In case you've recently found yourself wondering, "Self, I wonder what the relationship between the Department of Defense and green energy is?", allow me to introduce you to:
Lean, Mean, and Clean: Energy Innovation and the Department of Defense
which is a report by an outfit called the Information Technology and Innovation Foundation - an organization currently winning on titles in my book. Well, report titles, anyway. "Information Technology and Innovation Foundation" is sort of blah.
Fun facts from the article:
1) The federal government consumed 1.6 quadrillion BTUs (quads) of energy in 2007. The DoD accounted for 1.1 quads, or more than 70%. This makes DoD the largest single user of energy on the planet, roughly equal to the entire economy of Oregon. Yowza. (I know you're wondering what the second biggest government agency consumer is. It's the USPS.)
2) The biggest single driver in the DoD is the Air Force, with a little over half.
3) With such a huge energy consumption, the military is quite concerned over the impact on its operations of rising fuel prices and increasing shortages of fossil fuels (as oil production lags relative to increasing global demand).
4) The average amount of fuel used per soldier has increased 4-fold from WWII to now. This creates huge supply chain issues. 70% of the tonnage shipped by the Army for battlefield purposes is fuel. Fuel supply convoys are really nice targets. Guarding fuel supply convoys is a serious operational drain.
5) Things the military is looking into include green fuels for airplanes, aviation fuel efficiency, net-zero installations, a "Great Green Fleet" strike group (whatever that means), energy use monitoring, renewable resource prediction software, batteries, microgrids, solar and geothermal power generation, and general increases in efficiency and operational use of renewable energy.
Bottom line: The DoD is doing what you might expect, which is to say making good little liberals nervous by considering energy independence a strategic goal and doing some investing to try to assure it (good! sensible! how can we be wrong if even the ARMY is on our side!) because not attaining it might a) make us go to war, and b) interfere with the military's ability to do its job while at war which, it can't be denied, might include killing people (uh...).
Actually, side note: as a good little liberal, I do find the framing of military thinking suggested in this report a little troublesome at a higher level. It's one thing for the military to invest in technology to pursue operational energy independence - powering tanks with solar rather than oil so as to reduce supply chain issues seems like exactly the sort of thing the military might (and should) want to do if it could. That's a perfectly reasonable operational-level framing. To be fair, that is the bulk of the content of this article. But the framing of the article - the introduction, the background - is much more about grand strategy and national-level concerns. The implicit argument seems to go, "Oil problems can make us go to war. War is the military's business. Therefore it is the military's business to be thinking about energy independence at the national level." And I'm not sure I agree on that. The military ought to make strategy, but it should not, it seems to me, try to make grand strategy - even if I happen to agree with the grand strategy in this case.*
But perhaps I should shut my mouth and be grateful to anyone who wants to increase the renewable energy research funding pie. I actually think most of what the military's thinking is pretty unobjectionable; the initial framing of the article just rubbed me the wrong way.
* Note that that's the framing chosen by the research organization, so I don't really know how the military prioritizes these different levels of thinking internally. They have quotes supporting from generals about the grand strategy stuff, but for all I know that's just stuff generals have said at coffee party chats.
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