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The Environmental and Energy Study Institute and the House Energy Efficiency and Renewable Energy Caucus co-sponsored a Congressional briefing on energy efficiency in military applications, which has enormous potential for enhancing military preparedness and national security and reducing costs. Congressmen Mark Udall (D-CO), co-chair of the House Energy Efficiency and Renewable Energy Caucus, and Congressmen Roscoe Bartlett (R-MD), chair of the House Science Committee's Energy Subcommittee, provided opening remarks. The expert panel included:
At the request of Vice Admiral McGinn, RMI’s engineering team examined the energy-saving potential of USS Princeton, a 9,600-ton, 567-foot, billion-dollar Aegis cruiser. Princeton uses nearly $6 million worth of diesel-like turbine fuel each year. The study found that retrofitting motors, pumps, fans, chillers, lights and potable water systems, and changing certain operational procedures, could save an estimated 20 - 50 percent of the ship’s electricity, which could cut total fuel use by an estimated 10 - 25 percent, approaching $1 million per year.
This illustrates a far wider potential throughout the Armed Services. The U.S. Department of Defense (DoD) is the largest federal agency: 3 million employees, 36 million acres, more than 250 major installations, 40,000 additional properties, 550 public utility systems, over 150,000 land vehicles, 22,000 aircraft, and more than 300 ocean-going vessels. DoD’s annual budget for fiscal year 2002 is $331 billion, and President Bush has proposed a $369 billion budget for fiscal year 2003.
The Defense Department is the nation’s largest energy user - using one percent of all energy in the United States - and is probably the world’s largest oil buyer. DoD uses five billion gallons of petroleum a year for fuels weapons platforms (land, sea and air). More than five billion dollars of DoD’s annual budget goes toward purchasing energy, and much of the energy used by the military is used to move fuels around. According to the Defense Science Board Task Force on Improving Fuel Efficiency of Weapons Platforms, on which Lovins served, the Air Force spends about 85 percent of its fuel budget to deliver, by airborne tankers, just six percent of its annual jet fuel usage. Yet the aircraft being refueled often have 1960s-design engines which are only half as efficient as those now available.
There is an enormous opportunity for the Defense Department to improve the energy efficiency of its systems and operations. According to the Defense Science Board Task Force, improving fuel efficiency would enhance platform performance, reduce the size and vulnerability of the fuel logistics system, reduce the burden that high fuel consumption places on agility and deployability, reduce operating costs and dampen the budget impact from volatile oil prices. The Task Force recommended to the Defense Department:
In addition to saving operational fuel and logistics, DoD is helping to lead an increasingly common civilian trend of combining more efficient energy use with more diverse, dispersed, and renewable energy supplies. In time, this transition to a less brittle, less centralized architecture can make major failures of energy supply impossible by design. That shift would make attacks on critical energy infrastructure both less effective and less inviting, so it has been described by Assistant Secretary of Energy David Garman as a contribution to the war against terrorism. Lovins coauthored a major study of this issue for DoD in 1981, and believes that the high vulnerability of U.S. energy systems to disruption by groups like al Qaeda remains a key national security issue.