Energy crunch: Army powers up for ambitious fuel saving program.

• Author: Wagner, Breanne
• Position: Tactical Power

As roadside attacks on fuel convoys continue to plague the U.S. military, the Army is pursuing a new "intelligent" power program that could cut petroleum use in half at bases in Iraq, Army officials say.

The energy management system, called the hybrid intelligent power program, or HI-Power, will use a variety of techniques to reduce fuel consumption and harmful emissions, says H. Scott Coombe, chief of the Army power division at the service's Research, Development and Engineering Command.

The military has already begun to adopt fuel-saving technologies such as wind and solar powered generators. But those are individual systems that address only one piece of the puzzle. HI-Power is a much broader effort that seeks to efficiently manage the way energy is controlled and distributed at bases, program officials say.

HI-Power is "revolutionizing how we manage battlefield power," says Michael Padden, project manager of the Defense Department's mobile electric power program.

Army officials hope that these initiatives can help reduce the number of petroleum tanker convoys traveling to bases in Iraq and Afghanistan.

"Fuel logistics is still a major concern," Padden asserts. "Petroleum is absolutely necessary; there is no near term alternative."

The HI-Power project was conceived by the Defense Department's research and engineering division, which also is funding the program. Plans call for the six-year effort to run until fiscal year 2013.

The initial goal is to estimate potential energy savings at a "tactical operations center" for an Army brigade, Coombe explains. This will be achieved through a so-called "central power bus," he says at an Institute for Defense and Government Advancement conference in Washington, D.C.

"What we'd like to get to is a central power bus where we can have different sized units, renewables, all of that on a central power grid," Coombe says.

The centralized "phig-and-play" system will allow different power sources--anything from generators to solar panels--to easily hook up to the line, similar to the way printers and other devices connect to a personal computer.

That model is a departure from current tactical power systems, which use several generators in a "power island" configuration. These individual generators, which are isolated from each other like islands and do not share any kind of grid, feed equipment such as laptops or radios.

Based on a brigade-level model, Coombe says that the new power management system has...