Ken Girardin: On Energy, New York is Finally Putting Affordability Over Climate
Years of bad green policy have threatened to keep New Yorkers in the dark.
New York governor Kathy Hochul inherited what her predecessor, Gov. Andrew Cuomo, called “the most aggressive climate change program” in the nation. Earlier this month, she took her most aggressive steps yet to save her state from it.
The Hochul Administration signed off on two very different projects, allowing a small upstate power plant to remain open and allowing a gas pipeline to extend beneath New York harbor.
These small-sounding approvals are a very big deal. They’re an acknowledgement of the longstanding disconnect between Albany’s unmoored environmental aspirations and the state’s ability to accommodate them. Those aspirations were always in tension with the need to New Yorker’s energy bills down—a reality that Hochul seems finally to be acknowledging.
Cuomo’s plan, the 2019 Climate Leadership and Community Protection Act (CLCPA), included two major deadlines. By 2030, New York was meant to get 70 percent of its electricity from renewable power plants and slash—through today-still-unwritten regulations—its economywide greenhouse gas emissions by about one-quarter.
The state never stood a chance at reaching either: six years later, most of New York’s renewable energy still comes from its massive hydroelectric dams at Niagara Falls and Massena. Total emissions have ticked up, not down, thanks in part to Cuomo’s capitulation to anti-nuclear zealots who wanted Indian Point’s two reactors shut down. A recent review by state officials said the state won’t hit its 2030 targets before 2038.
Of course, New York’s government misses its own deadlines, energy-related or otherwise, with regularity. The real problem with CLCPA was a little-noticed provision in the law that required state agencies to review any applications for permits, licenses or other approvals for “inconsistency” or “interference” with the its goals.
Thanks to these provisions, regulators have often blocked on spurious grounds projects to replace power plants with more efficient units, or to extend pipelines and allow customers to swap oil furnaces for gas. Companies have largely stopped trying to get approvals for new energy projects. The lack of replacements meant the fleet of older gas plants that provides most of New York City’s electricity, and about half of electricity statewide, kept getting older.
The New York Independent System Operator—the nonprofit that runs the state’s electric grid—has gone to tortured lengths to accommodate and even cheerlead Albany’s climate policy. But even NYISO officials have expressed increasing levels of concern about the aging fossil-fuel generators’ reliability, warning earlier this year that older plants were experiencing “more frequent and longer outages.” In October, they sounded the alarm, saying the grid was “at a significant inflection point” and that the cushion between available electricity generation and peak customer demand could disappear in New York City next summer and on Long Island in 2027.
The Hochul administration seems to have gotten the message. Earlier this month, the state’s Department of Environmental Conservation (DEC) granted a long-stalled approval for the Greenidge Generation Facility in Yates County, between Rochester and Binghamton.
DEC had denied Greenidge’s 2021 application for a renewal of its air-emissions permit, citing CLCPA. The plant stayed open while the owners fought DEC in court, leading to a settlement that allows it to keep running.
Greenidge was hardly a sympathetic case. It’s a relatively small plant whose operators were burning gas primarily to power their cryptocurrency mining operation. Nonetheless, its approval indicates New York won’t be blocking power plant upgrades—at least, not to the extent it has in the past using CLCPA. Watch for developers to propose new combined-cycle generators with lower emissions soon. Previously blocked plans for Orange County and Queens are likely to be among the first to get a fresh look.
Hochul’s other significant move was to approve the Northeast Supply Enhancement (NESE), a pipeline that would deliver gas from New Jersey to Queens, tying into the local distribution system in the outer boroughs run by National Grid, a major utilities company. That, too, was an important signal that the state is once again open for energy business.
Since 2016, New York has blocked new pipelines using a spurious interpretation of the federal Clean Water Act. Besides keeping more New Yorkers on oil (and until this year keeping New England’s last coal plant open), the result was the emergence of “virtual pipelines” on state roads as tankers of compressed natural gas loaded and unloaded on either side of New York’s policy-created chokepoint.
After DEC thwarted NESE in 2020 by denying water permits (while also citing CLCPA), National Grid had to keep moving gas by truck—up to 240 vehicles per day—through the five boroughs on the coldest days of the year.
Both the Greenidge and NESE announcements reflect how much CLCPA made the perfect the enemy of the good and continues to prevent moves that would generally speaking reduce greenhouse gas emissions.
Hochul is now confronting what was arguably the worst of CLCPA’s unforeseen consequences. She’ll need to turn her attention to some of the more gnarly things that CLCPA’s proponents actually had in mind, such as purposefully driving up fuel prices so people would use less.
Environmentalists have been fighting in state court to force Hochul to issue the year-late regulations that will—through taxes, restrictions and bans—reduce state emissions. The governor, concerned about CLCPA’s effect on fuel and other prices, has resisted. But this is the next fight she’ll have to pick.
That’s because her top priority on the oft-mentioned affordability front must be wringing the uncertainty out of New York’s energy scene. Doing so will pay dividends across the economy. And it will give Hochul another chance to pointedly ask lawmakers how much more expensive they want to make life in New York.
Ken Girardin is a fellow at the Manhattan Institute.