Adam called it the Military-Environmental Complex where renewable energy would make power projection easier. Where once British projection was designed around collier stations such as the Falklands and more recently in Iraq where US convoys vulnerability to IEDs centered around the need to move fuel and food by road; the use of solar would eliminate the need to support these high risk and expensive operations. As adam noted;

Militaries depend on supply lines and logistical trains, and far from being an exception the modern American military has quite a high tail:teeth ratio, around 10:1 as I recall. A lot of this is just moving oil around.

Former General Wesley Clark makes a similar argument based on the issues of:

U.S. military operations represent the largest consumer of all forms of energy globally. Our troops in Afghanistan pay the equivalent of $400 per gallon of fossil fuel when security, transportation and mortality costs are tallied up, with the largest expense being battlefield electricity generation.

On the way to work each morning I pass First Solar which is one of the new startups that is helping the price of solar energy drop radically in the last few years. More recently ASU has been covering their open parking lots with solar panels for energy. It must be cheap if a university is coating complete lots at a time with panels. Quiggin notes:

Meanwhile, the cost of PV has already fallen well below that of nuclear and is set to fall further. The average retail price of solar cells as monitored by the Solarbuzz group fell from $3.50/watt to $2.43/watt over the course of the year, and a decline to prices below $2.00/watt seems inevitable. For large-scale installations, prices below $1.00/watt are now common.

In some locations, PV has reached grid parity, the cost at which it is competitive with coal or gas-fired generation. More generally, it is now evident that, given a carbon price of $50/ton, which would raise the price of coal-fired power by 5c/kWh, solar PV will be cost-competitive in most locations.

Because of the size of funding the US Military has access to, it is usually at the forefront of any technological change. It is likely that new applications of cheap solar will be driven by the US Military's projection needs.

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