy's energy security strategy involves conservation, efficiency and alternatives.  These three things are interrelated.  
• A global war game was conducted in 2009, and energy played a role.  The bottom line is logistics is an Achilles’ heel.  Fuel efficiency, fuel-efficient platforms, could make the difference.
• Makin Island commissioning is a hybrid electric ship, has some of the greatest advancements that the Navy has made in propulsion power in quite a few number of years.  
• The Navy is looking into converting current destroyers' propulsion systems into hybrid electric drive systems.
• One percent in fuel savings from advancements/modifications is a lot when you spread that across a significant portion of the Navy.  
• Conducting training in simulators saves a lot of fuel.  
• Current shore initiatives include smart metering, as a down payment towards a smart grid with greater efficiencies and improved critical infrastructure protection.
• Using the difference in temperature between the surface of the water down to very deep levels serves as an engine that you can convert into power and fresh water.
• Current testing is intended to ultimately develop a DDG and a green strike group and a green Hornet running on biofuel – Camelina-based biofuel – in afterburner.   

These are the Navy's energy messages:  

• Assuring mobility – off ramps to petroleum – other sources, other advantages to petroleum – and that gives us security, which translates to mission success.
• Expanding our tactical reach – lightening the load.
• Greening our footprint gives us resiliency from the grid.
• Five goals that the secretary of the Navy announced at the Naval Energy Forum:
• Sailing a great green fleet
• A green strike in local ops in 2012 and then sail it in 2016 – and that will include the aircraft that are flying off it
• Reduce petroleum on nontactical vehicles by 2015 – we’ll be at 50 percent in the commercial fleet
• Alternative energy ashore by 2020 – 50 percent shore-based by alternative sources
• Energy-use Navy wide, 2020 – 50 percent of total energy consumption from alternative sources.
• Tactical advantage will not necessarily be an extra knot; it may be an extra gallon of gas.

KEVIN GEISS: 

• The Army Senior Energy Council guiding goals for energy strategy within the Army:
• Reducing our energy consumption where possible
• Increasing our energy efficiencies across all platform as well as our installations
• Increasing our use of renewable and alternative energy
• Assuring access to sufficient energy supplies
• Reducing our adverse impacts on the environment.     

Five key components that address the main things that we were concerned about as far as energy security for the Army:

• Surety:  We need to make sure we have the power that we require for our missions.  
• Supply – where are we getting that power and energy from?
• Sufficiency – well, it’s not just enough to have power but you need to have sufficient power to complete the mission.
• Survivability - as far as our dependence upon the electric grid and our vulnerabilities that relate to that situation are concerned.
• Sustainability and how we impact the mission, our community and the environment as we carry out our operations in the Army.

• The Army has over 150 installations all over the United States – active duty installations – but then we have reserve sites, National Guard - sites are scattered across the United States and other parts around the world - opportunities for solar, wind, geothermal biomass.  
• Part of our challenge is coming up with what the right opportunities are for a particular installation - you have to think about all the other aspects that add to the context and the milieu of what the challenges are at that installation.  
• What is the mission at the installation?  
• The Army has six sites that have nuclear certificates.
• The Army signed the memorandum of agreement with Clark, the developer, and ACCIONA Solar to develop the 500 megawatt project at Fort Irwin, California, with the potential there, perhaps, to go up to a gigawatt.  
• That was day 1 of probably a 12-year process, starting off first with about 18 months, 2 years to go through all the environmental assessment.
• Large-scale projects really come down two basic things:  real estate and finance.  
• Real estate that’s available and that will not conflict with your mission.  
• A private developer secures capital to make this project happen; not money that’s coming from the Army.  
• The Army and Navy are working on a plan to coordinate development of a 30-megawatt geothermal project out at Hawthorne.  The Navy has the geothermal program office.
• The Army has a fleet of 70,000 hybrid vehicles – nontactical vehicles.
• Other projects include incorporating solar walls, fuel cells, traditional solar rays, building integrated solar panels.
• Thermal management is a significant challenge for our tactical vehicles.  
• Power management considers how the field, the deployed energy arena functions as a system, and how we can integrate both power development, power storage, power management and power utilization within that system.  
• In January 2009, Mr. Dean Popps, the assistant secretary for acquisition, logistics and technology in the Army, signed out a memo that said that all acquisition-category programs will include the fully burdened cost of energy calculation in their total ownership cost analysis; and that energy productivity is what we’re measuring.  
• Energy productivity means that for that weapons system, what is all of the energy that is needed for that weapons system to do everything within the lifecycle, not just mobility, going from point A to point B, but while it’s sitting there, communicating, sending rounds downrange for all of that operation, how much energy is required?
• The $32 million in stimulus funding was allocated to 17 projects across Army installations.  In SRM almost $400 million was allocated for energy projects; total SRM was ~$1.4 billion.
• RDT&E allocated $75 million for a number of projects; one of those is not yet awarded but will be a microgrid demonstration out at Fort Sill where they want to take a portion of the installation off the grid for a minimum of 30 days, preferably for a significant period of time to demonstrate microgrid technology.
• Maj. Gen. Bromberg talked last week at the Association of the U.S. Army conference about how he’s trying to look at all of the requirements at Fort Bliss for its $4 billion worth of construction.  Fort Bliss's overall installation population is growing 260%.  
• There are a lot of opportunities to address new technologies and incorporate new technologies for renewable and alternative energy as well as maximizing efficiencies of those buildings at Fort Bliss.
• Energy is a thread that runs through everything that we do - we need to think of it that way.
• Energy needs to be considered in all of the decisions that we make in acquisitions of systems and in operations and to optimize that.
• Consider energy as a multidisciplinary problem.  

MICHAEL MCGHEE: 

• The good news is, over the past several years starting in about 2003 – Air Force energy consumption in millions of millions of BTUs has been going down.  The bad news is, the cost of it has gone up rather substantially in spite of our economy of use of energy.
• The Air Force spent overall about $9 billion to acquire energy in 2008.
• A lot of money has been spent on recapitalizing our energy infrastructure; and a big chunk of that was from energy conservation.
• An energy senior focus group was established in 2005 and represented by the top leadership of the Air Force.  
• The Air Force has a pretty simple vision:  Make energy a consideration in all that we do.  
• A whole host of various goals on the reduce demand side like talking about more efficient pilot operations and training, reducing our installation energy intensity, looking at aviation fuel consumption and reducing that by 10 percent, reducing our motor vehicle fleet fuel use also by certain percentages.  
• We’ve been able to find some common ground where we can optimize our flying routes, save some time, save some airmen’s lives probably and also save some fuel.  
• On the reduced demand side, we’ve got some success, 3.8 percent reduction in fuel usage from 2006 to 2008.  
• One of the easiest things for people to appreciate is that we’ve adopted the LEED standard.
• There are a series of goals on the increased supply side embedded in our policy.
• One goal is to acquire 50 percent of the Air Force’s domestic aviation fuel requirements via an alternative fuel blend.
• The Nellis Air Force Base 14 megawatt PV array has been online sine November ’07.  It is the second largest photovoltaic array in the Americas.
• The Air Force Academy will become a net-zero installation or operation.  
• If you blend that synthetic liquid fuel from the Fischer-Tropsch process 50-50 with standard conventional jet fuel, the jet doesn’t know the difference.  It meets the spec.
• The Air Force has a goal that the entire fleet can be certified and ready to operate on synthetic fuel.
• Our last goal is to change the culture.  
• The Air Force public web site is safie.hq.af.mil

CARLA LUCCHINO: 

• New technology the Marines are testing is a lightweight water purifier we put in the back of a Humvee, it purifies about 125 gallons of water an hour.
• We’ve put a foam sealant on our tents, and it worked so good that Brig. Gen. Bob Rourke said he was able to turn off 600 air conditioners.  
• We have a 1.5 megawatt wind turbine at Barstow that was set up this year.  
• Garrison-mobile equipment:  These are our non-tactical vehicles that are hydrogen powered or ethanol-flex-fuel hybrids, electric cars.  
• We put some cameras in the vehicles - as the Marines realized they were being filmed, they slowed down, so we saved a lot of fuel in the process of slowing them down.  
• The real important thing is to have the infrastructure for the vehicles.  

JEFF ORNER: 

• The Coast Guard’s supports environmental and energy efficiency in their 23,000 facilities, 230 ships and 1800 boats.

Coast Guard energy management:

•  Sustainable energy usage – greening our footprint.  
•  Fuel management – providing the fuel that our operators need when they need it.  
•  Energy resource management that is the business case for the first two points.

Energy program dynamics include:

• Rising expenditures – using less energy, while spending more money doing it.  
•  Coast Guard-wide strategic reorganization:  the energy program has moved to under the Deputy Commandant for mission support at Coast Guard Headquarters, and that is the CIO - all of acquisition, which includes engineering and logistics, the chief human capital officer and all of the field activities who provide mission support to our operators.
• The landfill gas project - we drilled wells into their landfill, piped the methane under the Baltimore Beltway and to our Curtis Bay facility.  A company built the co-generation plant.  They’re generating enough power to take our Coast Guard yard off the grid.  
• We’re designing new buildings to LEED standards, we’re installing meters and we are focusing on reducing water consumption.  
• Up at our facility in Kodiak, we’ve been able to reduce usage by 49 million gallons a year.  
• On cutters, stern flaps and these high-energy propellers were installed and hulls coated to reduce fuel consumption.  We’re also retrofitting our older cutters.  
• Fuel management – like the other services, most of our energy use is on the operational side, not in ashore infrastructure.  That’s where the real challenge is, particularly in light of the fact that we build maybe a ship a year, so these things take time.  
• Resource management – we use 70 percent of the energy that the Department of Homeland Security uses.  We’re spending more money every year on energy.  
• We are also creating something akin to a taskforce energy. 

File Attachment: 

U.S. Military Energy Strategies Bullet Points 19 Oct 2009