Sustainability Videos & Lecture Series

Dan O'Neill: My name’s Dan O’Neill, general manager of the Sustainability Solutions Extension Service of the Walton Sustainability Solutions Initiatives as funded $27.5 million investment of the Rob and Melani Walton family foundation. To make our guests feel more comfortable, that would be the GM of the SSXS of WSSI as funded by the RAMWFF.

It gives me a great deal of pleasure to be asked to introduce Mr. Richard Kidd. Richard serves as Deputy Assistant Secretary of the US Army for Energy and Sustainability where he is responsible for overall program direction, policy, strategies and oversight through implementation of all programs and initiatives related to energy security and sustainability within the army.

I think the energy budget’s somewhere between 3 and $5 billion. I forget what that is. I’m sure we’ll hear about that, but it’s a huge energy enterprise. As the army senior energy executive, he also coordinates and integrates both installation and operational energy programs and strategies.

A 1986 graduate of the US Military Academy at West Point, Richard served as an infantry officer until 1991. After receiving a master’s in public and private management form Yale, he joined the United Nations and served principally in war-affected regions of the world.

He served in the State Department’s bureau of political and military affairs starting in 2001 and in July of 2008, Mr. Kidd joined the Department of Energy’s office of energy efficiency and renewable energy, where he’s responsible for leading the federal energy management program. In this position, he helped craft federal-level energy policy and assisted all federal agencies in meeting statutory energy and sustainability requirements in order to promote energy security and environmental stewardship.

With that, I would like to turn the floor over with a big both thank you for your service, sir, and a warm welcome to GIOS.

Richard Kidd: Thanks, Dan. Is the lapel mike working? Yeah? Great. I appreciate those kind remarks. I did notice, though, that the most prestigious lecture event was reserved for the navy. I also noticed that you didn’t mention that I’m a native Oregonian, so I don’t have to mention last night’s football game. Everyone’s still staying? Okay, good.

It’s a great pleasure to be here today and talk to you about sustainability, something that’s personally very important for me. I’m just thrilled and honored to be a public servant and to be sort of the senior energy and senior sustainability official for what is arguably one of the nation’s largest enterprises.

I’m preparing my slides—I’m gonna—I put some new slides together for this group, thinking there would be some students that are going to be looking at how do you manage issues of sustainability, so I’ve got a little bit of stuff in here on how we in the army—what our metrics are and how we manage sustainability at the enterprise level. I’ll go through the presentation and I look forward to your questions. I do have a tight schedule to catch a flight back home, but I really want to have some dialog here.

Let’s talk about the army for just a second. Also, if I use acronyms that you don’t get or they’re on the slide, you don’t understand, you can just quickly raise your hand, interrupt and say, “Acronym foul,” and I’ll try to correct.

We have both installation and operational energy, and I’m the first guy in the army who has a policy remit for both of those. You’ll see a little bit more on that later on. In FY ’11, we spent 3.7 billion on liquid fuel, which is what—is primarily operational fuel. It’s the fuel used in our vehicles to train and fight around the world. What is interesting about this, it was a $1 billion increase over the year before, so we have some significant numbers and some significant volatility in our energy pricing.

1.3 billion on our facilities side—important to—when you think about the army, we are the largest consumer of electricity in the United States—the United States Army. We have twice as much floor space as Walmart, ten times as much floor space as general services administration.

We have the second-largest non-tactical vehicle fleet in federal government. Depending on what happens with the postal service, we may have the largest tactical vehicle fleet, so our numbers are big.

Here’s what a couple of folks have said about the issue on army and energy. That quote from Thomas Freedman there, sort of my own personal sort of Domiclese that hangs over my head, but I want you to pay attention to the last two quotes because everything that we’re doing in the army about sustainability, about energy efficiency, is not about being green. It’s not about climate change. It’s not about an environmental cause.

It’s about our mission. It’s about our mission and about a future of our organization. I’m gonna try to bring that out in my remarks.

Speaking of missions, everybody in the army has a mission. That’s the mission of the team that I’m privileged to lead. I basically have four elements—sort of task functions—that I am responsible for on the policy side. I’m in the civilian control of the military in the secretariat. I am not a political appointee, but I spend my days with political appointees, so I’m part of the president’s control of the military, but I will be in my job regardless of whatever happens in November.

Those four issues—operational energy, installation, sustainability and the energy initiatives task force, which I’ll talk about in a few minutes, but it’s basically a dedicated effort by the army to accelerate the deployment of large-scale renewables.

The army power and energy framework—the iconic image of the army is a soldier—of the navy, of course, it’s a ship—of the air force, an airplane, but for the army, it’s a soldier. We have to think of all the energy inputs to that soldier from the batteries that he or she carries to the installational energy that they use where they live and train.

We look at basing power, soldier power and vehicle power. The color codes basically mean—the green is what we consider installational energy—our non-tactical—and the tan is the tactical energy. I’m not gonna go through all of these. I’m leaving the slides, but you can just look at all the things we’re doing from that zero forward operating basis to insulated tents, water reuse, set shower systems—over here to our vehicle fleet, hybrid electric drives on our new combat vehicles and these type of things.

Now, this is a complicated slide and I wanted to put this on here. A lot of this is about organizational design and behavior. At least in my mind, I went to a graduate institution that stressed organization design and behavior. I have nine-page position description of everything I’m supposed to do for the secretary of the army, but it boils down to I’m essentially to change the way the army values and views energy and how they incorporate that energy and sustainability into our enterprise decision-making.

These are all our external pressures, and just a couple of comments. Within the Department of Defense, there is no debate about climate change. The Department of Defense is probably one of the most objective organizations in the world. We live and work in observable reality, and the observable reality is that climate is changing. It’s changing our mission set and it’s changing the way we must train and operate our installations. The debate can occur someplace else, but it’s not a debate with—inside the Department of Defense.

In fact, environmental security concerns have been reflected in every single national security strategy back to the first one, which has Ronald Reagan’s signature on it. This is not new. It’s not trendy for the department. I could give you dozens of examples. I’ll give you one example we don’t really think about, but a lot of what the army does is engage around the world with friends and allies to prevent conflict.

People don’t normally think of that, but emerging conflict was taking place in South America between two countries who had previously had no need to demarcate their border because it was covered by glaciers. That border—those glaciers have gone. They were—tensions were escalating. Trade was being constrained, and so the US Army sent one of our corps of engineers’ mapping assets to go down there and help—and demarcate the border in a way that was acceptable to both countries, so practical example of what the army does to shape the environment but also to respond to—to shape the security environment while responding to changes in the natural environment.

Anyway, all of this goes around to say that we, the army—we do plans and we follow plans. We are doctrinally-driven, planning-driven organization. Like most organizations, we have a strategic plan at the enterprise level. It’s called the army campaign plan. For the first time this year, the army has embraced energy and sustainability as a corporate objective. This is what I wanna talk to a little bit on these metrics.

How do you measure and manage progress? At the highest levels of the army, we have achieve energy, security and sustainability objectives. This is tracked and reported to the Secretary and the Chief of Staff. We have the four major objectives down here and the assigned areas of responsibility, but I am the secretariat individual responsible for putting in place the management regime to track army performance. I show you this very busy slide with the end being that we will have an energy secure army.

Now—you’re the first group ever to see the next series of six or seven slides, so try to contain your excitement. [Laughter] We have put in place this tracking mechanism and we have a strategic management system at corporate level, which has a very creative red, yellow and green scoring system on the metrics, but we now apply this to the variety of tasks and subtasks.

Also, going back to the army campaign plan for just a second, we have a set of army values. They’re soldier values—never leave a fallen comrade, et cetera—but at the army value, we’ve changed—previously, we had a value statement around financial responsibility. We’ve changed that to sustainable and responsible use of all resources, recognizing that finance is just one of the many resources that we need to manage and be responsible managers of as part of our value.

What happens is we have a major objective—in this case, 8.1 is installation energy. We have these subtasks and then within the subtasks, we have individual metrics. The metrics are around things, of course, that we can measure, and how do you—and that’s one of the big challenges. Do you have a meaningful metric that you can measure and you have a meaningful metric that you can influence. Sometimes you may have a metric that you can’t influence like heating days or cooling days. Those are outside of your span of control.

We aggregate these all up, and I wanted to just show you—‘cause I suspect that many of the students in the room have looked and thought about how do you measure corporate sustainability performance. You can look at your supply chain, your inbed carbon, a variety of mechanisms.

We’ve got about 30 metrics in the army, and I just wanted to show some of these as examples of what a federal organization would track in regards to its overall sustainability score.

Percent reduction and energy intensity—this is a metric that is measured in BTUs over gross square footage. This is a metric that’s given to us by Congress. We have to respond to this as a statutory requirement. We could talk about whether this metric is good or bad, but that’s a metric that we, by law, have to track. We’ve embraced those and they’re part of our plan. We’ve got water. We’ve got petroleum reduction, alternate fuel use.

What’s more interesting is we’re trying to take a look at energy in the operational environment. I’ve got a slide a little bit later on—we don’t want to ration energy. Just like bullets—we never wanna ration bullets. What we want is the fewest bullets possible with every bullet hitting its target. Sorry. I know I’m in an academic environment, but that’s the seriousness of what the army does.

Same with energy—we’re never gonna ration fuel to our soldiers, but how can we use that fuel in the most efficient manner and in a way that doesn’t create a vulnerability.

We’re looking at gallons per soldier per day, just—historically, when my grandfather was in World War II, it was about one gallon per USGI a day. In Afghanistan now it’s about 20. That’s sort of the escalation of the energy consumption for our forces in combat.

Another metric—this is ABCT. That stands for airborne brigade combat team, so how long can an airborne brigade combat team operate in a deployed environment without fuel resupply? This is an efficiency measure, but it’s linked to an operational outcome. Remember how I said we’re gonna link all of these actions to our mission, our purpose, our reason for being, so the longer we can operate without that fuel resupply, then the more effective that unit is, so can we take waste out of that unit and extend the time without resupply?

Then this is very important here. The combined power—combined weight of power source components on an individual soldier. I’ll talk a little bit later about integrated design. Hopefully, many of you have been studying the concept of integrated design and holistic thinking, and that’s one of the essences of what we’re trying to do in the army is think in an integrated manner across a series of systems.

While the American solider—when he or she goes into combat, they have tremendous tactical overmatch of their opponent. We never wanna send that soldier into a fair fight, so we give them all sorts of stuff that make them more dangerous to the enemy. We have sights that can extend their vision. We have sights that can see at night. We have two different types of communications. We have a GPS so they always know where they are on the battlefield and where their fellow soldiers are, so they’re less likely to shoot each other.

You have all of these electronic systems which collectively give that soldier tremendous advantage. The problem is each of these elements was designed individually, and they each use a different battery. That soldier now goes into combat for 72 hours—an infantry soldier, an 18, 19-year-old like many of the ones running around on campus—they’ve gotta carry 70 types of batteries weighing 16 pounds.

Not only is this a physical load, it’s a cognitive load. Did I change out the battery in my sight or was it—did I change out the battery in my coms gear, or did I change out the battery in my GPS? I don’t remember which battery’s what. I’m gonna throw them all away and get new batteries. That’s the behavior that’s exhibited under the cognitive requirements to manage seven different types of batteries. You and I would do the exact same thing, ‘cause when you go, you’ve gotta know that your battery is fully charged.

I digress a little bit, but we’re putting charge indicators on our batteries, in many cases where it would not normally be cost-advantageous to do that, but we’re doing it so that you make an energy-informed soldier. Remember, I said the energy-informed operations.

Similarly, right now, when we started the war in Afghanistan, two percent of our batteries were rechargeable. This year, 52 percent are rechargeable, so the individual battery cost has gone way up, but the cost per delivered volt has gone way down. Yes ma’am?

Audience Member: Did you say 60 pounds?

Richard Kidd: Sixteen. All right, so these are just some metrics that we track.

Now I’m gonna pull back out of the metrics for a little bit and just talk about overall—the overall strategy, how we work as an organization. This is hopefully sort of energy management, sustainability management 101. Your first best investment, of course, is changing individual behavior or changing the cultural—the way the organizational culture values something.

We’re actually—this’ll probably be the last time I use this slide because we’re really not about changing the army culture. We like the army culture. What we’re about is changing the behavior of army elements within that culture and taking things that we value as an organization and using that as a point of departure, a strength—a point of strength to change our culture.

In other words, one of the things about the army is you would never jeopardize another solider. You would never take an action that would put another soldier in danger. You don’t smoke on patrol. You don’t give away secrets. Likewise, you wouldn’t waste energy, if that means another soldier has to protect and guard that energy.

We’re talking a lot within the cultural norms of the army rather than changing the cultural norms. On sustainability—one of the themes of sustainability that you guys have probably all heard is generational equality. I don’t talk about generational equality within the army or those great Native American quotes. You’ve all probably seen those in sustainability lectures.

What we do is we talk about the development of the army over time, and the army’s institution is obsessed about cultivating its next generation of leaders and making decisions for the army of the future. That’s how we talk about sustainability. We, the army of today, have to make decisions so that the army of tomorrow can have choice.

Behavior—then of course your best investment is efficiency. You’ve gotta address your demand side—integrate renewables and alternative energy for resiliency. Then we do have the advantage of having some investment streams that we can work to improve our S&T investments.

Operational energy—talk a little bit about this. You saw this from the first slide—70 to 80 percent of our convoy resupply weight is fuel and water. Eighteen percent of our casualties are suffered from defending those convoys. We, the army—when we talk about fuel efficiency, we talk—what’s important to us is not really saving the fuel or the carbon emissions. What’s important to us is if we can reduce our fuel load—and right now, we can by up to 50 percent—correction—40 percent of our fuel in Afghanistan goes to produce electricity. We can cut that portion in half with today’s technologies, and we’re doing that.

If we can reduce our convoys by one-fifth, then we can reduce our casualties by one-fifth, and that’s the tie to the organizational behavior.

We—saving 50 million gallons of fuel in Afghanistan today because of decisions we made last year. Previously—basically, the army goes to war. You have one generator, one load, and that’s the way we trained to fight and that’s the way we stayed for ten years. Someone had to ask the question, “Why do we do that in Afghanistan?” We’re not—our bases our stationary.

Pull out those spot generators, put in a one-megawatt—large, one-megawatt, two-megawatt generator and take away those spot generations. Just through changing your production and distribution of generator-delivered electricity, we’re saving 50 million gallons of fuel.

We’re accelerating new generators, and these generators are designed to be networked. Here’s what’s interesting. At the forward edge of the battlefield, we have a combat outpost. It has a rifle platoon and army assets, 50 soldiers Afghan, 50 soldiers—the fuel is flown in. It’s either flown in by helicopter or dropped out of the back of a air force aircraft, using about 350, 400 gallons of fuel a day.

What we’ve done is we pulled the five generators that were there. We put in three generators that were networked. We put in a battery pack and a collection of solar panels. We service the load off the battery pack. The generators only come on when the battery pack needs to be recharged, and when they do come on, they work at their optimum level. A generator likes to work at 75 to 80 percent, not at 20 or 25 percent unless a—former case.

What we’ve done is we’ve cut the fuel in half. We’ve reduced the downtime of our generators, reduced our operations and maintenance requirements, which is a mechanic flying around in a helicopter. We’ve increased the performance of electrical equipment because the power quality has gone up with the battery, and we’ve given back to the operational commander additional aircraft lifts.

We don’t talk in the army about saving fuel or money. I talk to the hardcore army combat commander and say, “Hey. We’re putting in solar panels and batteries and information technology. Because of that, I’m giving you back 24 aircraft lifts a month.” He says, “Wow. I don’t have enough aircraft to go around.” That’s the best investment I can make in Afghanistan to generate extra combat power. Again, making the attachment to the organizational needs.

I anticipate that we’re—full-on out effort—every installation that the army has in Afghanistan when 2014, when we’re sort of down to a training mode will have a hybrid energy solution on board. It’s gonna have a fossil fuel component, it’s gonna have a renewable component and it’s gonna have a power storage component.

While it pays for itself in this case in between four to six months is the payback period, the operational value—the operational payback to the army—is immediate. You’re gonna see wide-scale transformation of what our installations look like in a combat environment. Again, it’s all about mission.

On the installation side, a couple of things—the army’s been making great progress. Our energy consumption has gone down 13 percent since 2003. The number of soldiers and civilians on our installations has gone up by 20 percent during that same time period. Grow the army, activate the reservists, et cetera.

But also during that time, 13 percent reduction, 20 percent increase in physical bodies, a 50 percent increase in our utility bill. All of these investments are not keeping pace with the volatile utility market that we find ourselves in.

Net zero initiative—I’m gonna go into detail about this. It’s essentially as it sounds. We’ve adopted 17 pilot installations to drive net zero integrated design across the army with the intent being that this will migrate and be all the army installations. What is that? That’s about 160 towns in America. Our army installations are essentially small towns, from 5,000 people to 150,000 people.

We’re large users of energy savings performance contracts—the largest in the federal government—and we’ve got a dedicated team for deployment of renewable energy projects. I’m gonna talk about that now.

We’ve got a number of mandates for production of renewable energy on army lands. We also have this increasing pressure for energy-secure installations, so installations that can have some degree of on-site energy production. In many ways, we’re moving to hybrid installations just like that little forward operating base in Afghanistan. You can envision an army installation like Fort Hood, Texas with a networked system of its large-scale generators, on-site gas peaker plant, wide-scale renewable production.

To get that renewable energy production, we’ve built a team that reports to me which is intended to model the private sector because all of the renewable production in the army—or essentially all of it—is gonna be through third-party power purchase agreements just like you guys do for all the solar on the roofs here at ASU.

But in order to do that, we have to think and act like a corporate entity, not like a government bureaucracy, and we have to compete for capital. We have to design and develop projects and take them to the private sector in a timely manner with all of these areas of risk addressed so that the private sector will be interested in bringing their capital to help solve this problem.

This is just a look at our current renewable energy pipeline. For those of you who get into renewable energy project development, an RE developer will have three projects on the books with one that they hope to develop, ‘cause part of this is eliminating bad projects. We’re not in the business of wasting taxpayer dollars, so we want projects that address a variety of needs.

Basically, our—we’ve got a computer model that we built with the national renewable energy laboratory, tentatively identified a minimum of four gigawatts of renewable projects in army lands, going through the opportunity assessments, execution—we’re going to go to tender for 105 megawatts between now and the first of the year and we’ll probably be tendering about 50 to 60 megawatt every quarter indefinitely.

If you add this to the sister services—the air force and the navy—the Department of Defense arguably has the largest renewable energy project pipeline in the country right now. We’ve been spending a lot of time—we, myself, my colleagues from the navy and air force—on Wall Street, talking to Wall Street and others about the cost of capital.

I’ll digress for just a second. What’s interesting on Wall Street is when we were up there, all the investment bankers—the question is what’s happening to renewable energy with natural gas, and what’s this dynamic playing out? They said, “Well, no one really knows what the dynamic’s gonna be in the long run, but we as investment banks—we think that there’s a carbon bubble. We think that purely carbon-based assets are over-valued because of the embedded costs are not—the externalities and the costs of that fossil fuel production are not adequately reflected in their price. When they are, the prices will come down.”

As asset-holders, we wanna continue to hold a certain percentage of our portfolio in renewables as a hedge against what may or may not happen in fossil fuels. There is plenty of money in Wall Street for renewable projects, particularly if they’re well done and all those attendant risk areas are addressed, so we’re optimistic that we’ll be able to leverage the balance sheet scale and the power purchase authorities of the army.

What’s unique about the Department of Defense versus other federal agencies—we can do a PPA for 30 years, so when you take PPA for 30 years, a customer that you know is gonna be around—so the army’s been around for a while and we’re gonna be around for a while—and scale, we think that we can get really good rates. We’re starting to see some amazing things, particularly in the solar—the cost of installed solar.

The previous largest project in the army—this is interesting, too—in terms of Moore’s Law kind of in reverse—the previous largest solar project in the army was a little more than two megawatts at Fort Carson. It will have been the largest project in the army for about six years, but—and it was $8.00 a watt, installed. We just—the new largest project is twice that size, and it was four plus megawatts. It was $3.67 a watt installed. We got a price quote on a next project someplace else. I can’t tell you yet, but it may be around $2.30 a watt installed.

Then what’s interesting, if you look at the pipeline, that project that was the longest in the army, about six years—the next one is gonna be the longest in the army for about two years, then that will be the largest in the army for about a year, ‘cause if you—so if you look at the rate of size increase across the projects of the army, it’s kinda like—a little bit like Moore’s Law. Moore’s Law—computer chips? All right.

Net zero hierarchy—so we picked 17 installations across the United States to be pioneers of integrated design for energy, water, waste as well as—in some cases—all three. We picked these. They’re geographically dispersed. They’re dispersed by the type of installation—troop installations versus, say, a weapons depot or a scientific installation. The army runs lots of scientific labs.

The intent is that these will inform the way the army does all of its master planning on both its—both of its buildings and its installation as a whole. I don’t have a slide up here, but the army has the highest building standard in the federal government. We’ve adopted ASHRAE 189.1 as the building construction standard, so building certification standards, lead or green gloves—they’re great, but what really matters is how you build the building, and so we’ve got ASHRAE 189 and we’re the first federal agency to do that, and we’re happy with what we’re getting out of that and we’ll continue to do so.

Anyway, this is the reverse triangle hierarchy of net zero energy. There is the definition, so there’s the army campaign plan. First and foremost, it looks at energy efficiency and conservation measures and then assessment of renewable on-site power generation.

Energy security—that’s a interesting topic. It’s longer probably than I have time to do, but essentially, from now on, all army buildings and the renewables on army sites—if they are not connected to a microgrid now, they must be, by design, backward-integratable to a microgrid. Our intent over time is that we will reduce our demand and balance our demand and our supply on our installation through an intelligent, cyber-secure microgrid.

I’m really not a fan of any one technology. I’m a fan of design, but if there is a technology that’s gonna leverage all of the assets that—everything that we in the army want is probably intelligent microgrid ‘cause it’s efficiency, security and it reduces the cost profile for renewables.

Holistic approach—right mix of energy technologies—let’s go. I’m gonna skip ahead and come back, ‘cause these two slides our out of order, but where we start with our energy is we have a series of process evaluations and physical plant analysis tools and we look to where we can make investments to reduce our demand, and then what our opportunities are for various renewable energy technologies. Then we produce a roadmap over time. I don’t know why it’s got propane here. We do have some propane power consumption, but—for thermal, but anyway. It shows an overall reduced reduction over time and then a shift in the generating profile where that energy comes from.

Then in the back layers, there’s an investment strategy. How do you spend money to get here? Our preliminary analysis is that—and for the—we have to be very mindful of cost benefit analysis and return on investment, but we—from the installations that we’ve seen, we believe that we can get net zero—70 percent or more of the net zero final goal obtainment at or above a positive net present value. Some installations at 70 percent is not worth the continued investment.

That’s under today’s technology suite, and what’s very interesting, though, is the declining cost of technology. Every year or two—many ways, the technology—the change in the cost of technology is happening faster than just some of our federal decision-making processes can adapt to.

Water—a lot of the similar issues here on water. Again, we look at the inverse triangle of reduction, repurposing, recycling, recovery and disposal. What we’re trying to do in the water side is we do—go to our installations and we do a water balance assessment. Where is our water coming from and how is it being used, so again, a management tool. On-post irrigation is our largest consumer of water—potable water in many cases.

The good news about army installations is they’re run by a general, and if the general says stop irrigating, there’s no public outcry. There’s no civil disobedience. You just stop irrigating. In the case of Fort Huachuca—where there is a water-constrained environment a few years ago and there’s some tensions with the local community—the post said stop, and we reduced our water consumption by 23 percent and we’ve sustained that ever since.

A lot of things that we’re doing—we’re changing our grass fields for physical training and other things—they’re becoming turf fields. We’re bundling that—again, as I talk about culture—every soldier and athlete—so it’s interesting now if you go to basic training. First of all, the army’s the ultimate nanny state. You can’t get a Coke in basic training. It’s not physically possible for a basic trainee to get a Coke unless their sergeant brings one in.

Our diets, choices—all of this around physical health of our soldiers—part of this is driven by the fact that our inductees are so out of shape compared to where they were 20 years ago. The physical condition of the American high school student you could argue is a national security threat, but that’s not what I’m here to talk about.

But the point is now, when you go to basic training, rather than just having your mean drill sergeant, your company also has a civilian physical fitness trainer as well as a physical therapist. Every soldier is an athlete and each soldier gets individual training. Then you get their individual fitness assessment, their diet assessment and they go out on the artificial turf and they think, “Wow. I’m a superstar.” They don’t really care that they’re saving the army lots of water and getting our water mass balance assessment a little bit more in line.

But we look at all of these things across the army, and then we—just like in the—on the energy side, we develop a road map for investments that changes—that reduces water consumption over time and changes the composition of where that water comes from, whether it’s being recycled, whether it’s being collected, whether it’s gray water that’s been repurposed.

There’s some interesting challenges in water. Water is way underpriced. A lot of the water-saving investments don’t generate a positive payback, but some generate tremendous payback. We did a automated leak detection system at one of our net zero installations, at Tooele Army Depot. It went through, found a collection of leaks throughout the army system, cut our water consumption through leaks—so we were paying for water that was leaking—by 40 percent, paid for itself in six months.

Now, that’s gonna be a standard practice in the army, so we’re gonna do this acoustic, electronic, high-speed leak detection system for every army installation. Probably won’t get the same level of savings as we did at Tooele, but the point is that’s what these net zero installations do. They test and pioneer these ideas that we then migrate to the whole army.

Net zero waste—now, remember earlier, I said that the army of today has to make decisions so that the army of tomorrow has choice, that idea of generational equality. I did use the phrase generational equality once in the army and I got a lot of strange looks, so I don’t use it anymore.

But the best example may be in waste. Right now, the army runs 17 landfills—municipal, solid-waste landfills—on our army installations. These landfills will all be full in the next 10 to 12 years. When that occurs, then the army at that point—the army of the future—the only choice that they will have under the current regime is they will have to take training land out of its primary use—which is training soldiers—and convert that to a landfill.

That is adverse mission impact for the army—or you have to pay tipping fees, sometimes out-of-state tipping fees, so there’s huge budgetary implications. What we wanna do is act today so that those future garrison commanders and general officers don’t—aren’t faced with that less-than-ideal choice.

On waste, what we’ve found is—again, we do a waste roadmap and how we can—and we’re looking at landfill disposal as our metric here. How can we reduce the absolute tons of waste going into a landfill disposal. What we’ve found on waste, though, is actually that there’s not the technological solutions that you might find in energy and water. It really is process solutions and changes, like Walmart. We had a commissary—which is a big retail store on an army installation. We call them commissaries because—I don’t know. We call them commissaries, but it’s like a Target. It’s like a Super Walmart.

We just simply said, “All right. You guys that ship us all this stuff—we’re not taking your packaging anymore.” Saved us almost $100,000 a year. Previously, we pay—we take taxpayer money and we demolition buildings that are no longer needed or are surplus. Well, many of these buildings are 50 years old or 70 years old. We gotta get the clearance from the historical society.

But anyway, what we thought is, well, maybe this building is not a liability. Maybe this is a resource. At Fort Lewis, Washington, they’re now open bidding for firms to come in and deconstruct our buildings, take the brick or the wood or these other assets and recycle it and reuse it. You’ve got a great community up in the Pacific Northwest for recycled building materials, but they’re now paying us. We’ve turned a cost center into a profit center. We’re trying to look at ways to do that, and it’s important on the waste side.

A couple things about sustainability and then I’ll take questions. On Monday, the army will publish its annual sustainability report. I could give you a website, but we don’t have the website up yet. Anyway, a couple things, though, about the army sustainability report. The army was the first federal agency to report on sustainability using the GRI format. You guys are familiar with the GRI format. It’s sort of the industry standard. One of its key attributes is transparency, so the army embraced the idea of we’re gonna be transparent when and where we can.

It’s a little bit hard ‘cause it’s not fully applicable to a federal entity, particularly one with the mission of the army, but we have 5,000 archaeological sites, principally Native American graveyards and other things. We’ve got over 120 endangered species on army lands. We’ve got a variety of ecosystems and subsystems. We arguably manage that all very well.

We put that out—first ones to put it out in that format. This year’s format will not only have it in the GRI template, but we’ve also cross-indexed that with Executive Order 13514. For those of you familiar with the federal government, we’ve got statute—Clean Air Act, Clean Water Act—on the energy side, Energy Policy Act of 2005 and the Energy Independence of 2007. In many ways, all of these collective requirements that pertain to sustainability, plus some additional ones related to greenhouse gas, are captured in Executive Order 13514.

Now we’re reporting between—so what you’ll see is our army performance in an industry standard and in line with all the sort of federal requirements. We’re excited about that and we think it will, again, contribute to that commitment to transparency and, of course, our obligations to the American public at large. Take a look at that and if you guys wanna develop a course on the army sustainability, this would be a good resource and we’ll see where it goes.

Just one last thing about courses before I take questions is United States Military Academy at West Point—traditionally been recognized as a pretty good liberal arts school in its different disciplines but has not been considered strong in interdisciplinary or multi-disciplinary approach. The West Point Military Academy has adopted energy and sustainability as the interdisciplinary theme that will cut across the academy’s courses.

Not only are they changing it in their curriculum, but they have now cadet leaders in the cadet—we call it chain of command—are leadership elements that are responsible for energy and environment. The senior cadet leader—who’s called the brigade energy and environmental officer—does an internship with me in the summer, so that’s sort of been in [inaudible 42:41] in there, and West Point as an installation has been selected as a net zero installation.

The garrison management team and a lot of the funds that go to West Point for new buildings and all this are part of the installation team. These three elements—the cadets, the faculty and the installation—work together in a shared sort of collaborative environment to start to think in a holistic and integrated manner in regards to sustainability, so there are 23 courses at West Point that have problem sets or questions on things related to energy efficiency or sustainability.

For example, in your calculus class, rather than doing flow rates in and out of a reservoir, you might do flow rates in and out of a battery. Your electrical engineering class, rather than diagramming a light bulb or whatever, you would diagram an inverter—solar power inverter. Ethics class, why is it fair that the Americans consume 25 times as much energy as Africa, so sort of an energy justice question, so a lot of exciting stuff going on up at West Point with the intent being that this will shape and change the future leadership of the army.

Also, for our basic trainees, we are talking about energy discipline as part of soldier discipline. Back in World War II, everyone in the country was told to conserve energy and it was part of the army culture. We’ve lost that component of the army culture and now we’re trying to get it back.

I wanna close with these two vignettes about what we’re doing from the bottom up—future soldiers, future leaders—and remind you of where we started at the beginning where I talked about the army’s strategic plan—the army campaign plan—these metrics that are looked at and tracked by the highest leaders of the army.