Some of President Obama’s most impactful energy policy is taking shape through the military, which has committed to financing and using renewables at scale and to developing innovative energy technologies. Today’s GR Energy and Climate Brief analyzes the military’s efforts in these areas and what the implications are for the future of the clean energy.

President Obama's State of the Union commitment for the Department of the Navy to purchase a gigawatt of clean energy by 2020 – the only concrete and actionable commitment made - has important ramifications for the development of clean energy technologies and markets in the US and globally. The sheer size of the armed services and their purchasing power have the potential to make a significant, direct impact on green technologies and carry large spillover effects in technology, scale and financing. Today’s GR Energy and Climate Brief analyzes the military’s current efforts to ‘green’ its energy consumption and assesses the potential of these spillover effects to catalyze developments in the renewable energy sector and change the financing model for renewable energy.

The Key Advancing Renewable Energy Initiative: With renewables support a target in the budget debates and energy policy stalled on Capitol Hill, the military stands alone with a deeply embedded policy that is likely to survive and outlast this Administration/Congress and fundamentally change how it consumes energy. This commitment has been driven by cost savings and a security imperative, both at home and at forward operating bases (FOBs). Distributed generation of energy at FOBs would dramatically reduce the fuel supply vulnerabilities of US operations, the high cost of which also allows newer technologies to effectively compete and generate savings. And at US military bases, both at home and abroad, there is a push for grid independence to eliminate their exposure to aging and unreliable local grids. As one former high-ranking DoD official said: “On the DoD side, the budget process – for all its messiness and overruns – is still pretty structured. For this to get the internal support that it has, there has to be hard evidence that the program will pay for itself.

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