June 14, 2023 at 6:30 a.m. EDT
Top Pentagon leaders say the base — which is a hub for equipment going to and from Marine Corps deployments around the world — is a test project for the future of the military. Going green helps sharpen the military’s effectiveness, they say, making it less dependent on fossil fuel supply lines that can turn treacherous. Renewable energy on bases makes them more resilient and less prone to blackouts from the civilian grid. And reducing the Pentagon’s overall carbon footprint slows the climate change that President Biden and others fear could lead to future conflicts.
“This is the direction that we’re going. It saved money. It created reliable energy. It’s a good community partnership,” said Meredith Berger, the assistant secretary of the Navy for Energy, Installations and Environment, who has overseen the final stretch of work at the base in Albany, Ga.
Now officials on the base preside over a delicate, daily dance to match their electricity production to their energy needs, dialing their power generation up and down to meet demand. Installations around the country will soon need to follow suit as part of Biden’s ambitious climate goals. The Department of Defense accounts for 56 percent of the federal government’s emissions and 52 percent of its electricity use, so any effort to reduce the federal carbon footprint needs to take on the military.
The defense spending bill passed last year for the first time imposed a requirement to electrify all noncombat military vehicles by 2035, another step in the greening of the military, and other bases are also working to install renewable energy and reduce waste and power consumption.
“This is more playing into the mind-set of: ‘How do we get ready for the next conflict?’” said the Marine Corps base’s commander, Col. Michael Fitzgerald, adding that he studied energy issues at top U.S. military institutions because he was frustrated about the dangers caused by the need to move fuel around conflict zones.
Weaning the military off oil
The Albany base does maintenance and channels equipment to and from combat deployments. One goal of the net-zero effort there is to prepare the military to take full advantage of a world in which they are freer from fossil fuel. Fuel convoys are lumbering facts of life in many recent conflicts, and slow-moving tanker trucks were tempting targets for the Taliban and Iraqi insurgents in the wars the U.S. military fought in the decades following 9/11. A U.S. Army study found that in 2007, there was a U.S. casualty for every 24 fuel convoys that ran through Afghanistan.
“If we’re on a base, how do we not drag fuel around to run a generator? Are there other systems out there we can do?” Fitzgerald said. “As military guys, the less convoys we have to put out, the less vulnerability we have.”
When base leaders started thinking years ago about how best to find renewable sources of energy, they seized on the waste products of the surrounding community. They built a microgrid — an electrical grid for the base that can function independently of the civilian power grid, which makes it easier keep the lights on using local power sources, and harder for hackers to target it — and then they began feeding renewable energy into it.
The decomposing trash at the Albany city landfill was generating methane that needed to be flared and wasn’t being used to generate power, so they built a system to capture the gas and pipe it to a small power plant on the base. Uniformed Marines stop by from time to time to check on the civilians who are contracted to operate it from an air-conditioned control room where the refrigerator sports a yellow magnet that says “Navy/Marine Corps Energy Efficiency: You Make it Happen.”
Next to the base, trucks line up to dump wood scraps at a biomass power plant that generates steam for electricity by burning the detritus from the papermaking of a Procter & Gamble toilet paper factory. Cables run from that power plant across the road to supply more electricity to the base.
Environmental advocates sometimes question the green bona fides of biomass such as the paper factory waste since burning it still leads to emissions at the smokestack, but advocates of the power source say that when done correctly, replanting forests offsets the carbon that is released from the power generation.
Albany’s lessons go broader
Base leaders say they are trying different approaches to see what might work more broadly in the military. The installation in Albany is unusually small for a Marine Corps base, at 1.6 square miles, so new, base-wide projects are cheaper than they might be at a bigger one.
One large field in a corner of the base is covered with solar panels, although they are leased to the civilian power company to supply energy to city of Albany, an arrangement that Fitzgerald said he hopes the base might eventually alter.
“We’re a small base so we can experiment with, ‘How does a smart grid work?’ If it does on a smaller scale, we can extrapolate it to bigger bases,” Fitzgerald said. “If it works, run with it. If it fails, we didn’t spend that much money.”
The base is also starting to electrify its fleet of noncombat vehicles along with the rest of the military. For now, that’s just four plug-in hybrid Chrysler minivans and a brand-new electric Ford F-150 pickup, but the base’s plan is to electrify half the fleet by 2025. Fitzgerald even tried to pursue an electric semi truck, although the funding didn’t work out.
Military planners have just as much range anxiety as civilians when driving electric cars, it turns out, and some on base fear about the complications of stopping to charge their vehicles during the frequent back and forth trips to a big Marine Corps base 520 miles away: Camp Lejeune in North Carolina.
“The biggest thing is the charging,” said Ronnie Williams, the fleet manager of the base in Albany, who is directing the plans to expand the base’s capacity to recharge electric vehicles.
Not everyone in the U.S. military is enamored with working on climate issues. Fitzgerald said some of his friends question putting an effort into the green project.
“In the military, I’ve got some friends, who look at this as just: ‘Hey, we’re focused on one thing. We don’t care about the efficiency. More about effectiveness,’” he said.
But senior Pentagon leaders are careful to connect their climate efforts to the military’s bottom line, and to avoid packaging their efforts as going green purely for the sake of going green.
“Net-zero is not an organizing principle for the Department of Defense. Resilience is the organizing principle. And by building resilience, we will reduce our greenhouse gas emissions and we may get to net-zero,” said Richard Kidd, who, before retiring at the end of May, was the Deputy Assistant Secretary of Defense for Environment and Energy Resilience, where he oversaw the Pentagon’s climate initiatives.
He said that across the military, a wide range of efforts is being directed at improving energy usage. Bases across the country are building microgrids. The Air Force is investing in new fuel-efficient airplane designs. The Pentagon’s research divisions are working on small nuclear reactors that can help provide emissions-free power to bases in remote locations.
Leaders say they are excited to replicate the work they’ve done at the Marine Corps base elsewhere.
“It ends up that there are all of these benefits that come out of it, that give back to the Marine Corps mission,” said Berger, the assistant secretary of the Navy. “And that’s something that every installation is looking to do in terms of making sure that they can operate reliably, efficiently and effectively.”