GAO report: When airplanes and windmills collide

U.S. agency details impasse between renewable energy and military operations

BY ERIC LIDJI FOR GREENING OF OIL 

It’s common to hear about windmills posing a problem for local bird populations. It’s much less common to hear about windmills posing a problem for local fighter jet populations, but clashes like those keep a lot of renewable energy projects from being green lit, according to a recent report from the U.S. Government Accountability Office.

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At four of five military installations the GAO visited between October 2008 and November 2009, the potential incompatibility between military operations and renewable energy projects planned for military bases kept those projects from going forward.

For instance, one Marine Corps facility found that the wind resources on base were significant enough to support wind turbines for generating electricity. “However,” the GAO report noted, “the location of this resource was designated for training activities involving rotary-wing aircraft and live-fire exercises—activities that installation officials determined to be incompatible with the siting and operation of wind turbines.”

The incompatibility stretches beyond the gates of the bases in question. The GAO said that a commander at one Air Force base asked the Bureau of Land Management—the agency of the U.S. Department of the Interior that oversees federally owned land—to cancel plans for a solar thermal plant 20 miles from the base, noting that the tower required for the plant would get in the way of operating a military radar.

Sometimes, the conflict wasn’t with the generation facility, but with the transmission and distribution lines needed to move electricity around a military installation.

At a Navy base, the GAO found that the cost to route power lines around sections of the base used for testing weapons made a planned solar photovoltaic system too costly to build.

DOD is a major energy user

Several congressional acts and executive orders since 2005 have directed the Department of Defense to produce more energy from renewable sources, and while the department met early goals, it began to fall short of its prescribed benchmarks starting in 2008.

In examining why, the GAO report pointed to some usual suspects. For instance, the typically higher cost of renewable fuels conflicts with a directive to invest in cost-effective projects, and some public-private partnerships and other methods the department used to increase its renewable energy use didn’t count toward its mandate.

But the GAO also pointed to a third reason: Sometimes proposed renewable energy projects conflicted with the main work at the installation where it would be constructed.

The Department of Defense uses about 60 percent of the energy consumed at federal facilities, or, put another way, more energy than every other federal facility combined.

Starting with the Energy Policy Act of 2005, Congress and the Bush Administration began setting targets for the Department of Defense to increase its renewable energy use. 

Incompatibility can be overcome

The Department of Defense raised the issue of incompatibility in a March 2005 report to Congress, saying, “Renewable generation projects can conflict with existing and planned military land uses.” It noted that the problem was not only getting renewable generation projects to mesh with existing military operations, but also future land and air operations.

The incompatibility does not mean complete deadlock. The GAO said that many state and public utility commissions believed that seemingly incompatible renewable energy projects could be reconfigured to fit unobtrusively into existing military installations.

For instance, administrators at one Air Force installation worried that reflections from solar panels might disrupt training exercises, but managed to find another location on base with adequate sunlight that did not get in the way of training exercises. In another case mentioned in the report, several stakeholders created a map to pinpoint areas on base that could handle renewable energy projects without disrupting military operations.

While the Office of the Secretary of Defense wants these compromises to be made on a case-by-case basis at each installation, officials also told the GAO that the current strategy document guiding energy use “does not provide guidance to enable installation officials to develop the accommodations that may be possible and required to develop renewable energy projects that do not affect an installation’s primary mission.”

As a result, the Department of Defense may be missing out on a significant amount of renewable energy. Crunching data from the 2005 report, GAO concluded that the department could potentially purchase or generate as much as 20 percent of its electricity from renewable sources, but the incompatibility problem kept it from hitting that mark.

“A senior OSD energy official has acknowledged that base commanders need to do a better job ‘compromising’ between the two goals of primary mission execution and renewable energy project development and that OSD needs to do a better job of providing guidance to these commanders on their consideration of such projects,” the GAO said.

The GAO is recommending that the Department of Defense draw up guidelines to help installation officers balance military operations and renewable energy projects. The Department of Defense agreed with the recommendation, saying it wanted “overarching, yet sufficiently flexible” guidelines to accommodate every installation.

Contact Eric Lidji at ericlidji@mac.com 

Links of interest

December 2009 GAO Report (DOD Needs to Take Actions to Address Challenges in Meeting Federal Renewable Energy Goals)

March 2005 (Report to Congress — Department of Defense Renewable Energy Assessment