From its inception, implementation of the Climate Leadership and Community Protection Act has been driven by political obstinance and ignorance of engineering realities. Many of us provided input on the CLCPA in 2019. We went to Albany two years ago to criticize the scoping plan coming out of the Climate Action Council formed under the CLCPA.
The New York State Energy Research and Development Authority has provided build-out projections: about a million acres of forest and farmland will need to be sacrificed to support 55 gigawatts of Chinese solar panels and 10 GW of mostly foreign-made onshore wind. That’s in addition to massive investments in batteries, transmission and backup generation from sources yet to be invented. For Long Island, property values, fishing and marine habitat will be compromised by 1.7 GW of (Empire and Sunrise) offshore wind projects now moving forward.
The Albany Times Union cited NYSERDA: “The two offshore wind projects, totaling over 1,700 megawatts (810 for Empire and 924 for Sunrise) … would be the largest power generation projects in over 35 years built in New York state, according to NYSERDA.”
Appointees at NYSERDA may struggle with grade school addition, but we recognize the convenient political memory for which they were hired. In fact, two big gas power plants, Cricket Valley (1,100 MW) and CPV (680 MW) — clearly totaling more than the 1,734 MW of Empire and Sunrise — were recently built to replace the carbon-free power lost when Indian Point nuclear plant was shut down.
NYSERDA just issued a draft report that may have shocked EarthJustice and Sierra — which, along with other so-called environmental NGOs, have been cheerleading the state plan — but simply confirmed what energy experts have been saying. NYSERDA admits that the state will in all probability miss the 2030 CLCPA goal of meeting 70% of electricity demand with renewables.
The amounts of Tier 1 (solar and wind) project deployment that would be needed … in order to achieve the 70% goal in 2030 may far exceed what the renewables industry could be expected to develop in this timeframe, a NYSERDA report stated.
NYSERDA provided a host of excuses — supply chain, inflation, labor — as well as elaborate details about the shortfall. Although any numbers coming out of NYSERDA are suspect, it appears that approved projects would have to be five times what current solicitations are yielding.
To get a sense of the monumental ignorance and colossal hubris which went into the CLCPA’s decarbonization goals and the scoping plan: Every solicitation needs to be five times bigger than 2020 estimates. In other words, the state would need to bring online four or five times the solar and wind built in the last 30 years. NYSERDA’s new strategy, already floated, may be to claim that we are meeting a 70% decarbonization target for state energy use from some historical date, after the Mayflower, certainly. But maybe before Sputnik?
Assessing negative progress since passage of the CLCPA, the state has gone from over 60% carbon-free to over 50% fossil-fuel-powered electricity. Empirical evidence — provided by those places 20 or 30 years ahead of New York down this garden path — indicates that substantial fossil-fuel support, at nearly the same capacity as before the renewable plunge, continues to be needed. Why? Intermittent generators require fast-ramping “peaker-plant” type backup which is much less efficient than energy from slow-ramping combined-cycle generators. As renewables are added, energy costs rise with new transmission, batteries, and a 20-year-replacement cycle, and almost as much gas is needed as prior to intermittent deployment. Both California and Germany have expensive unreliable electric grids which rely on lots of gas- and even coal-fired power.
To get to the its current failure point, New York has had to cancel home rule of law and side-step the safeguards of the Environmental Quality Review Act for upstate communities despite “community protection” lip service in the CLCPA. Beyond the huge tax-payer-funded subsidies for resources which, mostly, generate no energy at all, Albany revised the assessment formula towns must use, robbing them of fair tax revenue. But even this has not been enough.
This year’s budget included “RAPID”: Accelerated transmission buildout financed by rural ratepayers, giving developers eminent domain authority to seize land to run poles and wire. Based on megawatt-hours of energy moved, this will be some of the most expensive transmission on the planet.
Transmission must support full nameplate capacity, but due to the astonishingly low capacity factors of solar and wind — especially in New York — the wires will, much of the time, carry no energy at all.
In its report, NYSERDA, doubtless coached by its recently-hired PR firm, never uses the word “opposition,” and so never discusses growing rural resistance to industrial energy infrastructure. Dozens of community organizations have joined the Clean Energy Standard proceeding at the Public Service Commission and have filed their objections to the state’s benighted plan.
What is their message to the state? Perform a detailed fiscal analysis to show New Yorkers what it will cost them, and conduct a credible engineering analysis to show what kind of energy mix New York will really need to provide reliable carbon-free electricity. According to the grid operator, the NYISO, the metro region already faces a narrowing capacity margin for the next decade resulting from generating plant closures including the reactors at Indian Point. NYISO expects New York City to experience a shortfall of half a gigawatt next summer even if we have normal weather.
There is a better way. France, Sweden and Ontario managed to decarbonize their grids in a decade or two while maintaining affordable reliable electricity and growing their economies. How did they do it?
With hydropower, nuclear power or both. New York policy makers and the Big Green groups that apparently dictate their behavior should read to the end of reports from the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change to see, after the dire climate warnings, what technologies are needed to tackle the problem. NYSERDA should look at reports from the European Union, the UN Economic Commission and energy resources endorsed by the recent UN Climate Change Conference. Those agencies, a dozen nations, and the U.S. Energy Department, all tell us that we should be building carbon-free nuclear power.