Officials discuss energy use at military bases

ALBANY — Officials charged with managing energy use on Robins Air Force Base met Tuesday with colleagues from other installations in Georgia at the Marine Corps Logistics Base to discuss how to dramatically increase their renewable energy usage.

They were joined at the strategy session by officials from Georgia Power, Chevron and the University of Georgia’s engineering department.

The conference came as military installations across the country inch closer to federally mandated requirements to increase renewable energy use.

By fiscal year 2012, all military installations will need to draw 5 percent of their energy from renewable sources. A quarter of the energy used at military installations will need to come from renewable sources by 2025.

Robins Air Force Base officials who attended the conference declined to be interviewed Tuesday.

At the Albany Marine installation, the top officer touted an effort to harness methane produced at a nearby landfill to generate nearly two megawatts of energy for the base — nearly a fourth of its entire energy grid.

“If you want to get somewhere from the installation standpoint ... you want to get into the megawattage (level),” said Col. Terry V. Williams, the commanding officer of the Marine Corps Logistics Base. “You can’t do that by piecemeal.”

Similar efforts by other Georgia military installations also may look toward generating energy from biological material.

“In the Southeast, we’re blessed with biomass,” said Ryan B. Adolphson, the director of the Driftmier Engineering Center at the University of Georgia. “There is off-the-shelf technology that is ready today,” Adolphson said, adding that to meet the mandates, installations “are going to have to pay.”

In an interview last July, Col. Debra Bean, the vice commander of the 78th Air Base Wing, said Robins Air Force Base would look to “go big” to meet the mandates, implying that the installation might launch a large-scale program toward increasing its renewable energy usage.

“If you want to solve these mandates, you’ve got to go for it,” Bean said. “You can’t do them by turning out the lights.”

To contact writer Thomas L. Day, call 744-4489.