Military Spending on Biofuels Is Under Fire

The following is an excerpt from an article in 

The New York Times
Tuesday, August 28, 2012

Military Spending on Biofuels Is Under Fire

By DIANE CARDWELL

When the Navy put a Pacific fleet through maneuvers on a $12 million cocktail of biofuels this summer, it proved that warships could actually operate on diesel from algae or chicken fat.

“It works in the engines that we have, it works in the aircraft that we have, it works in the ships that we have,” said Ray Mabus, secretary of the Navy. “It is seamless.”

The still-experimental fuels are also expensive — about $27 a gallon for the fuel used in the demonstration, compared with about $3.50 a gallon for conventional military fuels.

And that has made them a flash point in a larger political battle over government financing for new energy technologies.

“You’re not the secretary of energy,” Representative Randy Forbes, a Republican from Virginia, told Mr. Mabus as he criticized the biofuels program at a hearing in February. “You’re the secretary of the Navy.”

The House, controlled by Republicans, has already approved measures that would all but kill Pentagon spending on purchasing or investing in biofuels. A committee in the Senate, led by Democrats, has voted to save the program. The fight will heat up again when Congress takes up the Defense Department’s budget again in the fall.

The naval demonstration — known as the Great Green Fleet — was part of a $510 million three-year, multiagency program to help the military develop alternatives to conventional fuel. It is a drop in the ocean of the Pentagon’s nearly $650 billion annual budget.

But with the Defense Department facing $259 billion in budget cuts over the next five years, some lawmakers argue that the military should not be spending millions on developing new fuel markets when it is buying less equipment and considering cutting salaries.

This phase of the military’s exploration of alternative fuels began under President George W. Bush and grew out of a task force that Donald Rumsfeld, then the secretary of defense, convened in 2006 to explore ways to reduce dependence on petroleum. If the military had less need to transport and protect fuel coming from the Middle East, the thinking went, the fighting forces could become more flexible and efficient, with fewer lives put at risk.

In addition to biofuels, early efforts included developing liquid fuels from coal and natural gas for the Air Force, the largest energy user of the armed services. But the gas and coal fuels would not meet cost or environmental requirements, officials said. The Defense Department focused on advanced biofuels, which are generally made from plant and animal feedstocks that don’t compete with food uses, which is a concern with common renewable fuels like the corn-based ethanol used in cars.

For more, visit www.nytimes.com.

(Archived Article) Wind Turbine Projects Run Into Resistance

This post summarizes an interesting New York Times article with the above title that was published on or about September 9, 2010. (When I download an article from my Kindle to my computer, the date recorded is the date of the download, not the date of publication.)

Although this article did not contain many of the numbers that I am so fond of, it still highlighted a problem that does not receive much discussion.  People interested in the proper siting of wind turbines should take note.

BARSTOW, Calif. — The United States military has found a new menace hiding here in the vast emptiness of the Mojave Desert in California: wind turbines.

Moving turbine blades can be indistinguishable from airplanes on many radar systems, and they can even cause blackout zones in which planes disappear from radar entirely.

Clusters of wind turbines, which can reach as high as 400 feet, look very similar to storm activity on weather radar, making it harder for air traffic controllers to give accurate weather information to pilots.

Although the military says no serious incidents have yet occurred because of the interference, the wind turbines pose an unacceptable risk to training, testing and national security in certain regions, Dr. Dorothy Robyn, deputy under secretary of defense, recently told a House Armed Services subcommittee.

Because of its concerns, the Defense Department has emerged as a formidable opponent of wind projects in direct conflict with another branch of the federal government, the Energy Department, which is spending billions of dollars on wind projects as part of President Obama’s broader effort to promote renewable energy.

Eliminating turbine clutter on radar is complicated. Part of the challenge is that many radar systems in use in the United States date back to the 1950s and have outdated processing capabilities — in some cases, less than those of a modern laptop computer.

While there are technology fixes to ease interference on these aging systems, it can be tricky to filter out just the turbines.

On radar, “a wind turbine can look like a 747 on final approach,” said Peter Drake, technical director at Raytheon, a major provider of radar systems. “We don’t want to have the software eliminate a real 747.”

The Energy Department says the problem should be solvable through new technologies.