Tactical generators.
The two words may induce yawns for some, but improving their efficiency has become serious business in the U.S military during the past six years.
Small, medium and large electrical generators are needed to power forward operating bases in Afghanistan and Iraq. These generators are the largest consumer of fuel on the battlefield.
And this fuel often must be trucked in at a high price. There is the so-called “fully burdened” price of fuel – the actual cost of buying, moving and protecting a gallon of petroleum, which is estimated at somewhere between $15 and $42 per gallon depending how much security is needed. And then there is the ultimate price of fuel — the lives of men and women in uniform lost when ambushed during convoy operations.
“Where we are today is basically where we were 40 years ago with generators,” said Michael Padden, the Army program manager for mobile electric power.
Solar, wind, waste-to-fuel, fuel cells and turning garbage into electricity are all on the table, he said. “There is a lot of stuff going on, but no standardization. There is a lot of potential, but at the same time, no one is looking at it holistically,” he said at the National Defense Industrial Association Power Expo in New Orleans.
A House Armed Services Committee’s subcommittee on readiness hearing on the Defense Department’s efforts to reduce fuel costs reflected Padden’s assertion.
William Solis, director of defense capabilities management at the Government Accountability Office, testified that the department lacks an effective approach to reducing fuel demand – especially at remote outposts that rely on generators because they cannot connect to a local power grid.
“Managing fuel demand at forward-deployed locations has not been a departmental priority and its fuel reduction efforts have not been well coordinated,” Solis said.
Commanders at forward-deployed locations have received little guidance from the Defense Department, they don’t have viable funding mechanisms for fuel reduction projects and there is no one person in the Pentagon who can be held accountable for managing the problem, Solis said.
A director of operational energy, whose office was created in the 2009 Defense Authorization Act, has yet to be appointed.
And yet as Padden said, “There’s never been more interest in power and energy than there is today.”
Attention has increasingly fallen on generators, which are consuming more fuel on some bases than trucks, fighting vehicles and helicopters combined, according to GAO findings. About 70 percent of convoys traveling on Iraq and Afghanistan’s roads are tasked with moving fuel and water, said a February 2008 Defense Science Board report, “More Fight, Less Fuel.”
The Army, as the biggest user of battlefield generators, is the executive agent for the U.S. military on mobile electric power. Padden, as the service’s program manager for generators, said he often hears from companies that believe they have the solution to reducing power consumption.
But they don’t always meet his criteria. The generators must be rugged enough to meet military specifications, they must address a stated requirement and most importantly, there has to be a business case.
“It doesn’t make any sense to have a gee-whiz idea that does great things, but is unaffordable,” he said.
After three decades of using the same technology, a new family of generators, the advanced medium mobile power sources, are in the pipeline. They will be more fuel efficient and quieter, Padden said. Fully fielding these new generators could save up to $800 million in fuel costs per year, depending on the war time operational tempo, he said.
Padden said operational tests will begin at Aberdeen Proving Ground in Maryland this summer with a goal of fielding the first units in 2011. As far as reducing demand, more efficient air conditioner/heating units are expected to go into low-rate initial production this year.
A lack of power management has also led to inefficiencies. Bases would set up several small generators to meet their needs, which would require more fuel and more personnel to operate. The Central Power initiative reconfigured these setups to use fewer and larger generators. One infantry division saved roughly $384,000 in fuel costs in one year, GAO said.
Padden also touted a six-year research and development effort, called Hybrid Intelligent Power, which is intended to manage electrical grids on bases, whether they be powered by JP8, or other alternative fuels that may come along. This “plug-and-play” system is shooting for production in 2013.
Right now, with so many pilot projects ongoing, Padden warned against stove-piped energy systems. Long a problem in the communications world, where different branches couldn’t communicate with each other because they didn‘t have the same brands of radios, mobile electric power might be heading in the same direction if the problem is not addressed.
“There’s no reason we can’t have a standard family of solar arrays, fuel cells or hybrid generators,” he said.
Alan Shaffer, principal deputy director and executive director of the Pentagon’s energy security task force, said at the hearing that many of GAO’s concerns about a lack of direction regarding battlefield power sources are already being addressed.
“The task force has coordinated the growing energy programs and raised awareness of energy issues across DoD,” he said. “Energy security will not be attained by a silver bullet, but rather, by a long, focused campaign,” he added.
One stop-gap measure was the spraying of tents with insulating foam. The tents are no longer able to be reused, but the tradeoff has been a 40 to 75 percent reduction in energy costs. That amounts to 77,000 to 180,000 gallons of fuel per day in Iraq, or 13 to 26 tankers being taken off the road, Shaffer said. The foam is now being applied to tents in Afghanistan.
The Defense Department has tripled its investment in new energy technologies from $440 million in fiscal year 2006 to $1.3 billion in 2009, Shaffer said.