Can the Military Find the Answer to Alternative Energy?

DARPA, the Defense Dept. agency that helped invent the Internet, is setting its sights on cleantech

By Steve LeVine

John Ritter

Nine years ago, Robert J. Nowak, an electro-chemicals expert for the Defense Dept., learned that senior generals weren't happy with their troops' electronic gear. While the night-vision, laser, and GPS devices worked well, the batteries that powered them weighed some 25 pounds per soldier, heavy enough to hurt some of the troops.

So Nowak, who worked at the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA), the Defense Dept.'s famous research branch, solicited bids for a new device that would power a soldier's gear at a tenth of the weight and a fraction of the $100 cost of the batteries. Today, the original 18 companies that took up Nowak's challenge have been whittled down to two: Livermore (Calif.)-based UltraCell and Adaptive Materials of Ann Arbor, Mich. Their solution: small, sturdy fuel cells that can power a soldier's clutch of mobile devices for a week on a gallon or so of methanol or propane. Battle-ready versions of the fuel cells will be available this year.

DARPA regards the result as a game-changer for the military—akin to the potential shift in the automobile market from gasoline-driven to hybrid or electric cars. Before the fuel cells, "If you were in Afghanistan and had a battery, you basically had to go to another country to get it recharged," says Nowak, now retired.

U.S. consumers and businesses might someday gain as well. Both companies are testing models for the U.S. commercial market. First targets: city police forces and makers of recreational vehicles.

The big drive to create a viable alternative-energy future— by Detroit, multinationals such as IBM (IBM) and BP (BP), and Silicon Valley startups—is well-known. But there's another serious player in this sphere: the U.S. military, and especially DARPA.

Created at the height of the Cold War to bolster U.S. military technology following the Soviet Union's Sputnik satellite launch, the agency has a long history of innovation. Most famously, DARPA's researchers first linked together computers at four locations in the early 1960s to form the ARPANET, a computer network for researchers that was the core of what eventually grew into the Internet. Other breakthroughs have helped lead to the commercial development of semiconductors, GPS, and UNIX, the widely used computer operating system. There have been some serious gaffes as well, including mechanical elephants to carry troops through Vietnam's jungles and an ill-conceived search for people gifted with psychic powers. But on the whole, DARPA has a strong record of bringing ideas from the lab to the real world.

Can DARPA now score another double success by changing how both the military and civilian worlds consume and produce energy? DARPA's first goal is always to magnify the might of the U.S. armed forces. That's why Arlington (Va.)-based DARPA is devoting an estimated $100 million of its $3 billion annual budget to alternative energy. The U.S. forces deployed in Afghanistan and Iraq are voracious consumers of energy. As a result they have become perilously dependent on long, costly, and vulnerable convoys of diesel-fuel tankers. More vehicles are used to transport and guard the fuel—mostly for running generators for air conditioning, laptops, and other gear at U.S. bases and posts—than are deployed in actual combat, according to a May report by the Military Advisory Board. With the expense of convoys and guards thrown in, the cost of a gallon of fuel used at the front can range from $15 to several hundred dollars, says the same report. So the Army has set an overall goal of significantly reducing its fuel requirements. Under its plan, fuel and supply shipments to 5,000-troop brigades would be reduced from the current once every few days to just once a month.

DARPA describes itself as an incubator of long-shot technologies too risky for almost anyone else to take on. The agency operates by issuing challenges to companies that are so tough they are called "

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