On energy, the US military sees the future... by gimleteye

The online journal Grist, features an article today that reflects what is interesting in the front page story in The Miami Herald: "FIU and the military are testing a portable medical clinic that produces its own renewable energy". The Pentagon has the most clear-eyed vision of all sectors of the government about the urgency of adapting to climate change.

The Herald story is on the order of, isn't it cool that you can airlift a portable medical facility into the jungle and have it operating and making fresh water in 24 hours. The backstory is that the military is far ahead of civilians, in terms of undertanding the threat when the supply chain feeding industrial scale systems is broken.

It is a lesson learned every day in Iraq and the danger and difficulty of maintaining supply lines for to service troops in the desert. But we have our own lessons that argue for distributing power generation to the individual scale of users: what happens after a hurricane knocks out the electrical distribution system.

I'm guessing that the military ambitions to run solar and alternative energy are based in view of our collective future that is sharply different from what most of us expect with our SUV's and four dollar a gallon gasoline.

Grist gets it right: "Perhaps the single most important thing we can do to drive up our energy efficiency, lower energy costs, and bolster the overall reliability of our energy infrastructure is to overhaul our electric sector's regulatory model to move generation away from big, remote plants and toward local generation. From solar to CHP, we have a panoply of technologies, fuels, and companies who would participate in such a shift. Less understood is that our regulatory model creates obstacles to all of these options, unwittingly causing us to burn too much fossil fuel and pay too much for energy."

The military is not waiting around to see how politics and civilian life debate until it is too late, the challenge of adapting to global warming.

Part of that industrial scale regulatory model that will fail all of us in an age of rapid sea level rise is Florida Power and Light's effort to ramrod two new nuclear generating units at Turkey Point at sea level. You will soon see on your electric bill that you are already paying for FPL's nuclear ambitions at Turkey Point.

Last night, FPL "listened" to environmental concerns in Miami about its new nuclear power units. Amazingly, company spokespersons are giving conflicting information--vague as it is-- about where the cooling water will come from, depending on the audience. It is all wrong: what we need to be doing is concentrating technology and jobs on renewable sources of energy and applications to daily living and small scale.

We need to be doing it now, exactly the way the U.S. military is fast-tracking its makeshift mobile hospital fueled by solar.