By Ann Roosevelt
The Army spent $4 billion last year on energy and is working to develop policy and take actions to improve energy security for both the deployed forces and at its installations, officials said.
Last year, $2.7 billion of that $4 billion was for liquid fuel operational activities, which doesn’t count the cost to deliver and secure fuel at remote areas, only the purchase price and delivery to a major supply junction, said Richard Kidd, deputy assistant Secretary of the Army for Energy and Sustainability.
Last year in Afghanistan, the total fuel cost was up 64 percent in Fiscal Year 2010, compared to FY 2009, he said. The cost was driven by higher fuel costs, more soldiers on the ground and higher operational tempo. It’s likely to increase this year, too, since fuel costs are up and there is an increased Army presence.
Installation energy use was more than $1.2 billion last year.
“There’s recognition that the Army of today…has to make the decisions now so that the Army of tomorrow will have access to the energy, the fuel and the water that it needs to perform its mission–it has to have access to those things at a cost it can afford,” Kidd said.
There is a two-fold benefit, he said at a Pentagon briefing earlier this week–investing in alternate and renewable energy leads to mission effectiveness and cost savings.
“While this is going into an era of constrained budgets investments in energy security should be considered just that–investments that will pay back over (time),” he said.
Making it work follows the same pattern on installations and in the operational environment: first, change the culture. Every soldier and officer needs to be equipped with the information needed to make energy-informed decisions. “Every soldier a power manager,” Kidd said.
The second part of the effort is to aggressively drive efficiency across the enterprise by doing such things as adding insulation to efficient lighting or how generators are used.
Once those two steps are in place, diversifying supply with renewable or alternate energy offers redundancy and resiliency, he said.
Lt. Gen. Michael Vane, director, Army Capabilities Integration Center (ARCIC), is responsible for helping the Army secretary and chief of staff consider the future and integrating requirements across Doctrine, Organization, Training, Materiel, Leadership and Education, Personnel and Facilities
“Our experience shows energy plays an increasingly important role in assuring attributes like mobility, flexibility, endurance, resilience and protection,” he said.
Vane defined Operational Energy as: “the energy required for training, moving and sustaining military forces and weapons platforms for military operations.”
However, he said, operational energy itself is not the end state. It is there to help soldiers and units succeed in their missions.
That’s exactly how the service is looking at it. Operational performance must drive decisions that balance factors such as speed, range, weight and efficiency and how more power could potentially translate into improved system performance–for example for radars or vehicles.
This is what the situation looks like in Afghanistan: Energy and water drive the majority of the sustainment volume, which in turn diverts manpower, security and other resources from the primary missions, Vane said. Using less manpower to deliver energy and water means fewer soldiers exposed to enemy threats, thus, more lives saved.
“The more remote the operation, the more critical the challenge,” he said. Soldiers patrol in Afghanistan carrying loads of 120 pounds or more. For a three-day patrol, that probably includes about 15 pounds worth of batteries along with even heavier battery powered devices.
The Army has taken steps to improve energy performance. “We’ve issued fold-up solar panels that allow individual soldiers to recharge batteries using sunlight instead of using generators,” Vane said. “We’ve developed a new family of tactical generators that will convert fuel to electrical power with about a 20-percent greater efficiency and we have begun to recycle shower water at base camps.”
About a year ago, ARCIC began to think about how to solve the energy problem long term. That resulted in a power and energy strategy White Paper identifying three grand challenges: to provide capability to monitor and manage energy at all levels, to dramatically reduce the footprint, and to network energy sources and applications to provide greater performance and flexibility.
Since then, ARCIC is in the process of gaining Joint Staff approval of an Initial Capabilities Document that defines new needs: such as energy interoperability and operational energy management capability and provides the context for energy related cost benefit decisions addressing top capability gaps from power source duration to planning tools to reducing our energy demand.
Also under way is an Operational Energy Campaign Plan that will lay out the range of improvements that are needed for future budgets, ranging from analysis of operational energy and energy architecture, and connecting operational energy and installation energy so if the tactical force has alternative fuel sources, there’s the right kind of framework back at installations to plug into and for training.
Importantly, the plan will relate those initiatives to operational needs “so we can better manage progress and validate the performance improvements we expect,” Vane said. Such goals as net zero units, net zero platforms, net zero soldiers are the kind of long-term visionary effects the service is looking for.
Maj. Gen. Robert Radin, assistant deputy chief of staff of the Army, G-4, operations, said his office is working on the life cycle of expeditionary bases, how they evolve and how the energy piece fits in.
The Army is working with its contractors and soliciting their ideas on how to better, more efficiently produce and distribute power, Radin said. Even as the briefing was taking place, contractors and government personnel were meeting to help the service more efficiently and effectively produce and distribute power and, more importantly, identify those things that inhibit us from doing that.
Dale Houck, Energy Project lead, Army Logistics Innovation Agency, said his issue is what the Army is doing to be less dependent on energy in its operations.
The approach needs to be comprehensive. “There’s no single solution, whether it’s a process, a procedure or a technology that addresses all the challenges we face across the full spectrum of operations,” he said.
Several initiatives are under way. “We think that energy efficiency improvement on our base camps represents one of the best opportunities to reduce and more intelligently manage water, and our energy uses.”
This is being done by a systems approach to reduce the demand for both energy and water and their production–that includes the use of energy efficient shelters micro grids and renewable power, water reuse systems and others.
“We’re not doing this alone. We have the Army science and technology community behind us,” he said. The service also is leveraging what industry and the Energy Department have done.