October 10, 2014
BY Anna Simet
This week, I dialed into a media roundtable discussion held at the Pentagon to provide an update on the U.S. Army's power and energy efforts. It was a particularly timely call, as we are in the throes of producing our military bioenergy issue. It was a pretty long call so this posting won’t exactly be comprehensive, but I will include some of the points that stood out to me, and information that I think Biomass Magazine readers might be interested in.
This discussion was pretty intimate—I was just one of three reporters who dialed in, so we were each given to opportunity to ask questions. There to answer them were Katherine Hammack, assistant secretary of the Army for installations, energy and environment, Richard Kidd, deputy assistant secretary of the Army for energy and sustainability, and Amanda Simpson, executive director of the newly established Office of Energy Initiatives, formerly the Energy Initiatives Task Force.
Hammack began the call by announcing that this month, the Army would be releasing a sustainability report that will serve as a transparent mechanism to inform the public on where it is in terms of reaching energy and sustainability goals—renewable energy and water and petroleum reduction, progress that she said “hasn’t been reported on before,” but all of the trends are very positive.
She said that from now on, they would be doing this once every two years.
Hammack highlighted how the Army is leveraging energy savings performance contracts—it has the largest ESPC program in the federal government— in 2014, it did $319 million in ESPCs, the Army’s best year to date.
Simpson emphasized the long way the Army has come in just four years. Prior to that, there was really no renewable energy program to speak of. Then in 2013, renewable energy consumption doubled from 2012, and it will double again from 2013 to 2014. Out of all of the military branches, the Army has the largest pipeline of renewable energy projects, she said. When setting up the Army’s Energy Initiative Taskforce three years ago (to investigate, develop and implement processes to utilize renewable energy at installations), the challenge was to do so by leveraging private financing, and not congressionally appropriated or taxpayer dollars. “We’ve proven the feasibility of this concept and put it into practice,” she said.
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She then mentioned two large-scale projects underway—a solar array project at Fort Huachuca, Arizona, that will become the DOD’s largest to date and will steal that title from ReEnergy Black River’s biomass power plant at Ft. Drum, N.Y., which is contracted to supply the installation with 100 percent of its power needs, and there are several other projects in various stages of contracting. This includes a 60-MW peaking station that is biodiesel capable at Schofield Barracks, and what caught my ear and I asked to hear more about was when Simpson said an RFP would soon be issued for a combined-heat-and-power project at Redstone Arsenal.
Elaborating as much as possible prior to release of the RFP, Simpson told me that it would use municipal solid waste as feedstock, supply steam for heating and cooling to the installation, “with approximately 2 MW of electricity; it needs to be directly adjacent to our facility connecting into our existing steam distribution, as well as new electrical transmission that goes into our two substations,” she said, adding that the hope is to get the RFP out before the end the month, after two years of the project maintaining an in-the-works status.
When I asked them about how biomass in general is viewed in by the Army in comparison to other technologies—particularly when it comes its reliability—Kidd said that while the nonintermittency qualities of biomass are well understood and appreciated, there is that challenge of access to feedstock within a transportable area.
Simpson agreed, adding that it really does come down to that availability. “When we work with an installation, we look at their resources—wind, sunshine, biomass—what’s available on the property, what’s nearby that we can bring on and is economical for the Army.”
Another talking point during the call was that rather than looking at these projects as competition or losing a customer, utilities are coming to the realization that the Army is a great partner in newly developed energy projects. Initially, Simpson said, utilities expressed concerns that the EITF would serve as a competition, but most have changed their tune since then. “It’s not a change in Army strategy; it’s a change in utility behavior, based on their perceived value of working with the Army,” Hammack said.
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Simpson added that even with projects initiatives with utilities, the private sector is still very much involved, as utilities go to the private industry to actually design and build the facilities. “It’s more of a financing mechanism partnership with them,” she said.
And finally, all agreed that the biggest hurdle in terms of new, large-scale renewable projects is getting projects through the federal government. “Industry has its way of doing business, and the federal government—particularly the Army and the DOD—has its way of doing business, and the two don’t often match up. It has been and will continue to be a challenge to resolve those issues,” Kidd said.
Simpson added that the good news is that over the last year and a half, work to resolve those differences has drastically reduced the time to get projects approved and out for bid—in just one year, the approval time decreased by about 53 percent. “That’s one of the reasons we’re seeing a lot of the projects come out right now,” she said. “Some we’ve been working on for years, but some for only months, because we’ve reduced the amount of time to get their through.”
And of course, the other major barrier is seed money and manpower. “We have invested in manpower, we have invested money, but with budgets being reduced, some of that’s gone down,” Hammack said. “We’ve had more projects in backlog and in the pipeline that we’ve been able to process because of our manpower limitations.”
Be that as it is, Hammack was quick to point out that the Army is still on track to meet its goal of 1 gigawatt of renewable energy by 2025, and is staffed to do exactly that. “If we had more money and manpower, we could move faster, but it’s just not reasonable with today’s economic climate,” she said, adding that the Army’s goal is to add 100 MW of renewable capacity per year.
“That will get us there,” she said. “Right now, we’re on track and might beat it.”