Cryptogon has some Eestor tinfoil - Did Crashed Lockheed Martin HALE-D Airship Have EEStor Systems On Board?.

If you’re not familiar with the EEStor story, I’ve done several posts on it over the years.

With regard to this HALE-D airship crash, let’s first note Lockheed Martin’s links to EEStor. This is from 2008: Lockheed Martin to Use EEstor’s Ultracapacitors for Military and Homeland Security Applications:

Lockheed Martin has signed an exclusive international rights agreement to integrate and market Electrical Energy Storage Units (EESU) from EEStor, Inc., for military and homeland security applications. Specific terms of the agreement were not disclosed.

In the years since then, virtually no EEStor news has come out.

According to Global Security, “The HALE-D is powered by thin-film solar cells and rechargeable lithium ion polymer batteries.”

However, pay close attention to what Joe Myers, Harrison County Sheriff, says in this video starting at 1 minute 37 seconds:

You know it’s top secret through the military, but the batteries was a big thing.[sic] They didn’t want anybody going around that…uh aircraft once it was down. And they wanted us to provide security.

“The batteries was a big thing…”

Lockheed Martin was concerned about the public finding out about lithium ion polymer batteries, commonly used in remote controlled toys, mp3 players and portable computers?

The Climate Spectator has an article on Lockheed Martin's interest in renewable energy sources - Green energy meets military might.

The world’s biggest economy, the United States, may be spurning the opportunity to develop coherent climate change and energy policies, but the world’s biggest individual consumer of energy, the US Department of Defence, is certainly not.

The world of climate change policies is full of unlikely contradictions. In Australia, a Labor/Green coalition pushes for a market-based system to reduce emissions while the small government Tories argue for increased government intervention. In the US, the government finds itself incapable of providing the market signals that could unleash the forces of innovation, so the task of driving innovation and providing the budgets to bridge the path to commercialisation has fallen to its largest subsidiary, the United States Armed Forces.

Ambitious renewable energy policies are usually criticised for being both costly and risky, but the US Army, Navy and Air Force have a counter-intuitive view: they have developed the most ambitious policies anywhere in the world because they want to cut their costs and increase their security. The US Navy plans to replace 50 per cent of its petroleum consumption with alternative fuels by 2015, and wants half its overall energy consumption to be sourced from alternatives by 2020. The US Air Force wants to wants to source 50 per cent of its jet fuel from alternative fuels by 2016, while the US Army wants to sources 25 per cent of its energy needs from renewable sources by 2025.

US Navy secretary Ray Mabus recently said its pro-active position shouldn’t be a surpise, having helped pioneer the switch from from sail to coal for powering its ships in the mid-19th century, then the switch from coal to oil, and later from oil to nuclear power. It recently launched the first hybrid electric ship, dubbed the Prius of the sea.

In an environment where so many dismiss renewables as being either too hard or too hard or too expensive, it is refreshing to hear the Navy’s ambition. “Every time there were naysayers, who said you’re trading one form of proven, available energy for another that is expensive and not well known, and you shouldn’t do it,” Mabus told a conference in New York last month. “Every single time, those naysayers have been proved absolutely wrong, and they’ll be proved wrong this time.”

These mandates have certainly grabbed the attention of the US armed forces' principal contractors, such as Lockheed Martin, which has devoted much of the resources of its 140,000 engineers and scientists on to the energy sector. “We’ve been pretty good at getting people into space, make airplanes that fly upside down and backwards, and making fast ships. Now we’re applying those resources to energy,” says Christopher Myer, Lockheed Martin’s vice president in international business and energy markets, who is in Melbourne attending Clean Energy Week.

Some of the ideas it is pursuing are highly experimental. It recently won a $US400 million contract to develop high altitude blimps that are powered by flexible solar panels and fuel cells. It has also been mandated by the US Navy to develop a power plant using ocean thermal energy conversion (OTEC), where cold water is piped from the ocean’s depths and the energy generated from the temperature differential with the warm surface water is harnessed to drive a conventional rankine cycle turbine. Some say such technology has the potential to provide one third of the world’s energy needs.

In any case, the Navy is keen to develop 24/7 energy sources. Hawaii currently relies on imported diesel for 96 per cent of its energy requirements, exporting more than $6 billion a year to fund those imports. Will OTEC be cheaper? “Not initially,” says Myers. “But over the long run, yes.”

The Navy’s huge bases at Guam and the Marshall Islands rely almost exclusively on burning oil. In Guam, it burns more than 10,600 barrels of oil a day, and wants 80MW of renewable energy installed within two years. On the Marshall Islands, it imports 30 per cent more oil, and pays nearly 40c/kWh for its energy needs – more than the cost of virtually any renewable source. Mabus said recently that every rise of $1 a barrel in the price of oil adds $30 million to its fuel bill. He says the single hybrid electric ship will save $250 million in fuel costs over the lifetime of the ship. The scale of its mandate is credited with a 50 per cent fall in the price of biofuels in 2010.

Lockheed Martin has also teamed up with several different wave and tidal companies to explore ocean energy sources, including for remote sensor buoys, and is investing heavily in alternative fuels, including algae and synthetics.

It is looking at the development of solar and fuel cell technologies for army bases, as well as generating energy from waste materials from those bases. It is a question of both energy security and personell security – most losses of life in the theatre of war occur along fuel supply lines. Lockheed also has contracts to develop woody biomass power plants, and others fueled by medical waste from army and veteran hospitals. And it is also investing heavily in concentrating solar thermal, applying its engineering expertise to look at how production processes can be improved to lower costs.

Earth2tech has a post on Lockheed-Martin's interest in expanding from defence into the clean energy industry - Why Lockheed Martin Wants to Be In The Clean Energy Biz.

Lockheed Martin is looking to take its skills in managing, integrating and financing large engineering projects and apply them to the emerging clean energy and energy efficiency businesses. As clean energy projects move from demo size to large commercial scale (1 GW or more), a company like Lockheed Martin will start to attract interest from utilities that want to work with a large player that can streamline the process. For example Christopher D. Myers, VP of Solar Energy Programs for Lockheed Martin, said there hasn’t been a lot of upfront systems engineering or modeling systems for an industry like solar thermal. We can deliver a project on time, and on budget, said Myers, in an industry that has been dominated by a lot of small and VC backed companies.

One area that’s particularly attractive to Lockheed Martin is the smart grid. Like Boeing is doing, Lockheed can use its background in defense and security systems to appeal to utilities’ desire for robust security technology. Kenneth D. Van Meter, a principal within Lockheed Martin’s Enterprise Integration Group, said that Lockheed can offer the four things that utilities want: scalability, interoperability, security and situational awareness.

Lockheed is already working with a dozen utilities on security and integration, said Meter. With American Electric Power, for example, he said Lockheed is working on the world’s first cyber security grid operations center. That grid security center will accumulate data from real time sources and help mitigate possible threats. The center “will change in a material way security of the electric grid,” said Meter.

Lockheed Martin has been working in bits and pieces in the energy sector for awhile. It has solar thermal and solar PV demo plants in Moorestown, New Jersey, and has had its ocean thermal energy conversion project in Hawaii for years. Lockheed Martin is now taking a more aggressive approach and expanding its portfolio to offer customers a range of technologies. For example, ocean thermal conversion technology works well where wave power buoys don’t, so we can offer something like that as a package, said Kohlhaas.

Beyond these specific energy verticals, Lockheed Martin sees energy as a fundamental global opportunity. Kohlhaas said that energy could be the next transformative initiative that could fundamentally change the global economy and the workforce. But even in Lockheed Martin’s more traditional defense business, energy is rising as an important issue. Soldiers burdened with less fuel weight are more secure, and having troops independent from fuel lines (which can commonly be targets) can increase troop security, too. Lockheed has been working with stealthy ultracacitor firm EEStor to embed the startup’s Electric Energy Storage Units (EESUs) into Lockheed’s military applications.

And there’s also the fact that the defense industry has faced budget cuts and constraints from the economy. Lockheed’s future growth has to come from somewhere, and the company sees clean energy and energy efficiency as a reasonable crossover.

EcoGeek reports that Lockheed Martin is looking to build a wave power facility off the US west coast - Lockheed Martin to Build Wave Farm .

Like Exxon, Lockheed Martin Corp. is not usually associated with environmental friendliness, but it can now be counted as another large corporation that has discovered that adding some green projects to their portfolio is both good for the planet and their bottom line.

Lockheed is partnering with wave power company Ocean Power Technologies to develop a utility-scale project off the coast of California or Oregon. Lockheed will construct and run the project while Ocean Power will provide its Powerbuoy generators.

This is the second big partnership for Ocean Power, which recently announced a contract with the Navy to harness wave energy for coastal military bases. The company already has Powerbuoys deployed in Hawaii, Spain and New Jersey, but Spain is its only commercial project to date. The Lockheed-Ocean Power project would be the first commercial wave farm in the U.S. A project planned for the California coast by Finavera Renewables is no longer being developed.

Lockheed is making a smart investment by getting into wave power. Oceans are considered to be one of the most powerful sources of energy on earth and studies have shown that harnessing that energy could power the world twice over.

The New York Times has a report on new funding for work on OTEC by Lockheed Martin (better than paying them to build weapons, says I) - Lockheed Set to Tap Ocean Thermal Energy With DOE Funds (via OTEC News).

The world’s oceans are an energetic place, and military-industrial giant Lockheed Martin said today it has been granted $1.2 million by the Department of Energy to demonstrate that ocean thermal energy conversion is possible. Although the ocean often doesn’t feel very warm, the temperature gradient between the warm, sun-soaked surface and the frigid, dark depths provides enough of a differential to run a heat engine. The idea has been kicking around for over a century but has never been scaled. Lockheed Martin helped build the largest ocean thermal energy conversion system to date back in the 80s, but it only ever produced 50,000 watts, or .05 megawatts.

For those who aren’t so up on their thermodynamics, whenever you have a temperature gradient, there is accessible energy to be had. Ocean thermal energy conversion (OTEC) works best when there’s a temperature difference of at least 20 degrees Celsius. Waters of two different temperatures are pumped through a heat exchanger which vaporizes and then condenses the water, producing energetic steam in the process.

Lockheed will work on the problem of getting that cold, deep water up to the surface. The small-scale OTEC system Lockheed had previously help design in Hawaii used a polyethylene pipe that was 2,150 feet long and 2 feet in diameter to draw up cold water. Under terms of the grant, Lockheed will demonstrate cold water pipe fabrication using modern fiberglass and low-cost composite material manufacturing methods.

Harnessing ocean thermal energy is likely farther out than both wave and tidal energy systems. But if scaled, it could provide consistent base-load energy and help tropical islands, like Hawaii, attain energy independence, a serious issue in a world of petropolitics.