You may have heard that the state’s energy research and development authority, NYSERDA, has hired a public relations firm to boost the image of the financial and engineering fiasco that is the state’s “green energy transition.”
To meet targets in the Climate Leadership and Community Protection Act, NYSERDA wants to cover a million acres of farmland and forest with solar panels and wind turbines over the next 25 years. Executive Law 94-C established the Office of Renewable Energy Siting, which can override local law and ignore environmental impacts to “accelerate” the transfiguration of upstate farmland and forest into an industrial patchwork of glass, copper, concrete and steel.
Currently, transmission needed to move electricity — double or triple the current grid — does not exist, but developers are unfazed. Subsidies and “renewable-energy credits” guarantee they get rich even if no energy is generated at all.
Last year’s state budget required towns to use Albany’s assessment model, robbing communities of fair tax levies. In terms of the spike in your utility bill: NYSEG and other companies already have permission from the Department of Public Service to pass costs for new transmission on to customers. But this year’s budget will ratchet up the assault. Versions in the Assembly, Senate and governor’s budgets give developers eminent domain authority to take land for the thousands of miles of poles and wire that will be needed.
The state will need to invest billions of dollars in battery storage. But New York will also need most of its current fossil-fuel generators — particularly fast-ramping peakers — to provide backup for intermittent generators. Peakers running at 35% efficiency would often be replacing combined cycle plants running at 60% efficiency; consequently, there may be little reduction in combustion emissions. Since solar, wind and battery resources don’t last long, anything we install now will have to get trucked to a landfill within 20 years and we’ll need to replace it.
California has about 40% of its generating capacity in solar and wind, built out over 20 years. Yet California has energy costing almost double the national average, and has failed significantly to cut fossil-fuel use. California must curtail — dump — excess solar for lack of buyers. California relies on neighbor states to provide almost a third of its energy. In this context, consider the dubious fiscal sleight-of-hand New York is planning: It hopes to import energy whenever it is needed and assumes it will be able to sell excess energy whenever we have it. Like California, we may find ourselves building new gas plants to prevent blackouts.
New York is trying hard not to find a fiscally responsible, science-based energy plan which respects home rule and full environmental review of industrial development. Upstate New York is already “green,” 90% powered by nuclear and hydro. The metro region is dirtier than when CLCPA was enacted, now more than 90% powered by fossil fuels.
Besides being an engineering disaster, New York’s plan is a dollar- and land-hog. NYSERDA has hired a PR firm. Will the public fall for NYSERDA’s efforts to put lipstick on this pig?