

Helmand Province in Afghanistan isn't the most obvious proving ground for a green-energy project. But a Marine company that shipped out to war armed with solar panels says it cut down on its generators' fuel consumption by nearly 90 percent. That might just get the rest of the military to note that you can battle insurgents and carbon footprints at the same time.

When Danger Room last checked in on India Company of the 3rd Battalion, 5th Marine Regiment in September, it was preparing to head to Helmand's Sangin District with a passel of solar panels called the Ground Renewable Expeditionary Energy System, or "Greens."

The Humvee-transportable panels might be green, but they had a distinct tactical use: power up Marine operations while cutting back on the amount of fuel resupply that insurgents can target. The system hadn't been used in a war before, so it was an open question how well it would perform.

Pretty impressively, if a Marine press release is to be believed. One of the company's squad leaders, Staff Sgt. David Doty, said that the energy generated by the solar panels has dropped his generators' fuel consumption from 20 gallons a day to just 2.5 gallons. And the more gas the Marines save with solar power, the less they'll have to truck in through convoys that insurgents shoot at and blow up. The panels also allow Patrol Base Sparks to use its generators less at night, cutting down on noise that can tip insurgents off to the Marines' positions.

Those tactical gains make the military virtues of energy efficiency more plain than anything policymakers or think-tankers can say, according to Christine Parthemore of the Center for a New American Security. "The benefit to the lack of noise and attention drawn to the [base] because of not having to run the generators – no one was talking about that six months ago," Parthemore says.

The Greens deployment isn't the only renewable-energy technology the Marines have in Sangin. To recharge radio batteries, they've got a flexible solar panel that's light enough for a single leatherneck to carry, called a Solar Portable Alternative Communication Energy System. A photovoltaic tarp called PowerShade fits over a standard tent to light it up. And a large power source called the ZeroBase Regenerator sucks up enough sunlight to run more than 20 lighting systems and 15 computers.

Before India Company made it to Sangin, the military didn't have ground units using renewable-energy tech in the spartan conditions of a war zone. The Navy has set a goal for itself of cutting its petroleum use in half by 2015, something that shipboard nuclear power allows. And the Army recently set up a 500-megawatt solar plant in California.

But while the military gives lip service to reducing its overall energy consumption by a third over a decade, it exempted its bases in Iraq and Afghanistan, as well as gas-guzzling ships, trucks and planes.

It's obviously much different to power a base back home than it is to light up an operations center on a combat base. But demonstrating the wartime utility of saving energy crosses an important threshold.

"With any new technology, weapons or whatever, you don't really know the full benefits, the tangential side effects, or the net plus for war-fighting capability until you get the stuff in the field and start using it," Parthemore says. "These testimonials – why it's working to our benefit, how much fuel they saved gallon by gallon – that'll go very far in convincing Congress" to invest more in alternative fuels for the military.

It turns out there are lessons from Afghanistan that might not have anything to do with the war.

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