Reducing a sky high energy bill

You think your energy bill is high. Pentagon facilities ate up about $3.4 billion of energy in fiscal year 2007, notes a new report on energy efficiency opportunities from the Center for American Progress.

A lot of that energy was consumed by the Air Force and comes in the form of petroleum products that could come from not so friendly places, undermining the national security the service is there to protect in the first place.

But a hangar at the Bob Hope Airport in Burbank, Calif., may provide some hope for the service, as it were. According to CAP, a left-leaning think tank, the Air Force could reduce its energy consumption by re-designing 11 of its hangars in particularly sunny locales to be more like Hangar 25, the private aviation facility constructed to be greener than your typical aircraft hangar.

The model hangar uses solar panels to get much of its electricity. It cost a bit more to build -- $276 per square foot versus the $180-$208 the Air Force typically spends to construct its hangars – but the retrofitting would pay for itself in about 10 months in energy savings, CAP states in the report.

The report recommends that the Defense Department and the Energy Department get together to create a “clean-energy task force” to examine this and other approaches to lowering the Pentagon’s energy bill.

You can view the report here