Fears over reliability
But the law doesn’t bar new fossil fuel construction outright and remains open-ended about how to reach its targets. The New York Independent System Operator, the nonprofit that manages the state’s electrical grid, warned last year that a system devoid of fossil fuels is significantly more fragile. When a single fossil fuel plant goes down, its outage generally doesn’t impair the ability of other plants to burn fuels and produce electricity. “On the contrary, individual wind and solar generators may be simultaneously affected by regional weather conditions, such as extended periods of low wind,” NYISO concluded in its 2020 Power Trends report. Storage resources, meanwhile, “are currently limited in their ability to supply the grid for such durations on a daily basis due, in part, to the time needed for recharging,” it said. “To ensure reliability, you need to have some kind of system that will turn on very quickly to meet those peak load hours in case the wind dies or clouds reduce the amount of solar output,” Casey Kopp, a regional power market analyst at the energy research firm Wood Mackenzie, said by phone. “Storage is such a new product that it’s hard to understand whether it can really serve that peaking capability.” A growing body of research projects how the country could rapidly transition off fossil-fueled electricity production. One recent study from the group Rewiring America found that the United States could generate virtually all its electricity from wind, solar and nuclear by 2035 and keep global warming within the range the Paris Agreement hoped to set, even without drastically altering other facets of American life. But that assumes a grand federal program on the scale of the World War II-era New Deal — something even a rich state like New York could not do on its own. One solution would be to bring more renewables generated outside the city limits onto the grid, which is divided in the state. The upstate region generates 88 percent of its power from zero-emissions sources, primarily hydroelectric dams and nuclear reactors, according to NYISO data. Downstate in the city, Hudson Valley and Long Island, that figure is just 29 percent. And that percentage could decrease even more next year, when the Indian Point nuclear power plant shuts down. Laying new transmission lines from the sparsely populated upstate region to the metropolitan downstate could balance out the problem and make the city less reliant on fossil fuels. But building transmission lines, like fossil fuel pipelines, is costly and difficult, as the projects cross multiple jurisdictions and offer property owners ample recourse to block construction. Developers first pitched the Champlain Hudson Power Express, once described as “essentially a 333-mile extension cord down the Hudson River from Quebec to New York City,” in 2008. In 2020, a year before it was scheduled to come online, the proposal remains the subject of heated debate. Last November, Riverkeeper, a state environmental group, withdrew its support for the project. In June, the Sierra Club called for more reviews of the proposal. Offshore wind turbines offer what some see as an easier route, since transmission lines would run under open waters. Last year, the state granted contracts to build two massive wind farms off Long Island, set to generate a combined 1,700 megawatts of electricity. The projects have vast potential to both transform the industrial waterfront in Brooklyn and Queens with thousands of wind service and maintenance jobs and to provide much of the city’s electricity needs. But the turbines aren’t expected to come online until 2024, and that assumes none of the hiccups and delays that notoriously dog infrastructure projects in the Empire State. Peaker plant owners, meanwhile, are up against a deadline. New state regulations on nitrogen oxide emissions come into force in May 2023. The rules would require older, oil-fired units to shut down or obtain a waiver to continue operating. “We need to reach the (CLCPA) goals, but we also need to keep the lights and air conditioning on as we work to get there,” said John Reese, the senior vice president of Astoria Generating Co., the ArcLight-owned firm that runs the peaker plant in Gowanus. “Electric reliability is critical — as everyone who lost power during the recent storm can attest to — and building new infrastructure in New York is difficult, expensive, and time-consuming.”New, more hawkish legislators
On its website, NRG said the repowering in Astoria would lower peak emissions by “up to 99 percent per hour” and “use technology that can be fully converted to zero-carbon fuel in the future.” That could mean the company plans to eventually run the gas turbines on hydrogen, a cleaner fuel that is increasingly popular in Europe but that the federal Department of Energy describes as “still in its infancy.” In a letter urging state regulators to halt the project, four groups — 350.org Brooklyn, New York Communities for Change, Food & Water Watch, and the New York City chapter of the Democratic Socialists of America — accused NRG of promoting the potential of hydrogen “in an attempt to obfuscate” the near-term plans. The groups asked the state Department of Environmental Conservation to submit the project to review under a provision of a 2011 law requiring power plants to study pollution effects and hold public hearings on repowering proposals. But NRG received its initial approval for the project before that law was in place. At the time, there was strong support for the repowering project. Last year, the state Department of Public Service ruled that the project did not require additional review. It’s unclear how much legal leverage Mamdani, Brisport, and others would have in the state Legislature. But they’re already considering potential approaches. Mamdani and Brisport said they’d consider bills to prohibit new fossil fuel infrastructure in the state. Both also support the Democratic Socialists of America’s campaign to bring New York City’s electric utility, Consolidated Edison, and gas provider, National Grid, under government control, a process that would likely mean buying out the local infrastructure. Mamdani and Brisport see clear mandates from voters to go big. Brisport campaigned hard on climate issues and beat Tremaine Wright, a party-backed assemblywoman, in the race to replace legislative stalwart Velmanette Montgomery, the retiring 35-year Senate incumbent. Unlike other democratic socialists who unseated dynastic Assembly legislators entrenched in outer-borough political machines, Mamdani defeated Simotas, a telegenic 41-year-old with a liberal voting record. It marked perhaps the first major example of a democratic socialist triumphing over a mainline progressive — and, in his view, showed voters’ appetite for dramatic change. “When you dig yourself into a hole, you just stop digging,” he said. “Yet what these people are saying is ‘dig slower.’”This story was originally published by Grist with the headline New York City’s hottest new energy fight on Aug 23, 2020.