Army Energy

A senior Army official is pledging to boost the service's use of legal contract authorities to increase energy efficiencies or renewable energy use at its facilities, seeking advice from the White House Office of Management and Budget as well as government auditors about ways to better leverage the use of these authorities, Defense Environment Alert reports this week. Specifically:

The move follows findings released by the Defense Department that the military failed to meet key energy mandates last year, largely due to demands placed on the Army to move troops and to complete the base closure process.

The push to use more energy savings performance contracts (ESPCs), enhanced use leasing (EULs) and other third-party financing mechanisms available to it comes as the Army is gearing up to announce several installations that are expected to become so-called net-zero energy bases by 2020.

The Army wants to leverage private sector investments such as through ESPCs, especially at net-zero bases, to optimize the tight budgets it is now seeing, Army Assistant Secretary for Installations, Energy and the Environment Katherine Hammack said March 30 at an Association of Climate Change Officials (ACCO) forum in Washington.

Congress has given the military several authorities to leverage private sector investments in energy technology, she said, but of the 183 installations her office oversees, only 60 are using ESPCs, only 30 are using utility energy service contracts (UESCs) and only seven are using EULs. "These are underutilized authorities," she said, noting that is because sometimes "installations don't understand them, or they do not have the resources." Hammack also plans to increase the use of power purchase agreements, another type of contract authority that can be used to purchase or sell renewable energy-generated electricity.

She committed to increase the staffing and focus on leveraging these authorities "so that we can at least double if not increase quite a bit more our public-private partnerships and relationships."

Inside the Army reported on Monday that the service's operational energy strategy is focused on integrating innovative technologies capable of driving efficiency rather than fuel restrictions that might hamper the service's operations. Specifically:

While the service has yet to publish key guidance that would address specifics, Inside the Army has obtained an abstract of the Army's operational energy initial capabilities document (ICD) that reveals several newly created metrics to evaluate operationally based performance energy goals.

The new metrics include evaluations of "increased mobility" to measure the time required to relocate or deploy based on distance and force size, "increased mission focus" to determine the man-hours dedicated to a primary mission, "extended endurance" to track the hours or miles between energy resupply, "increased availability and resilience" to determine the number of alternative energy sources available, and the "reduction of the fully burdened cost" of energy.

The ICD also "draws upon a newly developed operational energy concept of operations or 'CONOP' for context that covers the range of military operations, from combat to humanitarian assistance" and addresses "urgent gaps" including power source duration, energy management processes, high-efficiency energy conversion and distribution systems, common power sources for soldier systems, reduced energy demand, energy interoperable interfaces and widely dispersed power generation, according to the abstract.

Katherine Hammack, the Army's assistant secretary for installations, energy and environment, told reporters April 5 that her office expected the ICD and CONOP to be published within 60 days, but noted that the service's operational energy strategy was focused less on regulating use and more on technological solutions that make installations, dismounted soldiers and vehicles more energy-efficient.

"We cannot tell soldiers that they have a fuel budget and, therefore, they cannot meet their mission requirements," she said. "We are not going to say that we are going to reduce our operational energy use overall by 20 percent because we don't know what missions we will be involved in. When we look at operational energy improvements, we're looking at it as a technology-based improvement. That is a generator that is more efficient, it is better management of a power grid so that you have fewer generators and those that you have are more highly loaded. It is tents that are better insulated and use less energy. It is lighting that is more efficient, it is leveraging solar energy and other renewable resources so that you use less energy."