ExFOB Memories: Why the U.S. military has long been a clean energy leader

I first became aware of the U.S. military’s leadership on clean energy in 2011, when I was the energy reporter at The Desert Sun in Palm Springs and was invited to the Marine Corps Air Ground Combat Center in 29 Palms for its Experimental Forward Operating Base exercise.

The 29 Palms base covers 1,100 square miles in the high desert — the largest Marine base in the United States — and was then the main training center for all troops headed to Afghanistan. It was where they learned to fight in extreme desert conditions, hot and cold. 

ExFOB was a week-long exercise allowing the Marines and U.S. Army personnel to test out different clean technologies, like folding or roll-up solar panels and solar-powered tents, that could be used at forward, or frontline, military bases (pictured above). Powering these facilities with fossil fuels meant transporting barrels of diesel or gasoline over roads often boobytrapped with improvised explosive devices — IEDs — the roadside bombs that killed hundreds of U.S. troops over the course of the war.

Going solar was a national security priority to save taxpayer dollars and American lives, I was told by officers providing an ExFOB overview for invited media. 

Now the thing about the Marines is that they are super mission-oriented — perhaps more so than other branches of the U.S. military. If they define anything, such as deploying solar panels or energy-efficient technologies, as part of their mission, you need to stand back and stay out of their way — like immediately. 

As one officer said, “The Marines will execute – smartly and ahead of schedule.”

My experiences at 29 Palms came to mind as I tried to make sense of President Donald Trump’s Feb. 11 executive order calling on the Department of War to prioritize powering military bases and “other mission-critical facilities” with coal-fired power.

DOW should procure coal-fired generation via long-term contracts, the order says, to ensure “that military installations, command centers, and defense-industrial bases remain fully powered under all conditions — including natural disasters or wartime contingencies.”

OK, let’s everyone take a few deep, calming breaths here before we break down everything that is wrong with this executive order in general and the above sentence in particular.

First, ensuring military bases are connected to the grid and powered by coal will not ensure secure baseload power in all situations, especially natural disasters and wartime contingencies. Electricity delivered by poles and wires is particularly vulnerable to storms, wildfires or enemy attacks, both physical and cyber.

It doesn’t matter how dispatchable or firm your electricity is if you can’t get it to the military base or mission-critical facility depending on that power to bolster national security.

The U.S. military figured this out over a decade ago and since then has been testing and investing in microgrids, often combining solar and energy storage. These smaller, flexible systems can be “islanded” — that is, operate off-grid — to keep power flowing even when the poles and wires go down. 

According to research from Industrial Info Resources, the military had 40 clean energy microgrids online as of 2025, with 35 more in development. The 2035 goal had been 130 microgrids. 

The current administration does not exactly advertise the military’s use of clean power, so the information I could find online was dated, and the sources of specific figures were hard to pin down. 

A 2023 article in Renewable Energy Magazine reported that “the Army currently has 950 renewable energy projects that supply it with 480 megawatts of power.”

Another article from the Planetary Security Initiative noted that as of 2022, about 45% of the electric power on U.S. military bases came from renewables, mostly wind and solar.

I emailed the DOW press office to ask if they could confirm or update any of these numbers, but as I get ready to publish, have yet to receive a response. 

Whether the figures are 100% up to date and accurate, they still tell a story. The U.S. military has, at least until recently, seen climate change as a serious threat to national security and actively pursued clean technologies as one way to mitigate its impacts. Given that the armed services are not supposed to be politically driven, the impetus here has never been to advance a “radical” agenda or “green scam”; it’s been science, national security and common sense. 

The scam here, if there is one, is Trump’s ongoing and highly dubious efforts to rebrand coal as “beautiful” and “clean.” Beauty being in the eye of the beholder, coal may well be beautiful to the president and others. But burning coal to generate electricity is not and never has been clean.

All forms of electricity generation have environmental impacts, and coal’s are particularly heavy and well-documented. An estimated one in 10 coal miners in the U.S. have contracted black lung disease — official name, pneumoconiosis — and according to a 2025 article in The New York Times, it is no longer an “old man’s disease,” the result of years spent underground. 

Miners are being diagnosed at younger ages, with severe cases of the disease, and all at rates not seen since the 1970s.

According to the most recent figures from the Environmental Protection Agency — from 2022 — coal accounted for 20% of U.S. power generation but 55% of the industry’s carbon dioxide emissions. Coal emits about twice the CO₂ of natural gas (which does not mean that natural gas is “clean” either).

Significantly, the executive order does not even go through the motions of requiring the military to ensure that any emissions from the coal-fired power it buys be abated; that is, captured and stored underground. Carbon capture and storage is still expensive and not widely available, and its long-term impacts are unknown.

Tracking emissions from coal or any other fuel is going to be increasingly difficult following EPA Feb. 12 rollback of the endangerment finding, the 2009 rule that classified GHG emissions as a threat to human health. The agency has not published what was an annual inventory of U.S. GHG emissions since April of 2024.

Finally, what is particularly not beautiful about coal is its potential impact on electricity rates. At this point, coal-fired power is more expensive than almost any other form of generation. It is worth noting that a 2025 EIA report on the comparative cost of different forms of electric power generation in the U.S. does not even include coal, and solar and wind were consistently cheaper than natural gas.

What neither Trump nor his executive order can do is roll back the clean energy already on the ground at U.S. military bases like 29 Palms. Back in 2011, my experience at ExFOB only got me more curious about green energy at the base, and I was soon back for a full tour of the Marines’ solar, combined heat and power generation and recycling efforts.

At that point, the base had one major solar installation and was putting solar on parking canopies and building rooftops. Plus, all new buildings were LEED certified — that is, built with high energy-efficiency standards developed by the U.S. Green Building Council. (LEED stands for Leadership in Energy and Environmental Design.)

The Marines were particularly proud of the base’s cogeneration plants — natural gas generators that captured waste heat to provide heating, cooling and hot water. 

According to a 2014 brochure, 29 Palms then led the Marine Corps in green energy production. Total solar generation at the base was 5.4 megawatts, including one installation with 8,706 panels. Total annual output was more than 7 million kilowatt-hours, or 7 gigawatt-hours.

The Marines were planning to add another 2.6 MW of solar and a microgrid to “integrate the installation’s renewable and cogeneration resources with other sources of electricity to provide energy at the lowest cost and to help ensure energy security and efficiency” at the base. 

I have no doubt the Marines at 29 Palms met or more likely exceeded those 2014 goals, but, beyond ExFOB, the coolest thing at the base was its recycling facility. The Marines recycled everything. I mean, it wasn’t only the normal stuff you recycle — food waste, bottles or paper — it was office equipment, bunk bed frames and shelving from barracks, and brass ammunition shells from firing ranges, hammered and then melted down. 

The standard souvenirs given to visitors at the recycling center were two small balls of hammered down and recycled brass; so you could say you had brass balls from the Marines. Mine still sit on my desk.