On March 1, 2019 the New York State Energy Research & Development Authority (NYSERDA) Energy Analysis program published Patterns and Trends – New York State Energy Profiles: 2002-2016 which they described as a “comprehensive storehouse of energy statistics and data on energy consumption, supply sources, and price and expenditure information for New York State.” I agree and strongly recommend that anyone who has any interest in New York State energy download the document and check it out.
For numbers geeks like me one of the features that I really love is the fact that the tables are linked to spreadsheets. For example, Table 3-1b: NYS Primary Consumption of Energy by Sector in the report only lists data from 2002 to 2016 but when you click on the table and download the spreadsheet data back to 1980 are available. Moreover, the data are in a spreadsheet so you can process it as you wish.
It is very disappointing that there was a 26 month lag between the end of the report period and the publication of the data. I consider this one of the best products of NYSERDA but apparently under the rule of the Cuomo Administration it is not a priority. Before the Cuomo Administration this report came out 13 months after the end of the reporting period. The 1997-2011 report was 18 months later and the last three reports were dated in October so were 22 months late.
I will be using these data in future posts but I cannot help but show how useful it is in one example. National Grid’s “Northeast 80×50 Pathway” is a blueprint for the region to reduce its greenhouse gas emissions 80 percent below 1990 levels by 2050 (“80×50”). The first of its kind in the Northeast, the Pathway spans seven states (New York and the six New England states), and addresses the three main sectors of emissions: transportation, electricity, and heat. If you search on “National Grid Northeast 80 by 50 Pathway” you will get a list of fawning articles talking about how great this is but I am a customer worried about home heating and they are talking about a plan for that.
The politically correct approach for reducing emissions from home heating is to convert to heat pumps. According to the pathway:
Heat pumps are very different from standard electric resistance heaters. Compared to traditional “baseboard” technologies, heat pumps achieve a 50-80% reduction in electricity use by moving heat rather than creating it. They use conventional refrigeration technology to absorb heat from one source (air, ground, or water), transfer it to another source, and raise it or lower it to a temperature suitable for space heating (or cooling) and hot water. Heat pumps still face major adoption challenges. In particular, ground-source heat pumps need to achieve cost declines to become more accessible to customers, and air-source heat pumps need to be paired with proper building insulation.
The question is just how much energy are we talking about. The Patterns and Trends document includes a table of NYS Net Residential Consumption of Energy by Fuel Type that shows just ambitious changes to home heating will be. Total residential consumption of energy typically totals 800 TBtu or 800 trillion British thermal units. Thomas Fuller writing about the challenges of meeting the Green New Deal notes that a BTU is a unit of energy–strictly speaking the energy required to raise the temperature of a pint of water from 39 to 40 degrees Fahrenheit. About the amount of energy released from a burning wooden match. There are around 115,000 BTU per gallon of gasoline and one TBtu is equivalent to 39,000 cars driving round trip between New York and Los Angeles if the cars get 25 miles per gallon.
I graphed the data to see the NYS Residential Energy Consumption trends. Natural gas use has increased over time, coal has disappeared and petroleum products have decreased. Today Natural gas provides 58% of the home heating energy, petroleum products 16%, and wood around 2%. Electricity, solar and geothermal provide 24%. National Grid’s pathway suggests that petroleum product heating should be converted to electricity which would mean that 128 TBtu of energy needs to be replaced. While that seems plenty ambitious to me there are those that think that we need to convert all home heating to electricity, solar and geothermal. I think that the disruption and expense of complete conversion far out-weighs any benefits but that will be the subject of another post.
Pragmatic Environmentalist of New York 