Navy Secretary Ray Mabus believes that the US military can jump-start the clean energy revolution. “If we can begin to get this energy from different places and from different sources, then I think you can flip the line from ‘Field of Dreams’: If the Navy comes, they will build it. If we provide the market, then I think you’ll begin to see the infrastructure being built, the price per kilowatt-hour come down,” Mabus told a Climate One audience at San Francisco’s Fairmont Hotel on Monday, August 16.
Mabus is quite proud of the Navy’s energy strategy, boasting that while a there is a healthy inter-service rivalry to adopt clean energy technologies, his branch ranks No. 1. That’s not to say the task is an easy one. The Navy deploys 290 ships (with over 60% at sea), 3,700 aircraft, and 50,000 non-combat vehicles; it owns 75,200 buildings on 3.3 million acres of land; and it employs 900,000 sailors, Marines, and civilians. Mabus framed the military’s energy use against the US total. The federal government accounts for 2% of U.S. energy use, he said, with the Department of Defense responsible for 90% of that total. The Navy and Marine Corps alone consume almost 1% of the energy America uses.
Against this profligacy, the Navy announced an ambitious plan last fall to slash fuel use and carbon emissions. “Within 10 years, the United States Navy will get one-half of all its energy needs, both afloat and ashore, from non-fossil fuel sources,” Mabus said. It will cut in half the fossil fuel use of its 50,000 non-combat vehicles within five years. By 2020, half of its bases will be net-zero energy sites. Soon, biofuel made from camelina will fuel its fighter jets, and hybrid drives will be installed on new and existing ships.
The Navy will also use smart meters track where all its energy is consumed. Mabus shared an anecdote illustrating the problem. “One base commander showed me his electric bill, and 15% of the energy coming off the base was itemized,” he said. “The other 85% said ‘line loss,’ – which meant it was going somewhere, but nobody knew exactly where.”
Mabus, a former governor of Mississippi, also serves President Obama’s point person for the recovery of the Gulf in the wake of the BP Deepwater Horizon blow-out. Much works remains to facilitate environmental and economic recovery in a region still reeling from Hurricane Katrina and the recession, he said. Additional work is needed to modernize the technology by which oil companies respond to spills and to update the legal structure under which they operate.
“Obviously, the cap that was placed on oil companies, which was $70 million, did not anticipate anything remotely like this incident. I do think that another look needs to be taken at things that were put in place, particularly right after the Exxon Valdez, with the notion that that was the biggest spill we could imagine. But 20 years have passed. This shows that there are much larger catastrophes that are possible. The legal structure … needs to be updated to take into account realities as they exist today,” Mabus said.
Asked by Climate One’s Greg Dalton what an appropriate dollar figure for the liability cap might be, Mabus replied: “I’m not sure there needs to be a cap.”
--Justin Gerdes
Climate One, The Fairmont Hotel, San Francisco (August 16, 2010)
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