SkyBuilt Power Press Releases
Wall Street Journal: Military Looks to SkyBuilt
for Oil Savings and Renewable Power
[excerpt from January
9, 2007, article by Massod Farivar: "Military Looks
to SkyBuilt for Oil Savings and Renewable Power". See
the full article at the Wall
Street Journal.
January 9, 2007 — Recent
energy-market disruptions have added urgency to the U.S. military's
efforts to curb its use of oil and other fuels. But the effort
faces considerable obstacles, including the difficulty in figuring
out how much it spends on energy to begin with.
In the year ended Sept. 30, the Defense Department
spent, by its estimate, $13 billion on fuel amounting to 134
million barrels of oil for the year, up from 107 million barrels
of oil in 2000. The wars in Afghanistan and Iraq led to a surge
in fuel use in that period, according to the Defense Energy
Support Center, a government agency that buys fuel from private-sector
companies and supplies it to the armed forces.
The most recent figure is more than the entire
nation of Sweden consumed in 2005. (Still, it adds up to less
than 2% of daily U.S. consumption.)
As energy prices have surged and volatility has
increased in important oil-producing regions, the military
is redoubling efforts to rein in consumption through conservation,
increased fuel-efficiency measures and greater use of alternative
energy. The effort picked up in earnest following the 2005
Atlantic Ocean hurricanes, which devastated the Gulf Coast,
lifted prices to records and highlighted the vulnerability
of supplies.
"Katrina was a wake-up call," says
Michael Aimone, assistant deputy chief of staff of the Air
Force who oversees the force's energy-conservation efforts.
The Pentagon is planning
to spend more than $2 billion in the next five years on energy
initiatives, which could help spur development of energy
sources for use in other sectors. "The contribution [the military's efforts] will
make will be in leadership rather than actual conservation," said
Rep. Roscoe Bartlett, a Maryland Republican, who last year
formed a bipartisan panel called the Defense Energy Working
Group to study the issue.
James Woolsey, a former
Central Intelligence Agency director who heads the policy
panel of one of two Pentagon energy task forces, said the
drive to curb energy use is being fueled less by high prices
than an increasing awareness about the "vulnerability and insecurity of supplies" world-wide.
The effect of the Pentagon's interest in conservation
and alternative energy can be seen from military bases and
hangers to the battlefields of Iraq and Afghanistan. In late
July, Marine Corps Maj. Gen. Richard Zilmer, commander of U.S.
forces in Iraq's insurgent al-Anbar province, asked for a shipment
of mobile solar panels and wind turbines to supplement gas-guzzling
generators at bases under his command.
Cutting "the military's dependence on fuel
for power generation could reduce the number of road-bound
convoys" and U.S. casualties resulting from insurgent
attacks on U.S. supply convoys, Gen. Zilmer wrote in a memo.
The Army's Rapid Equipping Force, the unit responsible for
processing such requests, has contracted SkyBuilt Power of Arlington,
Va., to build four hybrid power stations for delivery
this spring.
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