IF any company embodies the military and technological might of the United States it is Lockheed Martin. The world’s biggest defence contractor provides the scientific and manufacturing know-how for America’s high-tech arsenal, making the futuris-tic F-22 and F-35 fighters and the Hercules transport plane. It also designs atomic bombs.

Now, Lockheed is looking to beat swords into not ploughshares but solar farms. For years, Bob Stevens, its chairman, has pushed his executives to chase nonmilitary business. Lockheed runs the British census, for example, and is one of the companies behind the automation of Royal Mail’s processing of post. Now he is urging Lockheed into alternative energy and other green opportunities.

In an interview at last week’s Paris air show, Stevens sounded more like an environmental campaigner than an executive at the heart of the military-indus-trial complex.

“There is increasing evidence of the fragility of the the planet’s environment,” he said. “This throws up issues that aren’t national, they are global. Saving energy and using resources more efficiently will make for a better economy.”

Two years ago, at Stevens’s insistence, Lockheed set out goals to reduce waste, water consumption and carbon emissions by 25% before 2012.

Lockheed’s traditional activities have equipped it with expertise that can be put to work in new environmental businesses. It made the solar panels that have powered satellites and manned craft since America’s space programme began in the 1950s. In the process, it has developed power-management technology that can be applied to civilian electricity grids.

“Managing electrical power in space is vital. You have to get it right and it has to be reliable, because there aren’t going to be many visits from a repairman,” said Stevens. The group is now selling this grid-management expertise to American power companies, who need to cope with the problems posed by the intermittent supply from renewable-energy sources, such as wind and solar.

Lockheed is also heavily involved in America’s military nuclear programmes, giving it knowledge it thinks it can use on renascent civilian nuclear-power schemes. It is understood to be negotiating to become a supplier to General Electric and Westinghouse, the two companies that dominate nuclear-plant construction, although Lockheed will not confirm that talks are taking place.

As well as managing green power, Lockheed plans to generate it. Its most exciting - and riskiest - project is the revival of a technology it first worked on with another large American company, Bechtel, in the early 1970s during the first oil shock. Its scientists are working on a plan to harness the difference in temperature between the surface of the sea and the ocean depths to generate electricity.

The concept predates even Lockheed’s involvement. French physicist Jacques-Arsène d’Arsonval came up with a plan to tap the ocean’s energy in the late 1800s, and a small plant was built in Cuba before the second world war.

The basic idea is simple. Warm water at the surface of the ocean is used to heat a liquid with a low boiling point, such as ammonia. The evaporating ammonia gas drives a turbine, generating electricity, and is then cooled back to a liquid by very cold water pumped up from the depths of the ocean. Other versions of the plant include desalination as part of the process, making fresh water as a byproduct.

To generate significant amounts of electricity, large volumes of water need to be moved. A full-scale plant, which is Lockheed’s goal, would use a wide pipe descending several hundred metres into the ocean - a significant engineering challenge that the company thinks it might be able to meet by exploiting the kind of advanced composites it uses on military aircraft.

Lockheed is going ahead with the ocean research under a contract it was awarded last year by the Department of Defense.

Chris Kubasik, executive vice-president electronic systems at Lockheed, said the electricity produced would be fairly expensive. “Depending on the size of the plant, we are looking at about 25 cents to 30 cents per kilowatt hour, which is maybe double what you would pay in the continental US. But somewhere like Hawaii, where they rely on imported fossil fuels to generate power, they are already paying more than 50 cents.”

The choice of Hawaii is relevant; its warm surface waters, with close access to cold, deep ocean water, mean it could be an ideal site for such a scheme.

The Department of Defense’s interest springs from its desire to power its remote bases - such as Diego Garcia, the British territory in the middle of the Indian Ocean - without having to rely on expensive deliveries of oil by tanker.

Lockheed is also working on more conventional ocean power. It plans to manufacture the 50 metre-long buoys used in wave-power plants produced by Ocean Power Technologies. It is also moving into solar energy, using its expertise in radar arrays to make and install the complicated mirror systems in concentrated solar power plants.

Biomass is on the cards, too. Lockheed has installed a wood-chip-burning power plant at its large manufacturing and systems-integration complex at Owego, New York. The plant now provides all the electricity for the 1m square foot facility, which employs 4,000 people.

The group has used that venture into biomass to produce a smaller version of the plant for the armed forces. It has produced a small gasification plant - it fits inside a normal shipping container - that will burn waste produced by army camps to produce electricity.

Kubasik said the portable waste-to-energy plant showed green thinking was creeping into the company’s mainstream business, and into the thinking of the Pentagon officials who buy defence equipment.

“I think energy efficiency will become a differentiator over time. We are thinking about it with the design of our bid for the Joint Light Tactical Vehicle [a US Army programme to replace the Humvee armoured car].

“If there are two rival vehicles that are difficult to choose between, and one does five miles per gallon and the other ten, you are probably going to choose the latter,” he said.

BAE GIVES WIND A BOOST

LOCKHEED MARTIN is not the only defence group to use its expertise to win new business in green technologies. BAE Systems, the British group that is Europe’s largest defence contractor, is helping to remove a serious obstacle to wind-farm construction – the turbines’ interference with airport and aircraft radar.

BAE claims that in the past two years alone, it has cleared the way for about £1 billion worth of wind farms with a generating capacity of 500MW.

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