Center for a New American Security

The U.S. Coast Guard cutter Henry Blake recently conducted a 3,500 nautical mile trip from Puget Sound to Juneau, Alaska on a 50-50 blend of conventional petroleum and algae-based alternative fuel.

According to Defense News, the demonstration was driven in part by the Coast Guard’s need to understand how well its platforms operate on alternative fuels, given that officials anticipate that the military may be increasingly using blends of synthetic fuels in the future. “The Blake evaluation could be especially important, since the vessel’s mission encompasses so many variables. For example, the cutter moves at full throttle through open water, but also maneuvers at slow speeds for buoy tending duties,” Defense News reported.

Coast Guard officials will compare their performance data with the Navy’s demonstration data to look for any differences. “All the other tests that have been done by the Navy have seen no discernible difference, and we fully expect this to be the same thing,” Sam Alvord, energy fuel section chief for the Coast Guard’s office of energy management, told Defense News. “There were no leaks, no uneven wear, nothing that would raise any eyebrows. It was very short and sweet.”

Photo: The U.S. Coast Guard Cutter Henry Blake travels through the Puget Sound on August 22, 2011. 

In July, the Obama administration barred Iraq’s Elaf Islamic Bank from doing business with the U.S. banking system due to alleged ties to illegal financial transactions with Iran that threaten to undermine the effectiveness of Western sanctions against Tehran’s illicit nuclear program, according to The New York Times.

“The little-known bank singled out by the United States, the Elaf Islamic Bank, is only part of a network of financial institutions and oil-smuggling operations that, according to current and former American and Iraqi government officials and experts on the Iraqi banking sector, has provided Iran with a crucial flow of dollars at a time when sanctions are squeezing its economy,” The New York Times reported on Sunday.

Iraq and Iran have steadily increased economic ties since the U.S.-led invasion in 2003, with trade estimated at around $11 billion a year, according to The New York Times report. “Just last week, an Iraqi delegation that includes the deputy prime minister and top officials from the ministries of finance and trade and the central bank met in Tehran with their Iranian counterparts for talks about further increasing economic ties.”

Higher average temperatures in the United States continue to take a toll on U.S. energy infrastructure, raising concerns about the impact of long-term climate trends and U.S. energy security.

In June, the journal Nature Climate Change published a study that found that energy production from thermoelectric power plants (such as nuclear power stations) could become increasingly constrained as a result of climate change, largely from higher average temperatures warming rivers and other water resources that these facilities rely on for cooling. “During recent warm, dry summers in 2003, 2006 and 2009 several thermoelectric power plants in Europe were forced to reduce production, because of restricted availability of cooling water,” the study found. “In the US a similar event in 2007–2008 caused several power plants to reduce production, or shut down for several days owing to a lack of surface water for cooling and environmental restrictions on thermal discharges.”

That trend is continuing, according to a recent report in The New York Times. On Monday, the Times reported that a nuclear reactor at the Millstone nuclear plant in Waterford, Connecticut was shut down because that water in Long Island Sound was too warm to cool one of the reactors. “Under the reactor’s safety rules, the cooling water can be no higher than 75 degrees. On Sunday afternoon, the water’s temperature soared to 76.7 degrees, prompting the operator, Dominion Power, to order the shutdown of the 880-megawatt reactor,”  according to the report.

On Monday, the Departments of Defense and Interior formalized a partnership to develop renewable energy at or near DOD facilities aimed in part at strengthening the military’s resiliency to disruptions in the electric grid.

“Defense Secretary Leon E. Panetta and Interior Secretary Ken Salazar have signed a memorandum of understanding [MOU] that encourages appropriate development of renewable energy projects on public lands set aside for defense-related purposes and other onshore and offshore areas near military installations,” American Forces Press Service reported on Monday. “Each of the military services has committed to deploy 1 gigawatt of renewable energy on or near its installations by 2025.”

The DOD-Interior MOU comes on the heels of a warning by a top U.S. government official about the vulnerability of the U.S. electric grid. Last month at the Aspen Security Forum, Paul Stockton, Assistant Secretary of Defense for Homeland Defense and Americas’ Security Affairs, cautioned that the U.S. electric grid is vulnerable to disruption, particularly from a terrorists attack that could cause a “long term, large scale outage.”

Defense officials are acutely aware of this vulnerability and the implications for DOD’s readiness. The Department of Defense relies on many domestic installations to serve as command and control centers for critical operations abroad, such as drone missions in Afghanistan. “And to make those operations function, we depend on the electric grid,” Stockton said.

Developing renewable energy projects on DOD facilities can help mitigate this vulnerability by helping the military rely less on the civilian electric grid. The effort – known as “islanding” – is intended to insulate DOD facilities from a disruption to the civilian electric grid by generating enough power on base to sustain critical functions for an indefinite period of time.