A few years ago a Los Angeles-​​based firm called SolarReserve had what they thought was a great alter­na­tive energy idea: A field of mir­rors directs sun­light toward a tower filled with salt. The salt heats up to 1,050 degrees Fahrenheit and then flows down to a con­tainer where the heat is used to drive tur­bines that can power upwards of 50,000 homes.

Naturally such a device would need to be built where the sun shines a lot. And, ide­ally, it wouldn’t take up space in a pop­u­lated area or harm wildlife.

Hey, how about the Nevada desert? At a glance that makes sense, except once you start to move on the idea you real­ize that “Nevada desert” is syn­ony­mous with “Nellis Air Force Base Range Complex.”

And among mil­i­tary ranges, Nellis is as mys­te­ri­ous as they come, even for the mil­i­tary avi­a­tors who’ve flown around there. (“The Box” — rumored to be where nuke test­ing goes on — noto­ri­ously lurks adja­cent to reg­u­lar oper­at­ing areas. Troll into it and you’ll lose your first-​​born not to men­tion your wings.)

So it’s lit­tle sur­prise that after orig­i­nally warm­ing to the idea, the Air Force has balked at hav­ing the project on home turf. After all, who wants a bunch of green-​​minded braini­acs from LA (where they wor­ship the devil — very un-​​USAF) arc­ing around your ‘hood, even if your ‘hood is in the mid­dle of nowhere?

Read the entire arti­cle here.

(Photo: SolarReserve artist’s ren­der­ing photo)

– Ward

From this morning’s Military​.com front page:

MALMSTROM AIR FORCE BASE, Mont. — On a wind-​​swept air base near the Missouri River, the Air Force has launched an ambi­tious plan to wean itself from for­eign oil by turn­ing to a new and unlikely source: coal. 

The Air Force wants to build at its Malmstrom base in cen­tral Montana the first piece of what it hopes will be a nation­wide net­work of facil­i­ties that would con­vert domes­tic coal into cleaner-​​burning syn­thetic fuel. 

Air Force offi­cials said the plants could help neu­tral­ize a national secu­rity threat by tap­ping into the country’s abun­dant coal reserves. And by offer­ing itself as a part­ner in the Malmstrom plant, the Air Force hopes to prod Wall Street investors — ner­vous over coal’s role in cli­mate change — to sink money into sim­i­lar plants nationwide. 

(more…)

My boy Gordon Lubold with the Christian Science Monitor has a
great story on the lat­est feat for gree­nies in Blue…

The US Air Force is exper­i­ment­ing with a syn­thetic fuel that could become a cheaper fuel-​​alternative for the entire US mil­i­tary and even com­mer­cial avi­a­tion, offi­cials say.

As the cost of a bar­rel of oil approaches $100 and US reliance on for­eign oil sources grows, the Air Force, the sin­gle biggest user of energy in the US gov­ern­ment, wants to find a cheaper alter­na­tive. Air Force offi­cials think they may have found it in a fuel that blends the nor­mal JP-​​8 fuel, cur­rently used for the military’s jet engines, with a syn­thetic fuel made from nat­ural gas and liq­uid coal.

The 50–50 blend is less expen­sive between $40 to $75 per bar­rel and it burns cleaner than nor­mal fuel. The syn­thetic fuel is pur­chased from US-​​based sup­pli­ers and then blended with the military’s JP-​​8 fuel.

“We’re mak­ing sure the Air Force is ahead of the curve so we can uti­lize this domes­tic resource instead of hav­ing to be both depen­dent on for­eign sources and send dol­lars off­shore instead of spend­ing the dol­lars here in the US,” says Kevin Billings, a deputy assis­tant sec­re­tary of the Air Force help­ing to over­see the initiative.

Last week, on the 104th anniver­sary of the Wright Brothers’ first flight, the Air Force flew a C-​​17 Globemaster III from Washington state to New Jersey, the first transcon­ti­nen­tal flight using the syn­thetic fuel. The flight was an attempt to demon­strate that pilots could fly the plane, con­sid­ered a “work­horse” of the Air Force fleet, using “syn-​​fuel” with­out degrad­ing the per­for­mance of the plane’s engine.

The ser­vice hopes to have all its planes cer­ti­fied to run on the fuel within the next five years. And by 2016, the Air Force hopes to meet half their US demand for fuel using the syn­thetic blend, first used in the 1920s, but fur­ther devel­oped dur­ing World War II. 

So can we call the Air Force “tree hug­gers?” Or are they just pen­nie pinch­ers? Whatever…seems to me their exper­i­ments could have seri­ous pos­i­tive con­se­quences for civil­ian air trav­el­ers like us.

– Christian