More Army ‘power’ always welcome

People in this area like to boast, justifiably for the most part, about the success of partnerships between public and private interests that serve the greater good.

Few would dispute the premise that one of our most critical public interests, and among the greatest of our “greater goods,” is national security and defense, in the form of our armed services.

Officials of the U.S. Army, Georgia Power Co. and the Georgia Public Service Commission were on hand at Fort Benning Wednesday to formally dedicate one of those public-private collaborations — a project of tremendous dimensions that might ultimately have implications we can’t yet fully calculate.

A field of 134,000 solar panels covering some 240 acres on the Alabama side of the post is now in operation and generating renewable energy. It’s the first of five planned solar generating facilities to be built at Georgia military bases under a contract between the Pentagon and Georgia Power. The nearest of the others will be at the Marine Corps Logistics Base in Albany; the others are to be built at Fort Stewart in Hinesville, Fort Gordon in Augusta and the Kings Bay Naval Submarine Base at St. Marys.

The Fort Benning solar generator will produce 30 megawatts of power, or about 17 percent of the entire post’s electricity needs. Think of the size and energy demands of Fort Benning, and consider how much power 17 percent of that total really represents.

Brig. Gen. Eric Wesley, commander of the Maneuver Center of Excellence, said lower power costs ultimately pay off in national security: “Every dollar that we save goes to the readiness of soldiers and training.” Katherine G. Hammack, an assistant secretary of the Army, said, “To ensure the effectiveness of the mission, we must ensure access to energy sources.”

This project — the specific one at Fort Benning, and the larger presidential directive for military installations to tap into renewable energy wherever possible — also has obvious budgetary implications. As noted in staff writer Chuck Williams’ initial report, the Defense Department is the nation’s single largest consumer of energy (and the Army is the single largest consumer in the DOD), a budget line which Hammack rounded out to about $1.3 billion a year. If that 17 percent at Fort Benning is anywhere close to what this project will provide on a larger scale, the savings would be massive.

A more energy-sufficient national defense, with more money available for … well, national defense, has no downside.

This story was originally published June 2, 2016 at 4:38 PM with the headline "More Army ‘power’ always welcome."