INDUSTRY I ANALYSIS
together. On both base and battlefield, the Pentagon – throughout history, no stranger to technology innovation – is deploying unprecedented amounts of clean energy and becoming a critical market opportunity for the clean-tech industry. President Obama’s proposed budget for fiscal 2013, even if unlikely to pass Congress, calls for more than doubling Pentagon spending on clean energy and efficiency from its current $400 million to $1 billion.
The U.S. Department of Defense is the world’s largest single consumer of energy, spending about $15 billion a year and accounting for a staggering 70 percent of the entire energy use of the U.S. federal government. Every dollar increase in the price of oil adds $30 million to the Navy’s budget alone. So even incremental shifts from fossil fuels to clean energy can have huge market impacts, and the Pentagon has much bigger shifts in mind.
Typifying the new market opportunity for clean-tech players is the Marines Corps’ Experimental Forward Operating Base program, an annual event at the Air Ground Combat Center in Twentynine Palms, California, to test commercial vendors’ clean- energy and efficiency technologies for battlefield use. Some of these so-called expeditionary technologies, such as solar- charged batteries and small-scale water purification, have been deployed in Afghanistan within eight months of testing, a historically rapid deployment.
“We need to get a grip on the permanent vice that this threeletter word – oil – has had around our necks,” says Marines Maj. Gen. Anthony Jackson, a 37-year Corps member who commands seven Marines bases in southern California and Arizona. “I know the cost of that. I know it up close and personal.”
On the operational side, the opportunity is vast. The DoD spends $4 billion a year powering 2.2 billion square feet of space in 300,000 buildings – three times the amount of real estate operated by Walmart. The Army is leading the way with its NetZero Base program, with the goal of net-zero energy, water, and waste on five U.S. bases by 2020, 25 more by 2025, and all bases by 2050.
Key to achieving these goals is on-site generation, which also reduces the high security risk of dependence on the public grid. In January, SunPower broke ground on a 13.8 MW solar PV array at Naval Air Weapons Station China Lake in California, which will supply 30 percent of the base’s power and represents the first 20-year power purchase agreement from a federal government agency.
A Siemens unit is building the Army’s largest on-site generation project, a 4.5 MW solar PV system at White Sands Missile Range
Table 4: US based investments in clean tech
in New Mexico. In early 2012, Skyline Solar won the contract to build solar installations at Edwards Air Force Base in California and the Army’s Fort Bliss in Texas. And the military’s largest aggregate clean-generation project, SolarStrong, calls for SolarCity to install 300 MW of solar PV on 120,000 military housing units across the U.S. in the next five years – the largest residential solar project in U.S. history.
The Air Force – user of about half of all fuels consumed by the military – has mandated 50 percent biofuels use for domestic aviation. The Navy has called for a 50 percent biofuels mix for its ships and aircraft by 2020 – an estimated 336 million gallons of biofuels. In December 2011, the Navy placed the largest biofuels order in U.S. government history, $12 million for 450,000 gallons of algal and used cooking oil-based fuels from Solazyme and a Tyson Foods-Syntroleum joint venture, Dynamic Fuels.
Japan Moves Toward Cleaner Post-Nuclear Future
One year ago, a magnitude 9.0 earthquake and resulting tsunami devastated Japan, killing more than 15,000 people, damaging or destroying more than 125,000 buildings, and triggering meltdowns in three reactors at Tokyo Electric Power’s Fukushima Daiichi nuclear power plant. Although the crippled reactors were brought under control after many harrowing months, the accident’s impact on Japan’s energy future may be felt for decades to come.
Before the tragedy in March 2011, Japan received 30 percent of its electricity from nuclear power, with plans to increase nuclear’s share to 50 percent by 2030. Now (as of March 2012), all but three of the nation’s 54 nuclear generators remain shut down for safety tests, and new Prime Minister Yoshihiko Noda has stated that building any new reactors “will be next to impossible.” So Japan, pioneer of many new clean-energy and efficiency technologies in the past, is taking bold steps to change course and steer toward a future powered in much greater measure by
The case for grid energy storage is easy to make. Storing megawatts
worth of electricity for several hours at a time strengthens the grid’s ability to absorb supply interruptions,which can cost billions when they result in cascading outages. It allows for mass deployment of intermittent renewables,even with some cloudy days and windless nights
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