Wind eliminates water cleanup power bill at JBCC

  • Published
  • By Kevin Elliott
  • AFCEC Public Affairs
TYNDALL AIR FORCE BASE, Fla --  A major environmental cleanup effort that used to cost the Air Force as much as $2.5 million per year in utility expenses is now offset completely by renewable energy.

Three wind turbines at Joint Base Cape Cod, Mass., or JBCC, power equipment used to purify groundwater that was contaminated through nearly a century of activity at the base.

The massive remediation project is led by the Air Force Civil Engineer Center, which has spent nearly two decades cleaning up the site. The project currently uses 4,300 monitoring wells, 27 miles of pipeline and nine water treatment plants to clean a dozen groundwater contamination sites, both on and off the base. This equipment requires tremendous amounts of energy that amounted to, at its peak, a $2.5 million annual power bill for the Air Force.

One reason for the expense is Massachusetts' geography.

"Massachusetts doesn't have its own natural gas resource, nor does it have hydroelectric, so it has to import a lot of those energy sources into the state," said Rose Forbes, AFCEC program manager at JBCC and originator of the plan to use renewables to power the remediation. "Our cost per kilowatt hour is one of the highest in the nation."

The energy used for the cleanup came with an environmental cost as well.

"Here we are cleaning up the groundwater, but where is that power coming from? It's coming from fossil-fueled power plants like coal-based or oil-based, and we were using that energy and indirectly polluting the air," Forbes said.

This high cost and indirect pollution problem led AFCEC to consider renewable energy, particularly wind turbines, as a solution.

It took five years, but AFCEC's idea to add a wind turbine on the installation became reality in 2009. This first turbine offset approximately 25 to 30 percent of the cleanup's power needs. It was so successful that a few years later, Forbes oversaw efforts to build two more. Today, the three turbines provide 100-percent of the power needed for environmental remediation at the site.

The contamination at JBCC stemmed from almost a century of military activity at the installation, which was previously known as the Massachusetts Military Reserve. During World War II, it was home to more than 70,000 military personnel and, at that time, people didn't understand how their actions affected the environment.

"There weren't any laws in place for the proper handling of those materials, so when you had oil or fuel that you didn't need any more, you would put it in the drains or bury it in the landfills," said Douglas Karson, AFCEC community involvement lead at JBCC.

Because of Cape Cod's sandy soil, rainwater washed pollutants into the aquifer hundreds of feet below. Once there, they were carried along with the underground current creating a "plume" of contamination that, in some cases, drifted beyond the borders of the base.

Once the contamination was detected, the Air Force took action to remediate affected areas, paying not only for the cleanup but also to transfer homeowners living near the base off of possibly polluted private wells to municipal water supplies.

Much progress has been made in cleaning up the site over the past two decades, Karson said.

"We are happy this program has managed to get to this point," he said. "We're certainly not done with the work that needs to be done here but we have the systems in place. We've taken proactive steps to protect human health, which is our number one priority. The future looks very, very good."