A solar roof for Luke Air Force Base lights the way.

By DeWitt Smith

It was a daunting demand and one herculean task. But this was exactly what Honeywell International faced when it took on the job of replacing a 144,000-square-foot roof at Luke Air Force Base in Glendale, AZ. Moreover, it wasn’t any old roof. The contract called for the installation of a solar roof.

As if the challenges of size and time weren’t enough, there were quite a few others. For one, the wiring of the solar modules called for weaving a network of wires beneath this football field–size roof. Just imagine working a loom on the ceiling or Michelangelo doing solar wiring.

Honeywell was certainly equal to the task. Even so, this was a monumental undertaking with an absolute deadline. And there wasn’t any wiggle room.

“On every project we work under a determined set of drivers, and those drivers put shape to the project,” says William Johnston, the federal program manager for Honeywell. “Sometimes the drivers are time-, economic-, or policy-driven. At Luke our predominant driver was time. There was a failed roof on the exchange building. The leaking water was a substantial safety hazard, so we received a very clear message.”

Fix It and Fix It Fast
The necessity for speed was twofold: There was money in the current fiscal budget to replace the roof, and a real dilemma was beating what’s called the “monsoon season” in Arizona.

“What normally takes a year we did in 90 days,” says Johnston.

For officials at Luke AFB, located about 10 miles northwest of Phoenix, the project was going to address an immediate and long-range need. The leaky roof was on the post exchange—the base’s version of Wal-Mart—and base officials had a lot of inventory to protect from water damage. Then there was the matter of safety, to make sure leaking water didn’t short any electrical circuits and cause any personnel injuries or additional expense.

Factoring into all this was compliance with a US Department of Energy (DOE) mandate for all government agencies and departments to reduce the consumption of power.

“President Bush issued an executive order in January requiring all federal agencies to reduce their energy consumption by 2015,” says Tom Welch, a media officer at the DOE.

This was not, however, the first order to cut energy. The federal government had been cutting consumption since 1999, when the first such executive order was issued, setting goals to 2005. The new order, which sets goals to 2015, mandates a reduction by 30% from 2003 use, and it covers all areas: gas emissions, water use, and goods and services.

The military, a major consumer of energy, was not exempt from this order. Reducing energy consumption translates directly into big savings, and the savings in this Luke Air Force Base project were going to amount to more than $21 million over a 20-year period.

“Luke Air Force Base is significant because of the DOE policy, EPACT 2005,” says Ron Blagus, Honeywell’s director of marketing in Toledo, OH. “The policy laid out plans on how to reduce energy, and each agency had its own goal for cutting power consumption. Honeywell started installing solar panels in 2003 in earnest. But Luke Air Force Base was the first Air Force Base installation Honeywell has done.”

But Luke wasn’t Honeywell’s first solar project. The company also had worked on two California projects, building solar roofs for the municipality of Cathedral City and for a school in Pleasanton.

The driving power for both projects was the major savings for the municipalities involved.

“We installed a solar array on top of the municipal parking garage. The power that’s generated from the garage is used to offset the town’s electrical bill,” says Blagus.

Besides reducing the carbon footprint, another important factor in any project is location, location, location. Both those projects were in California. Blagus says Honeywell has scouted every locale in the United States, and the best solar markets are California and Hawaii, for the obvious reason: all the sunny days.

But the value of renewable energy, whether it’s thermal or bio, is dollars.

“Renewable energy protects customers from spikes,” says Blagus. “Private-sector customers work with fixed budgets and are very vulnerable when the cost of energy spikes. Solar power comes in fixed prices.”

Without a doubt, fixed prices are a big relief to increasing power costs.

“The power markets have been volatile,” says Blagus. “There was First Energy and Enron. And the Iraq war has triggered fuel spikes. When oil goes that high, natural gas moves in sympathy to that.”

This is where conservation pays, and companies and the government have been smart and quick to catch the renewable energy wave, especially with energy rebates.

For Luke Air Force Base, the savings are sizable, amounting to $2.7 million annually. Over a 10-year period, that $27 million can be used for a lot of other projects at Luke.

Blagus offers up a factoid to underscore the point of savings in terms of emissions. Using solar is the equivalent of annually removing 57 million pounds of carbon dioxide. That’s a lot of toxins we all don’t have to breathe.

Honeywell, which considers itself primarily an energy company, is also involved with conservation and energy-efficiency projects, transportation systems, and the production of turbochargers for automobiles and trucks.

“For instance, Honeywell produces a lot of consumer products to save consumption. Thermostats are a good example. The goal is tighter control of energy use to create savings for the homeowner,” says Blagus.

But as far as having the US Air Force (USAF) as a client, William Johnston, the federal program manager at Honeywell, says that Luke Air Force Base has been a long-term client with the Minneapolis-based company.

“Luke developed a relationship with Honeywell under the Air Force regional energy savings performance contract [ESPC],” says Johnston. “It started about eight to 10 years ago. The ESPC program begins with identifying new ways to save energy. And to conserve and use those conservation dollars means spending your money elsewhere. The saying is: You can pay your utility bill, or you can pay for your capital improvements. The simplest example of conservation, at an office or at home, is to turn off the motor, boiler, and your lights. Turning off your lights saves a lot of money, and it’s never been
more true.”

A stunning example is the savings figure at Luke. If the solar roof project had not been implemented, Luke’s annual energy bill would be over $7.3 million a year instead of the $6 million annually.

But Johnston returns to how the 90-day project got off the ground. To begin with, Honeywell had a skilled staff.

“We mobilized a very large development team to meet the timeline. And we worked with a broad range of local workers and consultants and with very high-quality contractors. There were 25 people on development and for each type of retrofit,” he explains.

Not to be overlooked was Arizona Public Service Corp. The utility company was an important partner in the roof work, especially as it provided rebates to the tune of $1.5 million.

Once Again, Money Talks
“Those rebates help create renewable energy projects,” says Johnson. “The utilities contribute money, and the payoff is savings for reducing fossil-fuel use.”

The project manager for the work at Luke Air Force base was Bill Jackson, who’s been with Honeywell for 23 years.

“This was my first solar project, and I came on board with this project about September of 2005,” Jackson says. It was a huge task he was assigned to—being responsible for the delivery, commissioning, and verification of the project.

“It was my responsibility to prepare contracts, to set up all the access and all the coordination for the subcontractors, the security and safety, and then ongoing quality control and taking care of construction,” says Jackson.

If planning is 90% of any successful campaign, then Honeywell was working with a well-thought-out blueprint.

Jackson elaborates. “What we had to do was tear off a roof on an occupied building and put on a new roof,” he says. “We stripped it down to the deck, put in the new roofing, and rolled out the solar panels and all the wiring that was needed. But we always had to plan as if it were going to rain.” That meant the crews were only allowed to tear off what they could put back that night. So the crews worked around the clock, literally 24 and seven. And with the roof measuring 144,000 square feet, that meant a lot of daily patching and unpatching. The end product, of course, was the solar roof, which comes in two varieties: fixed and flexible. Honeywell used the flexible type for the Luke project.

Long before the panels were put in place, however, there was an arduous layer-by-layer process. First step was to tear off the old roof—not all at once, but section by section because of the rain factor. Then all the solar modules—in which the panels were going to be laid—had to be wired to a central location; conduits were needed for every pair of panels. The next layer was the insulation, on top of which was a half-inch layer of board, like drywall. Only when all those layers were in place could the roofing membrane be rolled down. The ultimate step was pressing the photovoltaic (PV) solar panels into that. Rolling out the new roof like an Oriental rug in a huge room was definitely the “wow” factor, as far as Jackson was concerned.

“The fact that I saw this stuff rolled up and rolled out made me step back, because you sure don’t roll up crystalline,” says Jackson. Crystalline, often used for residential projects, is the typical style involving fixed glass plates angled at the sun. The flexible, “amorphous” solar cells are made with a thin, filmlike material having a higher efficiency.

The solar roof was installed layer by layer.

“This is the new generation of solar,” says Jackson.

Understanding the development of solar is to understand this new generation of material. The development of solar started in 1860 by a French inventor, who was promoting his device to be used in the French colony of Algeria. When French officials decided it was not practical, an English bureaucrat stationed in India saw the possibilities the French could not. And so in 1878, William Adams published the book, Solar Heat: A Substitute for Fuel in Tropical Countries.

In fact, Adams went on to build an arrangement of flat mirrors to use to concentrate the sun’s rays. He figured out that he would need 72 of the 17-inch-by-10-inch mirror panels to get the temperature high enough to produce steam or ignite wood. He showed off his experiment to a lot of British officials, including an Army colonel from the Royal Engineers.

While everyone was impressed, Adams didn’t take his work any further. Even so, he left his mark. Today, according to Solarenergy.com, his design, known as the Power Tower, is recognized as the basis for today’s solar construction.

But fossil fuels were becoming cheaper, and the push for solar power went dormant until 1885, when another Frenchman put a solar collector on his roof. Although Charles Tellier was pursuing refrigeration, he also saw solar energy as the way to industrialize the French colonies in Africa.

Then a Swedish-born engineer named John Ericsson came on the solar scene with his invention of a parabolic trough, looking like what we know as a satellite dish. This is the model that was used for the evolution of solar panels.

After Ericsson’s death, Bostonian Aubrey Eneas founded the first power company, the Solar Motor Co., in 1900. And he took his experiment to sunny southern California, as a tourist attraction in Pasadena. His machine boiled water, which then became steam that powered an engine that pumped 1,400 gallons a minute.

It was impressive enough for him to sell some devices to be used in Arizona, but the machines were damaged by storms.

So Eneas folded, and another American, Henry Willsie, stepped in and developed a machine that he tried to market for irrigating the desert. Next on the scene was Frank Shuman, whose experiments led to the founding of the Sun Power Co. in Talcony, PA. That led Shuman to a British physicist and the building of a huge solar collector in Cairo, Egypt.

But world events—the outbreak of World War I—halted the last of Shuman’s experiments. So from 1860 until 1914, the early solar pioneers had a good run. But after the war, they couldn’t compete with the oil and gas companies, which had a solid lock on the digging, delivering, and infrastructure of the energy markets.

There were some developments over the next half-century, but a familiar theme emerged. None of the startup companies could get the needed funding to sustain their work. Although the crystalline panels we see today were developed in the 1950s, it wasn’t until the oil crisis in the early 1970s, created by the OPEC price-setting, that the return to serious solar development started. At that point, the need for alternative energy became critical.

And in the mid-1980s along came the amorphous roof, made of Teflon and other polymers.

That’s the 147-year back story of solar development to its current generation of equipment.

But quick cut to 2006 and to Luke Air Force Base. A very tricky part of the Honeywell project was the issue of security, which has been paramount since the September 11 attacks. Vetting all the workers was a big deal. After that, it was making sure people weren’t tripping over wires and setting off alarms.

“We had to be cautious about people being up on an Air Force base roof with lights and to make sure alarms were not on,” Jackson says.

Having worked on military bases, Jackson was familiar with all the intricacies, such as making sure the refrigerator units were working or that the crews didn’t break any lines that would cut off power to any base equipment. If 90% of any successful campaign is planning, then Jackson was on top of it.

“We took care of these contingencies during the planning process,” he says. “The fire department was on call all the time. We had to be careful about loading and taking away debris. And we were working nights. And we had to be careful about security because of all the workers coming and going day and night.”

But he had confidence in his highly qualified crews. “I knew what we needed to do regarding coordination. It was a good team effort between us all, and we made that roof flawless and seamless. The payoff was that the customer and contractors and we were happy about that,” says Jackson.

While there was no topping ceremony, Luke had its own celebration to signify the end of the job. “The ceremony was turning on the switch,” says Jackson.

In this case, the light switch was an inverter, which was needed because solar power produces DC power, and an inverter is necessary to convert that to AC power.

The success of the solar roof project has the engineers at Luke looking at another project, possibly the commissary, says Jim Fitzpatrick, the deputy base civil engineer at Luke, which serves a large military population. “We support about 5,500 active Air Force members, 1,500 reserve members and about 1,300 civilian employees,” he says. “We also have a huge retiree base here—about 100,000 military retirees who have base privileges. We’re looking to reduce our energy consumption. The roof is zero emissions energy for the base, and it’s a limitless supply. The roof produces 375 kilowatts of electricity.”

That’s enough energy to power 100 homes for a year. To show its effectiveness, the roof saves about 233 kW annually. That’s a lot of juice.

And that’s precisely the point, which is why the US Department of Defense (DOD) has been diligent about all military bases and installations saving power.

According to the DOD, the first photovoltaic (PV) system was installed for the Navy in Hawaii in 2001. But that was a small project. Bigger ones happened in California from 2002 to 2004. The Navy built a 750-kW PV roof at its base in Coronado, and the Marine Corps installed a 1.1-MW PV ground-level system in Twentynine Palms.

But the USAF leads the way as far as being a consumer. In fact, it’s the third-largest consumer of renewable energy in the world, according to Garland Scott, the major command energy manager, based in San Antonio, TX.

“We have oversight for 13 bases, and Luke is one of the 13 in our jurisdiction,” Scott says. “We drive the bigger program here to encourage the bases to bring projects to the ESCOs [energy service companies]. At Luke, we got a new roof, and it gave us solar electric power as required by EPACT05, signed by President Bush in 2005.”

Once again, the point of saving money and energy is made by Scott.

“The bottom line is we want to replicate this example where we can because it’s so cost-effective,” says Scott.

Of course, many of the installations are in the West—California, Arizona, and Nevada—where solar is better because of the many clear days.

He says that Nellis Air Force Base, which is in the Las Vegas area, has an 18-MW PV array.

“This is just to say that the Air Force is onboard with renewable energy, and it’s very important to the Air Force,” says Scott.

DeWitt Smith is a journalist and features writer living in Ojai, CA.

DE - September/October 2007