Green Options

Underwater surveillance requires a certain supply of persistent power around the coasts, harbors, piers and offshore areas of this nation. Wave energy provides that certainty and reliability because nothing stops the supply chain of power from the roiling sea.

So the US Navy just awarded Lockheed Martin and Ocean Power Technologies a $15 million 4 year contract to provide wave power for terrorism prevention around the coasts. The collaboration holds the promise for finally bringing utility scale wave power to civilian use as well: there’s 2 Terawatts of wave energy potential around the world’s coasts. Twice what the entire world uses now.

In its search for more fuel efficient ways to provide drinking water for long sea voyages and remote bases, the U.S. Navy has developed a second-generation desalination unit that use 65% less energy than conventional technology.  It’s only in the prototype stage but the Navy is already looking beyond seagoing use, and has deployed an earlier version of the technology to provide emergency water supply to disaster areas.

Called the EUWP (Expeditionary Unit Water Purification Program) Gen 2, the new unit also offers a significant secondary benefit that applies to land operations.  By providing an on-site source for potable water, it eliminates the need to run convoys of tanker trucks.  The generators that power the EUWP units still use conventional fuel, but that could change.  If they could be adapted to run cost-effectively on solar power and other sustainable energy, the door is open to desalination on a mass scale.

The modern U.S. Navy may be about to put a 3,000-year-old weedlike biofuel crop in its tank.  Camelina, the “new darling” of next-generation biofuels, is among a small group of biofuels under consideration for testing  this year by the U.S. Navy.  One of the aircraft to be tested is the F/A-18 Super Hornet strike fighter, the latest incarnation of the battle-proven Hornet.  Sustainable Oils of Montana has just won a contract to provide 40,000 gallons of camelina-based jet fuel to the Navy, so the chances look good for putting the ancient crop to a new use.

The Naval Air Systems Command fuels team will start with a lab analysis of the new fuels, then move on to charting their performance on a bench-mounted Super Hornet F414 engine before moving on to the big one, an in-flight test.  Some time in 2010, the Navy could be flying high on a more sustainable fuel.

The European Union (EU) released a 94-page list of airlines that must reduce their emissions or will be banned from European airports two days ago. These are airlines of various sorts from all around the world. Some top players include United Airlines, US Airways, and the US Navy.

Barnacles, algae and other marine biofilm can reduce a ship’s fuel efficiency by up to 40%, and the U.S. Navy is working on a way to keep its hulls clean without using expensive chemicals.  Up to now, the Navy has been relying on biocides to keep the pesky hitchhikers at bay.  On top of harming marine life, the chemical regime is not ideal for keeping high-performance warships operating at peak efficiency.  The Navy estimates that it spends an extra one billion dollars yearly on chemical biocides and extra fuel, so in addition to pure environmental altruism there are significant tactical and bottom-line incentive to find a better way to prevent biofouling.  In what can only be described as poetic justice, naval researchers are turning to the marine environment itself to find safe, effective solutions to the problem.

After a year-long demonstration project, the U.S. Navy is poised add its own contribution to reducing the military’s carbon bootprint - or carbon wake, as the case may be.  The Navy stands to gain up to 87% in savings for shipboard lighting, by switching from conventional light bulbs to high efficiency LED and HID systems developed through DARPA under the HEDLight (High Efficiency Distributed Lighting) program.  One recent retrofit has been accomplished by Ohio-based Energy Focus, Inc. Saving energy is just part of the picture: the quantum leap to HEDLight is also expected to yield significant gains in the Navy’s strategic efficiency.

We’ve covered Sea Shepherd and their new television show “Whale Wars” quite a bit the past couple months, and while we love the organization and the show, we must admit that we cringe every time they make a disastrous mistake on the TV show. But things are looking brighter for the next season, being filmed currently: Sea Shepherd has brought along a former US Navy Lieutenant, Jane Taylor.

The US Navy has awarded Ocean Power Technologies a $3 million contract for participation in the second phase of its Deep Water Active Detection Systems (”DWADS”) program.