Presidio of Monterey: One of the country's most energy-efficient Army bases.

Sitting on hills overlooking the bay, the Presidio of Monterey might be one of the most beautiful military installations in the United States. Grazing deer are a more common sight than squirrels on the grounds, where it’s impossible to ignore the panoramic views of the Pacific below.

Vistas and natural splendor aside, Jay Tulley, the Presidio’s energy manager, notes the garrison – as well as Army operations at the former Fort Ord – are also a national leader in energy efficiency. The Presidio has won the Secretary of the Army’s Energy Award the last four years in a row. It also won the U.S. Department of Energy’s Federal Energy Management award in 2015, making the installation the greenest in the entire country, Tulley says, as he enters a building under renovation wearing a hard hat and safety glasses.

As Congress remains unable to come up with a sensible policy to address climate change, perhaps the greatest challenge humanity has ever faced, the U.S. military has identified a changing environment as a significant risk, and is using its massive $598.5 billion budget to take action.

The Energy Independence and Security Act of 2007, best known as the law that finished off the incandescent light bulb, created the goal of a 30-percent reduction in energy consumption for the federal government by 2015, from a 2003 baseline.

In 2012, the Army also partnered with the Energy Department’s National Renewable Energy Laboratory to bring nine pilot military installations across the country to net zero energy, waste and water consumption by 2020. Fort Hunter Liggett in South County is among those nine.

Since the passage of the EISA, the Presidio has decreased its total energy consumption by 32 percent while growing facility space by 12 percent. If Army installations could achieve that reduction worldwide, there would be cost savings of more than $300 million annually, according to a Department of Energy statement.

How the Presidio of Monterey achieved that is a story of renovation, engineering and education.

Walking through a gutted barracks that was built in the 1960s, Tulley is happy to point out improvements underway, from using heated graywater from sinks and showers to heat the facility, to simply installing light switches so people can turn off the lights in common areas.

“Once the Army gets into something, they go all the way.”

“Energy consumption was not an issue when most of these buildings were constructed,” says Tulley, who is a civilian in his current capacity, but was a civil engineer as an officer in the Navy from 1999-2004. “The boilers to heat the building from half a century ago are incredibly inefficient, and in some places there was only one light switch for an entire floor.”

There have been dozens of projects at the Presidio, ranging from $20,000 to $20 million, all with the goal of engineering better energy efficiency, he says.

The barracks is among three projects under construction slated to have a LEED Silver certification, he says. Two buildings at the Presidio are already LEED Silver.

Tulley smiles as he walks into the basement of the building under renovation, giddy to show off its new state-of-the-art double boiler. Never has anyone been so excited about a heater.

“Jay’s enthusiasm about energy efficiency is infectious,” says Dino Pick, Monterey’s deputy city manager and former commandant of the Defense Language Institute at the Presidio. “He talks to every incoming class at the DLI to help change behavior.”

Tulley became the Presidio’s energy manager in 2010, and since 2009, even as rates increased, more than $2.5 million has been saved in energy costs. The garrison has reduced carbon emissions by 5,064 tons a year, the equivalent of taking 1,070 cars off the road.

The impact of Tulley’s work, on a local level, may go far beyond the climate: In Pick’s opinion, the Presidio of Monterey’s overhaul to its energy infrastructure helps secure the installation from a base closure.

While the Army has no set date for reaching its net-zero goals, Tulley says he does have a timeline for the Presidio reaching net-zero, but disclosing it would break the chain-of-command. He adds it will require solar energy to meet that goal, which brings new challenges.

“To offset anything with solar, we’re going to have to produce a lot of it,” Tulley says.

Yet the Army is trying, and in June installed solar panels on a six-acre lot on Gigling Road in the former Fort Ord that produce 1 megawatt of energy – enough to power more than 160 homes.

“Once the Army gets into something, they go all the way,” he says. “We don’t have to ask for permission from the top. If we have an idea that will save water, energy and money, we can just do it.”