The Math Does Not Support New York’s Climate Plan

Roger Caiazza

I frequently collaborate with Richard Ellenbogen regarding issues related to the Climate Leadership & Community Protection Act (Climate Act).  This post describes his recent blog article The Math Does Not Support New York’s Climate Plan published at the Empire Center for Public Policy.  He explains why the numbers show that the Climate Act implementation plan is doomed to failure based on his experience adopting renewable and lower-emission combustion technologies in his home and business.  This post condenses his findings and publicizes his work.

Overview and Background

The Climate Act established a New York “Net Zero” target (85% reduction in GHG emissions and 15% offset of emissions) by 2050.  It includes an interim 2030 reduction target of a 40% reduction by 2030. Two targets address the electric sector: 70% of the electricity must come from renewable energy by 2030 and all electricity must be generated by “zero-emissions” resources by 2040. The Climate Action Council (CAC) was responsible for preparing the Scoping Plan that outlined how to “achieve the State’s bold clean energy and climate agenda.” The Integration Analysis prepared by the New York State Energy Research and Development Authority (NYSERDA) and its consultants quantifies the impact of the electrification strategies.  That material was used to develop the Draft Scoping Plan outline of strategies.  After a year-long review, the Scoping Plan was finalized at the end of 2022.  Since then, the State has been trying to implement the Scoping Plan recommendations through regulations, proceedings, and legislation.

Introduction

Ellenbogen introduces the problem:

I have been analyzing the numbers coming out of Albany regarding the Climate Leadership and Community Protection Act (CLCPA), New York’s plan to drastically reduce the use of fossil fuels, for over five years now.  

I am not anti-renewable and I am not a climate denier. What I am is an engineer that lives by numbers. The numbers underpinning the CLCPA—namely the belief that New York can replace most of its natural gas-fired electricity generation with renewables in the next six or even nine years—are a fantasy.

• New York is letting the perfect be the enemy of the good, prohibiting or frustrating viable solutions that could reduce emissions. 
• Instead, New York is relying on older, less efficient power plants, in hopes that wind and solar—built in more rural areas or offshore—can someday replace them. 
• Even if New York were to build the wind, solar and battery backup necessary to keep the lights on without fossil fuels, the storage requirements, either onsite or grid-based, would be cost-prohibitive. 

State Comptroller Tom DiNapoli in July described “inadequate planning, monitoring and assessment of risks and challenges” by state energy officials. That’s just the tip of the iceberg. 

Greener Than The Grid

In the next section of the article, Ellenbogen describes his manufacturing business and the steps he has taken to reduce energy use at his facility.  His company, Allied Converters, manufactures food packaging for large bakeries and supermarket chains. The machinery is thermally intensive and uses large amounts of electricity.  

In 2002 he “installed the first microturbine-based Combined Heat and Power (CHP) system in the Con Ed service area.”  This approach generates electricity by burning natural gas.  Waste heat is recovered “to heat the building in the winter, or to be sent to absorption chillers to cool the building in the summer.”  This approach allows him to recover 70 to 75 percent of the energy content of the fuel. 

He compares his efficiency to the grid:

Most of downstate’s electricity comes from burning natural gas. New York’s single-cycle gas generating plants are in the neighborhood of 30 to 35 percent efficient. Newer combined-cycle plants are in the range of 55 to 60 percent efficient. For both, about 7 percent of energy produced is lost as heat in the transmission lines, a loss we avoid by generating electricity onsite. 

Contrast that with New York’s plan to replace gas and oil furnaces at homes and businesses with electric heat pumps, which will—at least for the foreseeable future—require more electricity generation from fossil fuels, farther away from where the electricity is needed (and therefore more line losses). 

In 2007 he installed the first commercial-scale solar array in New Rochelle.  His article describes the tribulations related to being an early adopter with the planning agency and the utility.  Later that year he added a “Reactive Power Mitigation System and in conjunction with the onsite generation, reduced load on the utility by 80 percent.  To top it off he collects data on all the electric parameters in the building. 

This massive amount of data, along with my training as an electrical engineer, has formed my frame of reference regarding the CLCPA. Renewable generation has a place in the energy mix but it cannot be used as the backbone of the utility system. Renewables are a tool and when you misuse a tool, bad things will happen. When you need a hammer, you don’t use a screwdriver, but that is essentially what the state is trying to do with renewables.

Energy System Model

His facility is a template for a pragmatic energy system:

The factory is a microcosm of NY’s energy system. It has a fossil fuel-based high efficiency generator to provide baseline load which it supplements with a solar array. The balance of the energy is dispatched by the utility when we need more.

All told, the factory’s carbon footprint is 30 to 40 percent smaller than it would be otherwise.  Additionally, our utility bill, including the cost of natural gas, is less than half of what it would have been if we hadn’t added the energy systems. We have not only reduced our carbon emissions but we have also saved money through reduced energy usage and the associated expenses, about $1 million over the past 17 years. Our savings have been relatively higher during recent years as the business has grown and we have used more energy. Contrast that with current bills for other utility customers that are rising at an increasing rate. 

The New York grid relies on nuclear, fossil, and hydro resources for most of its load, wind and solar to supplement the other resources, and imports the rest.  The grid load varies more than the factory.  As a result, resources are called for varying loads depending on their operating characteristics and costs.  Ellenbogen describes current reliability issues.

The New York Independent System Operator (NYISO), the independent nonprofit organization that operates the electric grid and oversees the state’s wholesale electricity market, has been warning about potential blackouts due to closing existing fossil-fuel generators before new generators come online. 

A 2019 plan by the state Department of Environmental Conservation to close smaller “peaker” power plants risked causing rolling blackouts on hot days as soon as 2025, before NYISO officials pushed back and kept some of the plants open. 

As NYISO officials warned earlier this summer, reliability margins—the cushions in each region that ensure there’s enough electricity to meet demand at all times—“are also observed to be narrowing across the grid in New York, which poses significant challenges for the electric system over the next ten years.” 

The reality is that the issue is going to extend well past 2033 and the energy shortages will get worse as gas plants aren’t replaced. 

Future Model

Ellenbogen describes what would be needed at his factory if he were to rely only on solar and not use natural gas.  Note that wind is not a practical source at his location.

To generate the same amount of electric energy that we currently use, we would need a solar array six times the size of what we currently have. Below is a photo of the 25,000+ square foot roof of the factory with the 50,000 watt (50 KW) solar array on it. (The factory is 55,000 square feet across two floors).    

We could fit an additional 50 KW array on our roof for a total of 100 KW. However, we would need a roof three times the size of what we currently have to house a large enough solar array to generate the amount of electrical energy that we currently use. That doesn’t include the heat generated by the CHP system. 

If we switched to heat pumps, we would need at least an additional 300 KW of solar arrays to support the building’s thermal load. So in total we would need 12 times the panels—on a roof six times the size. 

Beyond the enormous additional costs needed to build a system of that magnitude, we don’t have the physical space or the roof area to remotely come close to supporting a system of that size. 

The Model Storage Problem

The Climate Act insists on a zero-emissions mandate so that fossil-fired generators cannot be used to support intermittent wind and solar.  This leads to the enormous challenge of storage.

Because of the looming plight of New York utility system, my team and I have been looking for ways to supply the building during a power failure. We first looked at a backup generator but Con Ed wanted $140,000 to run a larger gas line to our building. That being cost-prohibitive, we have been looking at a new type of energy storage that does not have the deficiencies of lithium-ion batteries. 

The newer storage, using supercapacitors, has a comparable cost to lithium-ion, will last 25 to 40 years instead of the eight to 10 years of lithium-ion, and it will not go into a state of thermal runaway and burn at 2600 degrees Fahrenheit as occasionally happens with lithium-ion batteries. It will fit in a space the size of a sea container and it can be charged at night from our CHP system and on weekends from our solar array. With an energy storage system of 720 to 900 KWh in conjunction with the CHP system and the solar array, we could operate 100 percent free of the utility with a carbon footprint 10 percent lower than what we have now. 

However, the Climate Act prohibits the use of the natural gas fired micro turbine currently in use.  That means more storage would be required.

We would have to install nearly sixty times the amount of energy storage as what we currently need for backup purposes—at sixty times the price–to ensure that the panel’s energy was available at night or for extended periods during the winter months. That storage would occupy a volume approximately equivalent to that of fifty large sea containers—for my factory alone.  

When the example for his factory is considered relative to the State the lunacy of the Scoping Plan becomes clear.

NYSERDA, the state’s energy agency, in late 2022 said “complete replacement” of fossil fuel plants with solar and wind generation would require 2,400 gigawatt-hours of storage to get the state through lulls when wind isn’t blowing and output from solar panels is low. At $567 per kilowatt-hour, the recent average cost of new non-residential energy storage, that works out to more than $1.3 trillion in new costs, or about $68,000 per New Yorker.

Summing Up

Ellenbogen describes his misgivings about the Climate Act.

Unlike New York’s plan that is relying on resources that either don’t exist, don’t exist at scale, are prohibitively expensive to install, are opposed by the residents near the sites, double utility costs, and as a result cannot be installed in any reasonable time frame so that they are not reducing GHG emissions, the technologies that we have used to achieve our carbon reductions are just the opposite. My neighbors are unaware of what we have onsite. The only thing that is visible is the solar array on the roof that can be seen with aerial photos or from a distance from the new high rises that have been built. 

The technologies we used existed 20 years ago, reduce GHG emissions, are cost-effective, reduce line losses, reduce transmission and distribution costs, save money for the end user and the utility simultaneously, and can be implemented now in densely populated areas eliminating the need for multi-billion dollar transmission lines. 

This conclusion wasn’t derived from what I like or don’t like, or about what I want or don’t want, and unlike the Climate Act, it is not based upon emotion. It is based upon tens of millions of data points that definitively say that if NY State keeps proceeding on this path, it will be a calamity for the state. If the Comptroller or others in state government wonder why the Climate Action Council never did a financial analysis of the Climate Act that they forced upon the state, with the assistance of unknowing legislators, it is because the costs are so ridiculously high that if the number was actually publicized, it would be political suicide. 

Richard Ellenbogen was an early adopter of renewable and lower-emission combustion technology, deploying them at both his home and his business in Westchester County. Ellenbogen, a Cornell-trained electrical engineer, explains below how his personal experience led him to become one of the leading critics of the cost and feasibility of New York’s ambitious energy policy. 

Roger Caiazza blogs on New York energy and environmental issues at Pragmatic Environmentalist of New York.  This represents his opinion and not the opinion of any of his previous employers or any other company with which he has been associated.