The Department of Defense spends about $4 billion per year on energy. In its Annual Energy Management Report for fiscal year 2011, the DoD focuses on energy at its fixed installations, which account for 20-25 percent of its energy costs.
Facility energy is important to DoD because it manages over 500 installations in the United States and overseas, comprising nearly 300,000 buildings covering 2.3 billion square feet. The Department’s footprint is three times that of Walmart.
The Department’s facility energy strategy, designed to reduce energy costs and improve the energy security of fixed installations, has four inter-related elements:
The DoD is making progress toward its energy metering goals. EPAct 2005 Section 103 requires that by FY 2012, federal agencies meter 100 percent of electricity in buildings appropriate for metering. By the end of FY 2011, DoD had metered 75 percent of appropriate buildings for electricity. The Department installed water, steam, and natural gas meters in 53 percent of appropriate buildings. These numbers are based on the services’ divergent analyses of cost-effectiveness of meter installation. In FY 2011, DoD captured approximately 53 percent of electricity consumption, over 49 percent of natural gas consumption, 23 percent water consumption, and 14 percent of steam consumption on installed meters.
Electricity and natural gas accounted for nearly 80 percent of DoD facility energy consumption. DoD facilities also consumed fuel oil, coal, and liquefied petroleum gas (Figure 3-2). DoD’s consumption mix mirrors that of the US commercial sector, where natural gas and electricity make up more than 75 percent of the supply mix. However, the Department’s FY 2011 facility energy consumption amounts to only 1.1 percent of the total US commercial sector’s energy consumption.
