by Shane Henson — November 7, 2012—The U.S. Department of Defense (DOD) recently released its Annual Energy Management Report for Fiscal Year 2011. This 441-page document discusses a variety of energy issues, including DOD efforts to manage its facilities energy program and reduce energy consumption, in part by increasing the supply of renewable energy.
The Defense Department’s annual energy bill is approximately $4 billion, partly because it manages more than 500 installations comprising nearly 2.3 billion square feet of building space in 300,000 buildings throughout the United States and overseas. Given the huge bill, reducing DOD’s energy consumption is an important and ongoing task, and one the Department is putting at the forefront of its agenda as demonstrated by its investment in clean energy.
In a new analysis of DOD investments in clean energy innovation, The Information Technology and Innovation Foundation, a nonpartisan research and educational institute, reported that DOD’s investments in clean energy innovation were second only to the Department of Energy in 2012. The group’s report, Lean, Mean, and Clean II: Assessing DOD Investments in Clean Energy Innovation, finds that DOD has invested $5 billion in clean energy since FY2009.
The study also found that the Defense Department now invests nearly twice as much in procuring new clean energy technologies than it does procuring commercial, off-the-shelf technologies. Also, of all the branches of the military, the U.S. Navy invested the most in energy innovation by committing nearly $500 million in FY2012 to next-generation technologies in electricity, transportation, and alternative fuels.
