U.S. Military Eagerly Adopting Renewable Energy, Electric Transportation
As suggested in this article, the U.S. military is leading the way in the migration to renewable energy and electric transportation.
Obviously, there’s a certain irony here, as the role of the American military is, in large measure, to ensure our access to oil on an ongoing basis. But anyone can see the rationale: depending on gasoline and diesel while you’re actively in battle or defending a military position is a potentially lethal place to be. According to my understanding, more of our soldiers are killed defending the supply line of oil to military bases and outposts in the Middle East than in any other single activity.
Thus the interest in clean energy here is rooted in self-preservation – which is more than fine by me; whatever gets the job done. I’m like anyone; I hate to see young people killed or wounded – for any reason.
I have read a bunch of articles about the military and renewable energy. Some good and some bad. They understand that by depending on fossil fuels they are actually feeding the enemy and leaving themselves vulnerable.
On the good side, they are starting to fly planes including fighter planes on biofuels. They are also installing solar panels and microgrids and energy efficient equipment at outposts in Afghanistan. This serves to lower the amount of fuel they need to transport through dangerous areas to resupply the outpost lessening the number of trips required and thus the risk. It also serves to change up the schedule since, depending on the weather, fuel is used at varying rates which means the enemy can’t bank on the fact that there will be a fuel convoy passing through a given area every third day for example and must tie down fighters for more time if they really want to hit the convoy. They have managed to cut fuel consumption by more than half and in some cases as much as 2/3. This also serves to make the outpost much quieter and less detectable by the enemy as a result since they are not running noisy diesel generators near as much.
On the bad side, there are several military bases that are looking to offset their usage with very large solar arrays. These bases could operate fairly independently were it not for the fact that these are grid tied systems and as such are under the control of the local utility company they are tied to. If the grid goes down so does the solar array. This doesn’t serve them well if part of the point is to keep the base powered when the grid fails. The power company complained that they didn’t want the array backfeeding the grid because it could hurt engineers trying to fix the problem. It was stated in the article that the equipment to disconnect the grid didn’t exist yet but I totally dissagree. All you really need is a set of contactors with the coils tied to the grid. When the grid is up the contactors are energized and the base is connected to the grid. When the grid goes down the contactors de-energize and the base is disconnected from the grid and continues to operate without backfeeding the grid. I actually made an outlet box for my computer room that operates exactly this way. When the sun is shining and the batteries are charged I turn on my inverter and the relay instantly switches the outlet box from wall power to inverter power. It happens so fast that the computers don’t even notice. When I turn the inverter off it goes back to wall power.
Anyway, what I see as the take away from this is, if the military gets it, why doesn’t the rest of the country?
Brian McGowan
http://home.comcast.net/~bigvid/