{"id":1862,"date":"2011-06-24T10:13:38","date_gmt":"2011-06-24T14:13:38","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.l-a-k-e.org\/blog\/2011\/06\/energy-as-a-national-security-challenge-col-dan-nolan-solar-summit.html"},"modified":"2011-06-24T10:13:38","modified_gmt":"2011-06-24T14:13:38","slug":"energy-as-a-national-security-challenge-col-dan-nolan-solar-summit","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/www.l-a-k-e.org\/blog\/2011\/06\/energy-as-a-national-security-challenge-col-dan-nolan-solar-summit.html","title":{"rendered":"Energy as a National Security Challenge —Col. Dan Nolan @ Solar Summit"},"content":{"rendered":"In his morning keynote at the sold-out\n\nSouthern Solar Summit,<\/a>\nCol. Dan Nolan (U.S. Army ret.) asked the musical question:\n
\n“When did our Marines become Birkenstock-wearing tree huggers?”\n<\/blockquote>\nThis was after some Marines asked for solar power so they wouldn’t\nhave to haul fuel in long convoys, which were among the most dangerous missions.\nMost of that fuel was going into very inefficient generators to run\nvery inefficient air conditioners in tents in the desert.\nDealing with that got the military thinking about energy security:\nassured access to mission-critical energy.\n

\nLooking up, he asked:\n

\n\n<\/a>\n“What is it we as a nation need to understand about our own energy security?”\n<\/blockquote>\nHe identified America’s strategic center of gravity as its economy.\nIt’s very resilient but has vulnerabilities open to attack.\nSo how do we secure those vulnerabilities?\n

\nThe main vulnerabilities are:\n\n\n

    \n
  • \nPetroleum for transportation (99% of oil used in this sector)\n
    \nU.S. is world’s largest oil consumer 25% of world usage,\n11 million barrels\/day, 51% net imports, $1 billion\/day imported oil,\nmuch of that money going to fuel foreign authoritarians and their militaries,\nplus spending on our military to defend it.\n
  • \nElectricity for homes, businesses, industry\n
    \nNot a supply problem: an environmental problem,\nwhich can be replaced by renewables (solar, wind, tides).\nAlso the brittle grid.\nWouldn’t distributed generation be more secure?\n<\/ul>\nBoth are mostly unprotected.\nEspecially oil: production, transportation, refineries, storage.\nForeign oil dependence is U.S. greatest strategic problem:\ndirect cost, drain on economy, vulnerability.\n

    \nLooking at the military again, technology is the U.S. military’s\ncenter of gravity (COG), and that is powered by electricity,\nwhich is its critical vulnerability: remember those supply convoys.\nHe said the military tends to be environmentalist because they have to\nuse the same terrain repeatedly.\n

    \n

    \nDoD employs more than 3 million people: nation’s largest employer\nand largest energy user.\nMany buildings (307,000, mostly old) and many acres (28.6 million,\nas big as Pennsylvania).\nMany opportunities for retrofitting for efficiency and conservation\nand for energy generation.\n

    \nDoD has 252 solar PV initiatives (and many other types).\n

    \nDoD FY2007 energy bill: $3.4 billion.\nPlenty of opportunity to reduce that, and to lead the entire U.S.\neconomy to renewables.\n

    \nElectricity drives the rest of the economy.\n

    \nIn 2001 U.S. military realized it had to reduce dependence on the\nbrittle grid.\nOf 584 U.S. bases, 90% now have local renewable energy supplies which\ncan take them off the grid and export power to local communities.\n

    \n$1.9 billion DoD renewable energy market by 2025.\n

    \nDoD is helping drive the U.S. economy towards renewable energy.\n

    \n-jsq\n

    \nPS: These notes summarize points from throughout Col. Nolan’s\ntalk, not necessarily in the order he gave them.\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"In his morning keynote at the sold-out Southern Solar Summit, Col. Dan Nolan (U.S. Army ret.) asked the musical question: “When did our Marines become Birkenstock-wearing tree huggers?” This was after some Marines asked for solar power so they wouldn’t have to haul fuel in long convoys, which were among the most dangerous missions. Most […]","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":false,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2},"_links_to":"","_links_to_target":""},"categories":[97,40,14,264,265,2,570,21,32,23,73,289,74,24,4250,449,36],"tags":[1239,4310,4305,4300,4306,586,4301,8704,2061,4307,4311,1069,397,4303,2421,8782,4309,8713,4308,8732,8714,4304,4302],"class_list":["post-1862","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-activism","category-community","category-economy","category-energy-conservation","category-energy-efficiency","category-government","category-military","category-planning","category-pollution","category-renewable-energy","category-safety","category-science","category-security","category-solar","category-southeast-solar-summit-24-june-2011","category-transportation","category-wind","tag-army","tag-brittle-grid","tag-convoy","tag-dan-nolan","tag-dangerous","tag-distributed-generation","tag-dod","tag-economy","tag-electricity","tag-energy-security","tag-environmentalism","tag-fuel","tag-grid","tag-marines","tag-national-security","tag-oil","tag-petroleum","tag-renewable-energy","tag-resilient","tag-security","tag-solar","tag-tree-huggers","tag-vulnerability"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p585fK-u2","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack-related-posts":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.l-a-k-e.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1862","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.l-a-k-e.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.l-a-k-e.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.l-a-k-e.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.l-a-k-e.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1862"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"http:\/\/www.l-a-k-e.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1862\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.l-a-k-e.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1862"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.l-a-k-e.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1862"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.l-a-k-e.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1862"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}