Energy Conservation and the Marine Corps

One of the questions that came from my last blog post was why we kept the A/C on so strong in our room, as it wastes electricity and would make it more difficult to adjust to the climate here. It’s a perfectly fair question, although we haven’t had it on quite so strong recently; we’ve been putting it on fan vice A/C for the past few nights. Yesterday morning when I woke up, it was actually cooler outside than it was inside the room. In fact, it’s supposed to be below 100 for four days in a row, starting yesterday. You wouldn’t think it would make that much of a difference, but I have indeed gotten to the point where there’s a day in the high 90s and I think it feels like a nice day. This is how I know that I’ve gotten acclimatized.

Regarding energy conservation. In case you haven’t figured out, fighting a war is not exactly environmentally friendly. This includes energy use. For example, when we go outside the wire, like we did Monday and Tuesday, we didn’t turn our vehicles off, even though they were sitting in the same place all day long. There’s a couple reasons for this. First is that unless you have a purpose for being outside the vehicle, such as working on a project, you stay inside the vehicle and keep the doors closed. This is because the vehicle’s armor does a much better job of protecting you than your PPE, or personal protective equipment. So one of the reasons you leave the vehicle running so that the personnel inside don’t cook.

There are other reasons, too: the vehicle needs to be powered for all the comm and BFT (Blue Force Tracker, the program that shows where all the nearby friendly units are) to work, you need to be able to go somewhere at a moment’s notice, and you don’t have to worry about the vehicle not turning back on if you never turn it off. What all this amounts to is that for 8-10 hours, I was “wasting” a lot of fuel. But what would have happened if we had been attacked? It was highly unlikely—our project was literally right underneath the guard towers on base—but it was a possibility we had to be prepared for. We would have needed to maneuver the vehicles to keep the threat away from the personnel working on the ground; that time it would have taken to start the vehicle could have made a big difference.

That’s a pretty unlikely scenario; the more likely scenario is that one of the work trucks we took out there, such as the dump truck or the trailer to haul the excavator, wouldn’t have wanted to re-start. That would have also left us unable to pick up and move at a moment’s notice if we had wanted to. So fuel consumption is not typically something we worry about.

As far as electricity goes, we don’t worry too much about conservation—water conservation is a bigger consideration. Our electricity comes from generators (ie fuel) and “shore power”, which is a power grid here on camp. I don’t know where the electricity is generated, but conservation is not something that is stressed. We are encouraged to conserve as much water as we can—turn the water off when you’re soaping up in the shower, don’t leave it running while you brush your teeth, etc.

This is not to say that the Marine Corps does not discuss energy conservation. It’s actually a hot topic in the Marine Corps stateside right now, as it’s an important issue to our Commandant. The Marine Corps actually had its first building LEED certified last year. I forget exactly what LEED stands for (you can probably google it), but it’s an organization that certifies that buildings are energy efficient. And HQMC is looking at ways to make bases and operation state-side more energy efficient. But here in theater…we haven’t gotten there yet.

I hope that makes sense. Any questions—just ask! And thanks for the e-mails. They were a huge morale boost in the middle of this week that I needed.