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The U.S. Army just broke ground on a largest-of-its-kind clean energy storage project, a sign of a military that’s increasingly focused on reducing its greenhouse gas emissions and adapting to climate change.
Leadership at Fort Carson in Colorado hosted a ceremony Thursday to initiate the Flow Battery Pilot program, which will test out a one-megawatt-sized long-duration battery to store on-base electricity generated from renewable sources. It’s another incremental step toward the fundamental transformation President Joe Biden, who set a national target for the U.S. to achieve net-zero emissions by 2050, wants to speed up by reorienting the Department of Defense’s operational strategy to prioritize climate change.
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Climate change has been a priority for Biden, who made it a centerpiece of his legislative agenda. He also issued a sprawling executive order during his first week in office directing government agencies to look inward and assess how climate change affects their operations and to draw up plans to reduce their department-wide emissions.
For the Defense Department in particular, Biden’s instructions were to develop a climate risk analysis charting out the security implications of climate change on military operations and to update it each year.
The order also directed agencies to develop climate change adaptation plans, and the DOD released a 2022 climate adaptation report last month.
The department is actively “incorporating climate considerations into wargaming,” the report said. In the last year, the Wargame Incentive Fund allocated $3 million to fund five wargames, including exercises “examining effects of climate change in South and Central Asia” and “exploring climate vulnerabilities.”
Biden, who also set targets for half of all new vehicle sales to be electric models by 2030 and envisions 100% carbon-free power by 2035, has set even more aggressive targets for the federal government.
Individual branches have set out strategies of their own to achieve compliance with Biden’s order, with the Department of the Army being the first to do so in February.
The “Climate Strategy” would transform the kinds of technologies the Army uses and its sources of energy. For example, it provides for acquiring an all-electric light-duty non-tactical vehicle fleet by 2027.
It also provides for the construction of a microgrid on every installation by 2035. The redox flow battery technology going up at Fort Carson, developed by Lockheed Martin, works by converting electricity into chemical energy and storing it and has the capacity to store the power equivalent of the electricity consumption of 400 Fort Carson homes for an average day.
It is the biggest installation to date of a long-duration energy storage technology at a U.S. military site and could be spread around to meet that target. If it proves successful, the battery program will be implemented across installations, the Army said.
The Navy’s “Climate Action 2030” plan aims for 100% carbon-free electricity by 2030, while the Air Force, which released a plan of its own on Oct. 4, targets 100% zero-emission aircraft support equipment by fiscal 2032.
“Our mission remains unchanged, but we recognize that the world is facing ongoing and accelerating climate change and we must be prepared to respond, fight, and win in this constantly changing world,” Secretary of the Air Force Frank Kendall said in remarks introducing the strategy.
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The Air Force already has a considerable amount of solar generating capacity, with installations on four separate bases accounting for 6.9% of its electricity in fiscal 2021.
Kendall said the Air Force will keep exploring alternative energy sources and sending a “demand signal” to the industry to continue to build products for the branch.
