After passage of the 2019 Climate Leadership and Community Protection Act, a politically-appointed Climate Action Council, with help from political appointees at the New York State Energy Research and Development Authority, went about crafting a “scoping plan” to achieve emission-reduction and grid-decarbonization targets in that act. There has been substantive criticism of that plan, noting, among other things, that no large economy is powered predominantly by intermittent solar and wind. Those places that have tried have expensive energy and continue to rely on gas and even coal power.
Responding to these concerns, the Public Service Commission held a technical conference Dec. 11 and 12, 2023. I was there, and provide this reality check.
The problem, as framed by PSC, is that there is a “gap” between the energy that renewable-resources-plus-storage can provide and our real-time demand for electricity. As the grid operator, NYISO, and NYSERDA, both estimate, the Dispatchable Emission-Free Resources needed to back up intermittent generators could be 25 to 45 gigawatts — that’s the state’s current fossil-fuel capacity, possibly doubled.
Panelists at the conference discussed biogas and RNG, hydrogen, virtual power plants, long duration storage and nuclear power.
Hydrogen advocates were eager to say the technology was ready. But is it ready at scale? Hydrogen is a costly storage mechanism — 50% of the energy needed to produce it is simply lost. Mystery generators would be needed to run electrolyzers to separate hydrogen from oxygen in water. Salt caverns would have to be converted for storage. Are New Yorkers ready for 400 miles of new special-grade pipeline or the cost of 25 GW’s worth of fuel-cell plants? Do New Jersey, Pennsylvania and Ohio know that New York expects them to make half our hydrogen?
Capturing biogas from farmsteads or landfills has shortcomings, too. First, there’s not much of it; biogas can provide only a token amount of backup generation. Furthermore, turning biogas into “renewable natural gas” requires refining, and new pipes or vehicular transport would have to move the fuel.
Panelists advocating for “virtual power plants” suggested that New Yorkers with solar roofs and power walls or EVs could help maintain reliability in a sophisticated network where distributed generation, distributed storage, and household demand are magically controlled from afar. Will residents who have invested in solar, batteries, or EVs really want to surrender their stored electricity to the grid, undermining the convenience of local storage and sacrificing part of the cost? Further, panelists noted that a “virtual power plant” is not a dispatchable resource: it could not ensure “no blackouts.”
As New Yorkers are learning, battery plants are expensive and can catch fire. Building longer-duration energy storage, like the state’s Blenheim-Gilboa pumped storage facility, would be costly and have huge environmental impacts. Current storage plans will not save energy for more than a few hours and will be quickly depleted, bringing us back to square one: a big energy gap.
Grid stability was discussed, but nobody mentioned key findings of the North American Energy Reliability Corporation, which lists five threats to the “bulk electric system.” The number one risk is poor energy policy; the number two threat is grid modifications made to implement bad policy. New York’s plan requires tripling energy exports so the state can pretend excess summer solar garners income and tripling energy imports to pretend the grid will be reliable.
But NERC (2023 State of Reliability Overview) indicates that our neighbors may have no energy to share. “Curtailment of electricity transfers to areas in need during periods of high regional demand is a growing reliability concern.” NERC warns that elevated temperatures now frequently extend beyond the summer months into periods when operators schedule generator maintenance. We must expect resource-constrained periods in the shoulder months as unseasonable temperatures coincide with generator unavailability. While solar and wind resources may be damaged by storms, according to NERC, even “newly built solar PV and battery storage resources continue to be commissioned with known performance issues” — issues highlighted in NERC alerts since 2016.
Despite mandates in CLCPA, NYISO says that inner-city “peakers” including the Gowanus 2 and 3 and Narrows 1 and 2 barge-mounted generators will be needed for reliability beyond 2025. But even keeping inefficient, dirty peakers online, NYISO predicts a half-gigawatt capacity shortfall in the metropolitan area as early as summer 2025 under normal weather conditions.
Notably absent was any critical conference discussion of New York’s stumbling efforts to build out intermittent resources: onshore wind, offshore wind, and solar contractors across the state recently asked the PSC for more money and the PSC indicated that it would not adjust contracts awarded through competitive bidding. As Politico reported, “The state has awarded 136 onshore renewable projects representing 11 GW of capacity under Tier 1 of the Clean Energy Standard. Of those, 79 projects totaling 7.3 GW of capacity have terminated their contracts. That’s about 66 percent of the capacity awarded”. Onshore contracts will be rebid at a much higher prices, meaning ratepayers will have higher utility bills. Offshore wind bids could be quadruple the current wholesale electricity rate. Consider now that more than a million New York ratepayers already can’t pay their utility bills.
Aligning energy planning with climate justice continues to receive lip-service from Albany and the Big Green NGOs, even as they promote energy strategies that won’t work, strategies that lock in demand for fossil fuels. After banning hydraulic fracking in New York, the Department of Environmental Conservation is looking at CO2 fracking in the Southern Tier. DEC is also mulling the expansion of gas supply from the Iroquois Pipeline, knowing that the metro region’s narrowing capacity margin could be alleviated if Cricket Valley Power Plant — one of the gas plants which replaced Indian Point — had enough fuel to run at full capacity.
Iroquis and CO2 fracking would move us in the wrong direction: Increased gas use, increased emissions and increased utility costs show us that that’s exactly where state policy is taking us. As for climate justice: rural New Yorkers see their communities stripped of home rule, the protection of robust environmental project review denied, and fair tax compensation blocked by Albany, as land-hungry solar and wind projects are plastered across the state.
If New York were wise, it would invest in advanced nuclear. Our current grid was designed around large baseload power plants. Unlike solar and wind, nuclear reactors don’t require new transmission, storage or backup power. A thousand acres for nuclear power could save the thousand square miles of farmland and forest needed for the 55 GW of solar and 10 GW of onshore wind in state plans. Today’s nuclear plants are designed to last 80 years or more, while any solar or wind built this decade will need replacement before midcentury.
Speakers to provide the “wake-up” call needed at PSC’s technical conference were not invited. Ontario had a Green Energy Act similar to our CLCPA which was, after honest fiscal scrutiny and careful engineering analysis, trashed. Economist Brady Youch at the Canadian Consumer Policy Institute noted that in designing the Green Act, the government had ignored engineers and designed “a political electricity system, as opposed to one based on economics or cost-effectiveness.”
In annulling the act, Ontario Minister of Energy Greg Rickford said, “By repealing this act, we’re restoring planning decisions to municipalities that were stripped by the previous government and ensuring local voices have the final say on energy projects in their communities.” Ontario did not give up on clean energy: it is pursuing additional nuclear power. New York could learn a thing or two from its northern neighbor.