by Brianna Crandall — November 3, 2014—The American Council On Renewable Energy (ACORE) , a nonprofit membership organization promoting renewable energy, released a new report last week that highlights the need for the U.S. military to assign a dollar value to energy security. The final white paper outlines liabilities fostered by the natural dependence of the Department of Defense (DOD) on energy resources, and suggests that DOD should closely consider the actual, all-in cost of energy to make its energy system more resilient, efficient, and secure.
“As the largest, most technologically advanced, and geographically dispersed military in the world, DOD has sought to develop a more comprehensive energy strategy to reduce liability on limited energy resources, said Lesley Hunter, ACORE’s lead researcher and the paper’s editor. “We believe, and our research backs this up, that there’s significant room for improvement in cost-accounting of DOD’s present energy strategy, and that renewable energy and microgrid technologies can add real value in the push for energy security.
This research indicates that renewable energy offers greater lifecycle value when compared to fossil or nuclear energy, and provides a more reliable and secure resource that ultimately lowers the actual levelized cost to DOD. Furthermore, the paper asserts that with improved supply-chain accounting for costs of present installation energy and realignment of some federal processes private, third-party capital investment in military renewable energy would exponentially grow.
President and CEO of ACORE Michael Brower also noted the challenges associated with shifting one of the world’s largest energy consumers to a modern, reliable and diverse system, and co-author and Distributed Sun Managing Director Jeff Weiss praised ACORE’s ability to effectively convene the private sector and the Department of Defense.
The report concludes by noting that energy security and resilience on DOD installations, as well as the reduction of the growing level of costs and uncertainty energy security represents for DOD planners, is increasingly recognized as being essentially intertwined with DOD’s primary mission to protect and defend.
ACORE believes that, because energy and thus energy security is a major driver of costs, deployments and national policy, the opportunity of long-term cost control and parallel energy resiliency can only be realized by tapping private-sector partnership innovation and capital resources.
The Monetizing Energy Security paper is available for download from the ACORE Web site.
