The military is going green! No, seriously – IT IS!! And not just the old uniforms or a Sherman tank at the Fort Knox museum either.
The Department of Defense has been considering various alternative renewable energy projects – 249 in all, in 35 states and Puerto Rico. A month or so ago, results were released and 229 of these projects were determined to have little or no impact on military missions, thus clearing the way for the future production of more than 10 gigawatts of renewable energy generation capacity. This review involved approximately 6,500 wind turbines and 30 solar projects.
The projects include photovoltaic solar, wind turbines, and solar panels, from Arizona to Wyoming. This is a little good news from DoD – saving money, reducing the need for electricity generation in areas near military facilities by coal burning power plants.
So, why am I excited about this? If the Department of Defense, which isn’t always known for being progressive in many ways (wasn’t that better than calling it an immovable behemoth), can change their way of thinking, and can actually use renewable energy to reduce the need for fossil fuel electricity generation, I have hope that others can. In this day of budget problems and belt tightening, the cost benefit analysis has to come down firmly on the side of saving them money.
In order to close down the oldest electricity generating coal-fired plants, the ones that are the biggest polluters, the ones that don’t have the scrubbers; we need to provide alternatives. In a perfect world, clean energy would be the moral obligation of every company that generates electricity. This isn’t a perfect world, so we need to make every effort to understand the cost effectiveness for generators. After all, the almighty dollar is what they understand.
In order to get our voices heard; in order to get the “powers that be” to listen to us; we have to be pretty loud. Just you? Just me? Well, I might be loud, but not louder than the coal companies or the electric companies. So we get together – we put all our voices together and get the amplification – Moms Clean Air Force is our loudhailer. It is our microphone!