The US Navy has com­mit­ted to reduce its petro­leum use by 50% by 2020 and to sail a Great Green Fleet in 2016. The Air Force set a tar­get of acquir­ing “50% of domes­tic avi­a­tion fuel require­ments via alter­na­tive fuel blends by 2016.” The Air Force and the Army set the goal of increas­ing their “use of renew­able energy to 25% by 2025.” Col­leagues at the Army recently stood up an energy task force to facil­i­tate renew­able energy devel­op­ment on Army bases using third party finance, and the Marines are using solar pan­els and bat­tery packs at for­ward oper­at­ing bases in Afghanistan. It is an honor and a priv­i­lege to col­lab­o­rate with many of the fine peo­ple who are lead­ing this charge.

Thank you to ACORE and to the Lead­er­ship Forum folks for invit­ing me to par­tic­i­pate in the recent U.S. Mil­i­tary and Renew­able Energy Indus­try Forum and the Clean Defense Sum­mit.

I gave the crowd an overview of the renew­able fuels and avi­a­tion work that I am doing at the Car­bon War Room dur­ing the Giga­ton Awards Cer­e­mony in Dur­ban, South Africa in Decem­ber. I talked about the impor­tance of mov­ing away from fos­sil fuels despite the dif­fi­cul­ties in shift­ing sup­ply chains and pro­cure­ment pro­ce­dures, and renew­able avi­a­tion fuels as a means to get the entire advanced renew­able fuels indus­try off the ground (no pun intended). This was a pre­view to the launch of our beta renewablejetfuels.org web­site and the Else­vier beta renew­able fuels data­base a few days later.

Photo pro­vided by the US Navy

I helped out with this piece by Marketplace’s Scott Tong that aired on August 31st, 2011. Mil­i­tary fund­ing spurs clean-tech innovation

“As the Pen­ta­gon looks to cut oil use, its efforts are giv­ing a boost to start-up tech­nol­ogy that could one day go mainstream.”

SUZANNE HUNT: Some­one has to pay for those expen­sive test batches. It’s very sim­i­lar to what the mil­i­tary did with cell phones and com­puter chips. They were the ones that bought the big, clunky, super expen­sive first model.

And they may play a big cul­tural role in the new energy econ­omy. Hunt says just as the mil­i­tary was an early insti­tu­tion to deseg­re­gate — sol­diers, sailors, Marines and air­men are now early adopters of renewables.

HUNT: They bring that knowl­edge and that expe­ri­ence back to their com­mu­ni­ties. And they tend not to be the same com­mu­ni­ties as one often things of — Sil­i­con Val­ley, Man­hat­tan — what­ever peo­ple think of with clean tech.

As for alter­na­tive fuels, the mil­i­tary has a lot rid­ing on it. The Air Force, Navy and Marines all hope to cut their fos­sil fuel use in half. But, is the tech­nol­ogy ready? Is now the right time to bet on it?

Photo taken from Forbes article

Forbes Magazine’s Todd Woody quoted me and other col­leagues in his August 08, 2011 “Jet Green” arti­cle. Note to self, any­thing you say to a reporter could end up in print!

Algae is the great green hope for jet fuels. “The­o­ret­i­cally, algae has incred­i­ble pro­duc­tion capac­ity,” says Suzanne Hunt, senior advi­sor to the Car­bon War Room, a group cofounded by Virgin’s Richard Bran­son that is work­ing with air­lines and bio­fuel pro­duc­ers to jump-start the indus­try. “Camelina plants and all the other plants that grow on land have to put all this energy into fight­ing grav­ity and into roots and fruits and flow­ers. Algae just floats and grows.“

Suzanne and David will be co-hosting two impor­tant work­ing tracks at the Car­bon War Room’s most sig­nif­i­cant annual event: the Cre­at­ing Cli­mate Wealth Sum­mit.  Suzanne will con­vene renew­able avi­a­tion fuel lead­ers to dis­cuss impor­tant next steps to the sus­tain­able com­mer­cial­iza­tion of renew­able avi­a­tion fuels.  David Muyres will be co-hosting a new track this year focused on Per­sonal Trans­porta­tion.  If we are to reach giga­ton car­bon reduc­tion lev­els we must look at this topic more broadly: beyond pol­icy and tech­nol­ogy alone.

On April 15th, Dave Muyres addressed the Amer­i­can Cham­ber of Com­merce regard­ing the role of inno­va­tion in the future of the car indus­try. While in Shang­hai he also pre­sented at the Inte­ri­or­mo­tives Con­fer­ence to a group of 400 global design lead­ers about Design and the Future of the Trans­porta­tion Indus­try on April 17th. On April 19 and 20 he attended the Shang­hai AutoShow press days, Asia’s largest autoshow and blog­ging about chang­ing con­sumer behav­ior. In Feb­ru­ary 2011, at the invi­ta­tion of IDSA, Dave addressed a group of 300 design enthu­si­asts about the Role of the Indus­trial Designer, Sus­tain­abil­ity and the Future of How We Move Around the Planet. This event was hosted by Design West Michi­gan and held at Kendall College.

The IDSA Michi­gan con­fer­ence, titled Expand­ing the Fron­tiers, will focus on how to trans­form the car indus­try into a robust provider of trans­porta­tion sys­tem solu­tions.  Dave will dis­cuss the key role of design in guid­ing and ener­giz­ing this crit­i­cal trans­for­ma­tion.  The con­fer­ence will take place on Sep­tem­ber 17th, 2010 at Michi­gan State Uni­ver­sity in Troy, MI.  For more infor­ma­tion on the com­plete event, go to their web­site.

It is esti­mated that by the year 2050, eighty per­cent of the world’s pop­u­la­tion will live in cities. In addi­tion, the Urban Land Insti­tute pre­dicts that eighty per­cent of cur­rent build­ing stock in the US will still be in use in the year 2050. A series of impres­sive efforts are under­way to mobi­lize the financ­ing and tech­nolo­gies to retro­fit large build­ings, but nearly half of the build­ing stock in Amer­ica is small-medium sized.

Liv­ing City Block is an ini­tia­tive to help cities redesign and retro­fit inef­fi­cient and/or aging build­ings at the block scale and is is com­mit­ted to work with com­mu­ni­ties to cre­ate resource hyper-efficient, eco­nom­i­cally sus­tain­able and health­ier and more liv­able neigh­bor­hoods. Aggre­ga­tion of square footage at the block scale enables economies of scale for small-medium sized build­ings and lends the abil­ity to work with local gov­ern­ments to imple­ment not just trans­for­ma­tive energy solu­tions, but also to rework water, waste, health­ier streets and other block-scale issues.

Liv­ing City Block was born at the Rocky Moun­tain Insti­tute and was launched ear­lier this year by Llewellyn Wells.
The ini­tial pilot project is under­way in lower down­town Den­ver that will pro­duce a frame­work that can be exported and adapted in sis­ter cities. Already we are in con­ver­sa­tions with key poten­tial part­ners in Boston, Wash­ing­ton DC, and Santa Marta (Colombia).