Navy Announces Goals to Reduce Energy Demand, Increase Renewable Supply

On October 14, Secretary of the Navy Ray Mabus announced five new energy goals at the Naval Energy Forum in McLean, Virginia. Secretary Mabus said he was committing the Navy to reducing its energy demand by cutting oil consumption by 50 percent by 2015, from 100,000 barrels of oil per day to 50,000. He pledged that 40 percent of the Navy’s total energy will come from fossil fuel alternatives and 50 percent of its onshore energy will come from renewable sources by 2020. He also commissioned a Green Strike Group, consisting of nuclear and biofuel powered ships, which will be action ready by 2016. Finally, he vowed to change the way that the Navy and Marine Corps award contracts by incorporating lifetime energy costs of the system into the contract’s parameters. “We can do these things. We have to,” Secretary Mabus said at a follow up speech to the San Diego Military Advisory Council. “We need to for strategic reasons . . . and because we need to be better stewards of the Earth.”

On September 10, the Environmental and Energy Study Institute (EESI) held a Congressional briefing with CNA on energy, national security, and Defense Department solutions. One of the speakers at the event was U.S. Navy Deputy Director for Renewable Energy Chris Tindal, who presented on the efforts that the Navy has made to embrace renewable energy and reduce fossil fuel consumption. Deputy Director Tindal said that the Navy’s energy strategy had four pillars: reduce demand, leverage technology, drive awareness, and increase supply. A focus within the U.S. Department of Defense -- the world’s single largest consumer of energy -- on energy efficiency and renewable energy will help spur development in the private sector, decrease the military’s dependence on foreign oil, and lessen the burden it faces from humanitarian crises, resource conflicts, mass migrations and other devastating effects of climate change .