This is one of a series of posts on Governor Andrew M. Cuomo’s New York State Green New Deal. As part of his 2019 Justice Agenda he included a “nation-leading clean energy and jobs agenda that will put the state on a path to carbon neutrality across all sectors of New York’s economy”.
Not surprisingly there are no details other than the announcement, no mention of potential costs, and no explanation how all this will affect any of the many impacts that he claims are caused by climate change. There is a proposal to provide the plan to make New York carbon neutral and I will blog on those plans as they become available. In the meantime this post discusses the plan announcement for a path to make New York buildings carbon neutral as part of the New York Green New Deal.
In the following sections I list the text from the announcement and my indented and italicized comments follow.
Chart a Path to Making New York’s Statewide Building Stock Carbon Neutral
Buildings – and the fossil fuels traditionally used to heat and cool them – are a significant source of energy-related carbon pollution. As such, Governor Cuomo has made the improvement of energy efficiency in buildings a major priority. The Governor’s New Efficiency: New York agenda, released on Earth Day 2018, contains a comprehensive portfolio of proposals and strategies to meet an ambitious new target of reducing on-site energy consumption by 185 trillion BTUs by 2025. In addition, Governor Cuomo launched RetrofitNY in 2016 to stimulate the development of an energy efficiency industry that can tackle the challenge of deep building retrofits that will enhance building performance, reduce energy usage, and improve the quality of life for low- and moderate-income New Yorkers.
The Green New Deal announcement lays out some specific goals. In order to be credible those goals should be quantified. For example, what is the starting point for on-site energy consumption? An initial guess could use the NYSERDA Patterns and Trends documents table 3-3a nys primarary consumption of energy by sector and assume that residential and commercial sectors represent “on-site energy consumption”. In 2016 residential sector energy consumption was 558 TBtu and commercial sector energy consumption was 379 TBtu for a total of 937 TBtu so a 185 TBtu reduction represents a 20% lower value.
In my opinion energy efficiency is a classic energy example of the Pareto principle or the 80:20 ratio which states that 80% of the effects come from 20% of the causes. For energy efficiency it means that you can get 80% of the available reductions at 20% of the cost of doing all the reductions. Consider the anecdote of insulating your home. Adding insulation in the attic gets you a big benefit and is relatively cheap. Adding insulation to the walls gets you less of a benefit but is more expensive. Replacing the windows and doors with more efficient ones is a big expense but doesn’t get that much of a reduction. Those are the easy energy efficiency projects and anything else is going to cost a lot and not get much of an improvement.
Wallet Hub analyzed state energy efficiency (https://wallethub.com/edu/most-and-least-energy-efficient-states/7354/). Their conclusions are highlighted below[1]:
To identify the most energy-efficient states, WalletHub analyzed data for 48 states based on two key dimensions, including “home-energy efficiency” and “car-energy efficiency.” We obtained the former by calculating the ratio between the total residential energy consumption and annual degree days. For the latter, we divided the annual vehicle miles driven by gallons of gasoline consumed. Each dimension was weighted proportionally to reflect national consumption patterns.
In order to obtain the final ranking, we attributed a score between 0 and 100 to correspond with the value of each dimension. We then calculated the weighted sum of the scores and used the overall score to rank the states. Together, the points attributed to the two major categories add up to 100 points.
Home-Energy Efficiency – Total Points: 55
Home-Energy Efficiency = Total Residential Energy Consumption per Capita / Degree-Days
Car-Energy Efficiency – Total Points: 45
Car-Energy Efficiency = Annual Vehicle Miles Driven / Gallons of Gasoline Consumed
The Wallethub rankings are listed in Table 1 2015 energy efficiency RGGI state rankings. New York ranked number one. This suggests to me that New York has already implemented most of the easy low hanging fruit of the available energy efficiency opportunities.
Because buildings are one of the most significant sources of greenhouse gas emissions, Governor Cuomo is announcing a comprehensive strategy as part of the Green New Deal to move New York’s building stock to carbon neutrality. The agenda includes:
Advancing legislative changes to support energy efficiency including establishing appliance efficiency standards, strengthening building energy codes, requiring annual building energy benchmarking, disclosing energy efficiency in home sales, and expanding the ability of state facilities to utilize performance contracting.
All these requirements add to the regulatory burden for doing business in New York and it is not clear how much value for carbon reduction they will get.
Directing the Public Service Commission to ensure that New York’s electric and gas utilities achieve more in scale, innovation, and cost effectiveness to achieve the state’s 2025 energy efficiency target, especially through their energy efficiency activities and clean heating and cooling programs, and that a substantial portion of new energy efficiency activity benefits low- and moderate-income New Yorkers.
All these efforts disguise costs. The Public Service Commission will require that these programs be included in rate case submittals and the costs will be passed on to the customers. There is no unaffiliated voice for keeping consumer costs low vis-à-vis climate goals and myriad special interests involved in rate cases to fund these programs. Moreover the utilities have no reason to question these costs because it is a pass through.
Directing State agencies to ensure that their facilities lead by example through energy master planning, net zero carbon construction, LED retrofits, annual benchmarking, and by meeting their electricity needs through clean and renewable sources of energy, specifically including the exploration of clean energy solutions at State Parks and at State facilities within the Adirondack Park to dramatically reduce emissions, create jobs, and increase resiliency.
We will have to wait to see what this means.
Developing a Net Zero Roadmap to articulate policies and programs that will enable longer-term market transformation to a statewide carbon neutral building stock.
We will have to wait to see what this means.
Together, these bold actions will establish New York as a global leader on environmentally sustainable buildings while catalyzing major economic development opportunities and helping to create good jobs.
It is not clear to me what benefits accrue to the citizens if New York is a global leader on environmentally sustainable buildings.
[1] Wallethub reports that “Data used to create these rankings were obtained from the U.S. Census Bureau, the National Climatic Data Center, the U.S. Energy Information Administration and the Federal Highway Administration.”
Pragmatic Environmentalist of New York 