Pentagon faces major hurdles in meeting greenhouse gas targets

Despite lacking key guidance from the White House, senior Defense Department officials said Friday they expect to meet next month's deadline for agencies to file strategic sustainability performance plans. Defense's plan, however, isn't likely to provide much detail on how the department will pay for investments needed to meet new pollution targets.

Under Executive Order 13524, which President Obama signed in October 2009, federal agencies have until June 2 to file plans with the Office of Management and Budget outlining how they intend to comply with far-reaching energy conservation goals, including greenhouse gas reduction targets.

The White House in January set a governmentwide target of cutting heat-trapping emissions by 28 percent by 2020. Achieving that goal will save taxpayers between $8 billion and $11 billion in avoided energy costs through 2020, and will represent the equivalent of taking 17 million cars off the road for a single year, according to the White House. The Pentagon will play a key role in meeting the target. It manages 2.2 billion square feet in more than 300,000 facilities at 500 installations -- 10 times the square footage the General Services Administration manages.

Maureen Sullivan, director of environmental management in the Office of the Secretary of Defense, said the Pentagon has developed a draft plan, which it is circulating among the military services and other major Defense organizations.

"The White House has not yet finalized what must be in this plan, but we had to proceed" in order to meet the deadline, she said. "It's supposed to lay out your budget requirements, but unfortunately, our position is our budget process doesn't align with the executive order, so we're still struggling with how to do that."

Defense has pledged to reduce its greenhouse gas emissions 34 percent between 2008 and 2020 at U.S. installations. The goal does not include tactical vehicles or operations overseas.

A key problem is quantifying emissions. "You can't manage what you can't measure, and we are not doing a very good job of measuring [energy use] right now, because we haven't in the past metered all of our buildings," said Joe Sikes, director of facilities energy at OSD.

Sullivan and Sikes spoke at a roundtable discussion sponsored by Global Green USA, the U.S. affiliate of Green Cross International, an organization that promotes nonproliferation, clean up of global defense sites and environmental sustainability programs.

"As we've set all these goals we are discovering we're really having to measure them with macro inputs if you will and probably are not able to focus our efforts on the places that would give us the most bang for the buck," Sikes said.

To remedy that, the department is creating an enterprisewide energy data management system that uses smart meters to measure energy consumption in facilities. The plan is for the meters to feed into a centralized computer system that local commanders and senior leaders can use to better oversee and manage energy use.

Right now it takes months to collect annual energy consumption data across the department, which makes it very difficult to manage in any meaningful way, according to Sikes.

"We need to get that management system in place if we're really going to get good at doing this," he said. "It's not the most interesting part of the effort, but it's probably the most important part of the effort."

Early in 2011, the Pentagon, along with other federal agencies, must submit its first comprehensive inventory of greenhouse gas emissions to OMB for the 2010 calendar year.

"We have some challenges along the way," Sullivan said. "The White House has not issued the final guidance on how we are to count the greenhouse gasses -- what's included what's not, what numbers go into the process."

Once it's determined what data agencies will collect, they will submit the information to the Energy Department, which is developing a standard calculation for measuring emissions so agencies aren't using different methodologies.

"We have a lot of work to do between now and early 2011," Sullivan said.