The Defense Department is making progress reducing energy demand, but it has a long way to go to meet the federal government’s aggressive targets, military and government officials said.
Cutting energy consumption is critical to U.S. security and in responding to climate change, but there are no easy solutions, officials said at the National Defense Industrial Association’s Environment, Energy and Sustainability Symposium and Exhibition in Denver.
“Energy efficiency goals cannot be met without Defense Department leadership,” said Richard Kidd, the Energy Department’s federal energy management program director. “We need to do more, invest more. Otherwise we might not meet the goals.”
The 2007 Energy Independence and Security Act calls for total energy use in federal buildings to be reduced 30 percent by 2015 from 2005 levels. Similar goals for federal agencies to reduce “energy intensity” and greenhouse gas emissions were set forth in President Bush’s Executive Order 13423.
President Barack Obama and Congress, meanwhile, have been working on comprehensive climate change legislation.
The Defense Department has a critical role in meeting the government’s targets because it expends the bulk of the government’s energy resources. The Pentagon burns slightly more than 1 percent of the 21 million barrels of oil that the United States consumes each year. The fuel bill for the Defense Department was $20 billion last year — a jump from $13 billion in 2007.
The Defense Department has reduced energy demand somewhat in recent years, but its performance is below average compared to other federal agencies.
“Quite frankly, the Department of Defense was kind of late in coming to the table of energy renewables,” Kidd said.
The Defense Department faces a more difficult challenge than the government as a whole, Pentagon officials said.
Its 350,000 buildings account for only 20 percent of its total energy consumption, said Al Shaffer, executive director of the Defense Energy Security Task Force.
The remaining 80 percent is for deployed military forces, including support and operational units in Iraq and Afghanistan. A large portion of the energy equation is fuel — and more than 70 percent of that is jet fuel.
Shaffer said he appreciates that the Energy Department’s federal energy management program and National Renewable Energy Laboratory in Golden, Colo., are helping the Defense Department to become more energy efficient.
“But at the end of the day, the Department of Defense has some unique problems,” Shaffer said. “I have to remind you we’re still a nation at war.”
Shaffer said the high demand for generators in battlefield areas has required an additional 20,000 tanker trucks to provide fuel. Transporting generators, fuel and other equipment is a risky business, with lives lost because of attacks on convoys.
“Energy and energy security and the logistics of moving things are huge,” he said.
Shaffer said he doesn’t agree that the Defense Department has lagged in its efforts to cut energy consumption.
He noted Defense has tripled its spending on energy initiatives from $440 million in fiscal year 2006 to $1.2 billion in this fiscal year, and has reduced energy demand 6 percent since 2005.
“And we’re starting to play energy in war games,” he said.
Tad Davis, the Army’s deputy assistant secretary of environment, safety and occupational health, said that ways to improve performance include bringing energy-efficiency efforts into the mainstream of what the Army is doing, rather than treating them as add-ons. He also recommended focusing on the things that make the most difference.
“It’s incumbent to act now,” Davis said. With so much public attention on the issue, “we don’t want to lose the opportunity.”
The Army also is looking at how it can better articulate to leaders what it is trying to do, Davis said. “We have to do a better job of defining (sustainability) and then getting buy-in by the senior leadership.”
A Rand Corp. “Green Warriors” report last year concluded that the Army could boost the probability of success in combat and post-conflict missions by better managing environmental issues.
The Army is trying to incorporate into its process what it calls “triple bottom line plus,” which takes into account mission, environment, community — plus economic benefit.
Challenges, however, mount.
In addition to current conflicts across the globe, a growing population worldwide is competing for precious energy and water resources.
Maureen Sullivan, director of environmental management for the office of the deputy undersecretary of defense for acquisition and technology, predicted that the Pentagon’s resources will be pulled in many directions because of climate change. That is likely to include increasingly providing humanitarian assistance related to conflicts and natural disasters such as tsunamis and droughts.
While some federal agencies have started an accounting of greenhouse emissions, she said it will be difficult for the Pentagon to come up with a single, consistent approach, and there are questions over whether to include in the measurements such energy gobblers as tactical equipment and weapons.
Kevin Kampschroer, acting director of the office of federal high-performance green buildings, said the government needs to rethink how it uses energy inside buildings.
“There’s a lot we’ve forgotten about how buildings can work,” Kampschroer said, noting that buildings built between 1900 and World War II are much more efficient than buildings from the 1950s, 1960s and 1970s.
Sullivan provided anecdotal evidence of energy efficiency efforts that lack common sense. For example, officials at an installation in Hawaii were pleased that they had asked the landscaping crew to be more vigilant in conserving water. Sullivan’s reaction is, “You’re in Hawaii? Why are you irrigating?”
“Water is the next threat we have to address,” she warned.
She also referred to what The Washington Post recently dubbed renewable energy’s environmental paradox. For example, wind farms — and the power lines connecting the energy to the grid — might at the same time disrupt wildlife habitats.
Or how do the renewable energy efforts implicate homeland security? For example, she said, the military has learned that “radar and wind turbines are not a good mix,” Sullivan said.
Another potentially problematic issue for the Defense Department is that the U.S. energy grid is in poor condition and vulnerable to possible cyber-attacks.
A huge discussion rages over whether military installations should try to get off the energy grid and be self-sufficient, said Sullivan.
What happens to community support, she said, if there is a power outage in the area and the public sees the military base continuing to glow?
“We just haven’t reached a final decision point on it,” Sullivan said.
Roger Pielke Jr., an environmental studies professor with the University of Colorado’s Center for Science and Technology Policy Research, offered the most sober assessment of the magnitude of the challenge to cut greenhouse gas emissions amid a growing global population.
Eighty percent of the world lives on less than $10 a day, he noted. Increasing wealth will result in more demand for energy, such as in India, China and the developing world. “Reducing GDP is a no go” in terms of global policy, he said.
He likened “cap-and-trade” policies — which allow industries to trade pollution permits to those that pollute more — to be an accounting scheme, rather than helping achieve targets.
“The policy is disconnected from the reality of the magnitude of the problem,” Pielke said.
With emissions growing, energy efficiency can’t alone achieve carbon dioxide reduction targets, he said, as he illustrated his point with recent data from environmental leaders such as France and England. There are few other tools in the toolbox, short of switching to clean fuel sources such as nuclear power, which would take some time even if there is political will to do so.
The National Renewable Energy Laboratory has been working on technology to produce military jet fuel from algae. Algae can be grown under a variety of conditions and produces lipid, an oily material.
But such technology is years away from being commercially viable, cautioned Michael Pacheco, NREL’s vice president of deployment and industry partnerships.
When asked if he sees a way forward in terms of energy independence, Shaffer reflected a can-do attitude.
An analogy, Shaffer said, is the concern decades ago about feeding everyone in the world. Food production efficiency has increased multifold through technology. He suggested similar breakthroughs could occur in the energy sector.
“I do see a clear path forward,” Shaffer said. The United States just has to “get on” with investing in technology, he said.
The Defense Department has an important role to play in the national effort to be more energy self-sufficient, said Sherri Goodman, general counsel of the think tank CNA Corp. and former deputy undersecretary of defense for environmental security.
“We are at a pivotal moment in history where the choices we make will reverberate in this century and into the centuries beyond,” she said. “Climate change is far more than simply an environmental threat. It’s a threat to our stability. It’s a fundamental threat to global security today as were nuclear weapons during the Cold War.”
Goodman said that was the conclusion of a 2007 CNA military advisory board report on national security and the threat of climate change.
The board concluded climate change isn’t subject to a linear equation, but is a “threat multiplier,” she said. In other words, it could occur in different areas at the same time, creating further instability in volatile regions of the world, through such things as severe storms, drought and the spread of diseases.
Consider the human consequences, Goodman said: Loss of coastal regions that already comprise the most densely populated areas of the world, reduced water supplies and agricultural activity, and forced migration of tens of millions of people.
The reaction by some observers is that “well, people just have to move.” But the reality is much more complicated than that. Consider Darfur, Sudan, Goodman said. She said that might be the first conflict in which climate change is an underlying factor. She characterized it as a conflict triggered by desertification, “a struggle by desperate people to survive in a rapidly changing environment.”
Since the 2007 CNA report, critical work has been done, Goodman said. Congress directed the Defense Department to consider climate change in its plans, and to coordinate with other nations to help prevent, mitigate or adapt to the likely consequences.
The military also has begun to evaluate such things as how rising sea levels could affect military installations, what role the Pentagon would play in civil authority, and how to mitigate energy supply risks and dependence on the commercial utility grid. Goodman iterated other experts’ views that the country’s dependence on fossil fuels leaves it vulnerable to hostile regimes and terrorists.
Current efforts by the military to install more energy efficient systems are a good start, but there’s a long way to go before the country truly achieves energy stability, she said.