I'm highly amused by this: the Pentagon wants less reliance on fossil fuels. And if there is any truism in American politics, it's that what the Pentagon wants, the Pentagon gets. This might be the perfect "back door" crucible to develop alternative energy resources -- while the government has dithered for 40+ years on alternative energies, held captive to Big Oil and Big Coal, the Pentagon implementing alternative energies will get the tech out there and field-tested and will have civilian applications, and the same politicians who would have been hell-bent on stalling/stonewalling/stopping its implementation at home will be scurrying to placate the Pentagon on this. Bahah!
What'll be especially nice is it'll emphasize portability and decentralization, which'll work nicely to help move beyond the centralization model that's dominated alternative energy so far. The civilian sector, the industrial component, will not want that kind of decentralization in the power grid, because it'll mean energy independence on all sorts of people, but that's exactly what makes this kind of tech so awesome. Eat it, Big Coal and Big Oil.
