THE FLEET
“The way we define public-private partnership [in the
Department of Homeland Security] is that we certainly
include contractual relationships, but we also include
relationships that provide mutual benefits not necessari-
ly codified in some sort of legal documents, such as an
information-sharing partnership, and the relationship
building that happens,” Givens told Seapower.
McGinn said a fair amount of savings have been
realized simply because of an extensive amount of
information sharing between the Navy and private sec-
tor partners. He said by drawing on their industry
experience, there is a development benefit.
“If, by dealing with the private sector and asking
them to use the mechanism of an energy savings per-
formance contract to improve overall energy efficiency
and to add energy resiliency and add renewable energy
to an installation, we can say to them, ‘Bring us your
ideas. Tell us what you have done with a university
campus, or a national laboratory, or a private industrial
park, or a municipality, or a state entity,’ and they can
bring us a business case,” McGinn said. “In that sense,
there is a development benefit that we get in that we
are not doing these things necessarily for the first time.
“We are not on the bleeding edge of new business
models, although we are open to all kinds of business
models, but where there is one that is tried and true,
where they’ve done deals with other entities, that is a
good thing. So the magic of how to do it right is a good
business case,” he said.
While DoN is saving a lot of money by saving ener-
gy, that is not the primary reason the department
launched its energy program, McGinn said.
“We do it to enhance warfighting readiness and qual-
ity of life and operational efficiency,” he said. “But those
savings are in fact starting to accrue. When you are talk-
ing about deploying a gigawatt of energy and you start
talking about upwards of, for the federal government, $4
billion total value in public-private partnerships, that
really accrues to a lot of savings. The other nice thing
about this is that it is a very bipartisan [program]. We
talk with folks on the Hill, on both sides of the aisle, and
they like it because it benefits the federal government, in
the case of the Department of the Navy. It benefits job
creation, and it benefits investment.” 70 S E A P O W E R / A P R I L 2 0 1 5 W W W. S E A P O W E R M A G A Z I N E. O R G