"Island Microgrids"

Pentagon wants to spur a revolution in clean energy

05/31/2011 - For American drivers, $4-a-gallon gasoline is painful: It bites deeply into household incomes at a time when millions of people are stretched to a breaking point. But for the U.S. military, the cost of fuel is a magnitude greater--and a matter of life or death. Fuel shipments account for the majority of the supplies trucked through Afghanistan, and militants attack the convoys almost daily. At least one member of the armed forces is killed for every 24 fuel convoys that snake their way along Afghanistan's dangerous roads; hundreds of troops and contractors have died protecting the trucks. All of that ramps up the cost of a gallon of military gasoline to stratospheric levels. Gen. James Conway, the former Marine Corps commandant, estimated in 2009 that gas sometimes cost his forces $400 a gallon once all of the expenses were taken into account.

Because of the military's vast energy needs, senior Defense officials say that reducing those costs is a national-security imperative. On its own, the U.S. military is the single largest industrial consumer of oil in the world. It requires approximately 125 million barrels annually--more oil than 85 percent of the world's nations consume. Every $10 increase in the price of a barrel of crude costs the Defense Department $1.3 billion. In 2008, the year that oil and gasoline prices last reached record highs, the Pentagon spent about $20 billion on fuel alone--a burden ultimately borne, of course, by U.S. taxpayers. Energy experts predict that prices will only rise in the coming years. Meanwhile, the nation's broader dependence on oil all but ensures that the military will remain handcuffed to the Middle East, North Africa, and other volatile-but-oil-rich parts of the world.

So the Pentagon has launched an aggressive program to change all that, with a slew of ambitious plans to convert the oil-hungry U.S. military to alternative-energy sources--and, at the same time, spur creation of a commercial industry capable of producing enough renewable energy at affordable prices for civilians. {continued}

The argument of the deniers to climate change is the new diversion from the same sources of some thirty to forty years ago, we had started installing solar panels back then, till the special interest of the quick bottom lines and growth of locked the breaks on moving forward, something this country was once envied for by everyone else. Just think where we'd be today if those advancements had continued leading to new finds of alternative cheaper cleaner energy sources, we certainly wouldn't now be falling rapidly behind those who once envied and not really even following them as they quickly advance, technologies and their economies!!