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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. * * * * * 2500 Wilson Blvd., Suite 215, Arlington, VA 22201 |
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