In the lead up to the New York Power Authority’s vote on its draft Renewables Strategic Plan this month, New York City environmental justice communities and clean power advocates are calling for more generating capacity for renewable energy over a shorter time frame.
But most of all, they want more projects in the city to lessen reliance on polluting natural gas facilities.
The New York Power Authority, the country’s largest public power utility, is tasked under state law with building the bulk of the renewable energy projects to ensure New York meets its ambitious emissions targets.
Critics of the draft plan in New York City say it risks delaying the state’s goal for 70 percent renewable energy by 2030. The plan itself acknowledges that the target could only be achieved in 2033 at the earliest, and currently only plans to generate around 3.5 gigawatts of additional renewable energy capacity.
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Environmental justice advocates, as well as some assemblymembers and state senators, are calling for additional generating capacity from renewables of 15 gigawatts, which they contend is necessary to meet the state’s Climate Act target for net zero emissions for the electric grid by 2040.
Since the draft plan was released in October, the New York Power Authority took in over 5,000 comments, many of which were endorsements of the 15 gigawatt target, a level of support activists assert is rare.
This support was also clear when the power authority held hearings on its draft plan in November. “People were absolutely clamoring for this build out to 15 gigawatts,” said Michael Paulson, a co-chair of the Public Power Coalition, an organization that supports the shift to renewable energy. “People in New York City are fed up with how this energy system has failed us.”
The Public Power Coalition published a financing report in 2023 arguing that even if the power authority added more projects to hit the 2030 target, it would be in a similar financial standing as other public utilities across the country.
But most irksome to environmental justice activists is the draft plan’s paucity of renewable energy projects in the city: Out of 40 proposed in the document, including wind, solar and battery storage systems, only one is in the city.
“One single project in New York City is not enough to address the differentiated reliance on fossil fuels in New York City versus the rest of the state,” said Daniel Chu, the senior policy manager at the New York City Environmental Justice Alliance, a nonprofit that links local environmental justice organizations operating in low-income neighborhoods and communities of color.
Chu said the draft plan also offers few clues as to what will be done with the city’s peak demand plants, or “peaker” plants. These old, highly polluting gas and oil power plants are known to run less than 15 percent of the time—during the hottest days of the summer when people are running their air conditioners on high and the need for electricity is at its peak. Their operations are incredibly costly, both in terms of money and the health of vulnerable city residents.
Around 44 percent of the city’s census tracts are home to disadvantaged communities—residents who have experienced a disproportionate amount of negative impacts from pollution. In this urban center, the state’s adherence to its visionary Climate Act, and the power authority’s plan for developing renewable energy, has outsized importance.
New York’s Complex Transition to Renewables
The New York Power Authority operates 17 generating facilities across the state, and much of its electricity currently comes from hydropower. But how the authority is choosing renewable projects, as well as what its cost-benefit analysis looks like, has been fairly obscure, Chu and other clean energy advocates say.
“They’re issuing bonds to develop and finance those projects—it’s clear to me that they have some more capacity to develop these projects,” said Chu. “I do hope that the financing aspects of those issues could be made more clear.”
Activists also note that the draft plan has very few downstate projects–in the Hudson Valley or the New York City area—likely due to the higher cost of land and the limited space available. The electricity from some of these new projects will have to be moved from upstate to downstate, creating more need for an extensive buildout of transmission lines.
Moving electricity across the state is not without its complications, particularly with renewable energy, which can produce large amounts of electricity in short spurts of time, overwhelming transmission lines in a phenomenon called grid bottlenecks.
“There are renewable energy resources in New York State that are actually not producing to their full potential because the transmission grid is too congested for all of their energy to be moved and used downstate,” said Paulson. “Essentially, we are not getting all the benefits and that means more fossil fuel resources getting used downstate.”
A spokesperson for the New York Power Authority responded in an email statement that the authority is continuing to assess lands, building and parking lots owned by its customers for renewable project siting opportunities.
“Please keep in mind that the strategic plan is designed to be flexible and adaptive, and the projects included in the draft represent only the first tranche of projects identified by [the New York Power Authority],” the spokesperson said in an email.
The Public Power Coalition released a report earlier this month that said the widespread use of distributed energy resources–smaller devices that generate and store electricity—could complement larger utility-scale renewable projects in New York City, particularly because the space is limited.
“There are renewable energy resources in New York State that are actually not producing to their full potential because the transmission grid is too congested for all of their energy to be moved and used downstate.”
— Michael Paulson, Public Power Coalition
“According to the research we looked at, there is a lot of potential for [the New York Power Authority] to turn a profit very quickly with distributed energy resources in the city, in part because there’s an absolutely guaranteed demand to purchase that electricity in the city,” said Paulson.
These devices, which include rooftop solar or smaller battery storage projects, serve the specific buildings or neighborhoods in which they were built.
A study last year by the City College of New York also explored the possibility for distributed energy resources to give low- to moderate-income households access to affordable renewable energy resources and to decrease brownouts in these neighborhoods.
The spokesperson for the New York Power Authority said that it has already developed, or is in the process of developing, nearly 60 Distributed Energy Resources projects in partnership with various city agencies.
“There are several challenges associated with building in a densely populated, high real estate market, and complicated infrastructure area like New York City,” the spokesperson said in an email. “There is limited land availability that prohibits development of large-scale projects, and developing small scale projects may be more expensive and may not provide the benefits of ‘economies of scale’ due to a higher unit cost of energy.”
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The pressures on the city’s, and the state’s, electric grid will only increase. The power authority’s draft plan itself asserts that the anticipated statewide electric load for 2030 increased from 151,678 gigawatt-hours according to estimates in 2020, to 164,910 gigawatt-hours in 2024. The city’s electric load is forecasted to grow with more widespread adoption of electric vehicles, the electrification of more buildings and new cryptocurrency mining and data centers.
“Increasingly, [the state is] saying it’s not electrification that’s causing the problem, but data centers, artificial intelligence operations and cryptocurrency mining operations that are putting a strain on New York State’s grid,” said Chu.
Peaker Plants Persist
For Chu and other environmental justice advocates in New York City, retirement of the city’s peaker plants remains a top priority.
A 2020 report by the PEAK Coalition, a group formed to fight for the closure of polluting power plants which often impact environmental justice communities, found that over the preceding decade, an estimated $4.5 billion of ratepayer money—in the form of what are called “capacity payments”—went to the owners of the city’s peaker plants, just to ensure that the plants were online if they were needed.
“It’s a lot of money that people who live in these communities are paying to turn these power plants on,” said Chu, who works closely with the PEAK Coalition. “But they’re also paying in terms of the public health costs that these peaker power plants are emitting because they’re older, they’re more polluting and they run sort of infrequently.”
In the South Bronx—an area already plagued with multiple sources of pollution—two peaker plants belonging to the New York Power Authority remain in operation. Because of the area’s history of redlining and disinvestment, Arif Ullah, executive director of South Bronx Unite, believes it has long been considered a “sacrifice zone” by city and state officials.
“Because these communities are regarded as sacrifice zones, there have been a disproportionate number of polluting facilities that have been sited in communities like this, whether that’s power plants or waste transfer stations or last mile warehouses or even highways, expressways, byways,” said Ullah. “And that has then resulted in alarmingly poor air quality, which has devastated the health of people living in communities like the South Bronx.”
The state’s Department of Environmental Conservation has imposed stringent limits on emissions from peaker plants since its 2019 Peaker Rule. But the rule exempts plants when they are deemed to be needed to avoid a blackout.
In 2023, the New York Independent System Operator, which is in charge of the electricity grid, announced it would keep four city peaker plants running past their planned 2025 retirement. This comes despite reports of higher rates of asthma and hospitalizations in neighborhoods like Ullah’s.
“It’s a lot of money that people who live in these communities are paying to turn these power plants on. But they’re also paying in terms of the public health costs…”
— Daniel Chu, New York City Environmental Justice Alliance
For the peaker plants that are in the process of being phased out, many residents hoped that the draft plan would offer specific guidance as to how to potentially turn some of them into battery storage systems, or other types of renewable energy projects. The plan currently acknowledges the need to address this, but has no concrete plan yet.
With increasing pressure on the electricity grid and delays in the implementation of renewable project targets, there is real worry that more of these plants will stay active to address peak demand periods.
“The only way these peak power plants will be retired is if there is enough energy available to offset the energy that they’re currently producing to meet the demands of New York City,” said Ullah.
Ultimately, for many environmental advocates and vulnerable residents, the power authority’s plan seems to lack ambitious thinking. Many of these groups fought long and hard for the passage and implementation of the state’s Climate Act, and see this draft plan as falling far short of its goals, particularly in New York City.
“We know that all these things are technically possible and we know that they’re also actually highly advisable, they’re economically feasible,” said Paulson. “It’s a question of sticking to business as usual versus revolutionizing our energy system when we need it the most.”
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