The United States has hundreds of military installations on domestic soil alone and is considered responsible for the most energy consumption from a single source in the nation. As the American electrical grid shifts toward renewable energy, it’s expected that the Armed Forces would do the same — and a good number already have solar and storage on base. Keeping the lights on is especially important to the military, and solar has proven to be a viable means to do so.







There is over 150MW installed at 3 bases around Pensacola, FL- likely the biggest projects on military bases.
There have been two trends in the last 10 years. What can be considered a ‘conservative’ entity, the military is moving towards all electric and hybrids. some special programs have been around for almost 20 years. UQM Technologies was heavily involved in military electrification in the late 1980’s. Hybrids with small diesel engines, battery packs were being tested in field conditions as fuel efficiency and the ability to set up a “mobile” generation station any where one of these vehicles was deployed. At that time the UQM Technology could be used as a drive motor, hybrid drive or stand alone generator with one device.
Then about 10 years ago, the news was getting stories of large scale solar PV installations in Nevada, Florida and California. Energy storage, is now becoming the thing on military bases. Your military is only as good as the intel, the troops receive. Keeping critical functions like RADAR, GPS, Radio, Satellite communications up is necessary to survive in hostile territory. Sooner or later, it will be all solar PV military sites, mostly electric operation and autonomous robotic pack mules, perhaps even robotic autonomous soldiers going into hostile environments first. I keep getting a flashback to the movie ‘Blackhawk down’. Now we have technology from the DARPA challenge and companies like Boston Dynamics building autonomous robotics units. The irony of technology, solar PV powered life, solar PV powered war.