Advanced Energy Perspectives

The military has long been the single largest consumer of energy in the United States. In fact, fighting a war today takes 16 times the energy it did during World War II due to mechanization, remote locations, and more advanced technology. The Army uses so much fuel it accounts for half the supplies they carry. As a story this week in USA Today points out, the U.S. military now sees its dependence on fossil fuels as a source of risk and vulnerability – and is now doing something about it. “Because of our thirst for liquid fuel, we’re not as light and agile as we once were, putting both our Marines and our expeditionary capabilities at risk,” Gen. James Amos, the Marine Corps commandant, said in 2011, explaining the military’s turn toward new energy options.

Fisker Automotive gave signs of ill health this week as its COO indicated that the electric vehicle company may file for bankruptcy. The New York Times concluded that the company has “broken down on the road to electric cars,” as the company skipped a large loan payment due last week, which led the federal government to begin seizing Fisker’s assets.

The road to electric vehicles itself continues despite the setback, though. This week, research and consulting firm Navigant released a new report predicting sales of electric vehicles will grow to 22 million by 2020. With wider availability, greater charging infrastructure, and falling prices, sales of EVs have already begun to break records. News this week from EV manufacturers show growth across the board: Tesla announced strong first quarter performance, and sales of both the Chevy Volt and Nissan Leaf are up compared to this time last year. All told, the three companies sold more than 12,500 electric cars in the first quarter of 2013.

This week AEE partner organization North Carolina Sustainable Energy Association helped to defeat a threat to the state’s renewable energy mandate. North Carolina was in the sites of an effort to roll back renewable energy portfolio standards across the board—more than a dozen states faced similar threats to their renewable energy requirements. Greentech Media published a story earlier this year about the “war” on state renewables standards. But so far, that war seems one-sided: not a single state has compromised its commitment to renewable energy.

This week the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission released its March Energy Infrastructure Update, revealing that advanced energy accounts for all of the new capacity installed so far this year. This data comes from calculating all the newly built energy projects that have come online in the first quarter of 2013, as well as any expansion of existing projects. Wind is closing in on installing a gigawatt of capacity this year alone—so far wind projects have added 958 megawatts to America’s energy portfolio. AWEA also released its report for 2012 this week, revealing that the U.S. cruised past 60 gigawatts of total wind capacity last year.

On Tuesday Maryland’s Governor MartinO’Malley signed the state’s first offshore wind bill into law. The law, which made its through House of Delegates in February and the state Senate in March, will provide as much as $1.7 billion to construct a wind farm off the coast of Maryland. The new measure alters Maryland’s renewable portfolio standard (RPS), adding offshore wind as one of the renewable categories.