New Climate Reality is Passing New York By

Note: For quite a while now I have put my Citizens Guide to the Climate Act article as the top post on the website because it summarizes the Climate Leadership & Community Protection Act (Climate Act). This post updates my current thoughts about the Climate Act and will replaces that post at the top of the list of articles on October 2, 2023

There is a new climate reality and it is passing New York by.  New York decision makers are going to have to address the new reality that proves that the Hochul Administration’s Scoping Plan to implement the Climate Act will adversely affect affordability, reliability, and the environment.  This post highlights articles by others that address my concerns.

I have followed the Climate Act since it was first proposed, submitted comments on the Climate Act implementation plan, and have written over 350 articles about New York’s net-zero transition.  I have devoted a lot of time to the Climate Act because I believe the ambitions for a zero-emissions economy embodied in the Climate Act outstrip available renewable technology such that the net-zero transition will do more harm than good by increasing costs unacceptably, threatening electric system reliability, and have major unintended environmental impacts.  The opinions expressed in this post do not reflect the position of any of my previous employers or any other company I have been associated with, these comments are mine alone.

Climate Act Background

The Climate Act established a New York “Net Zero” target (85% reduction and 15% offset of emissions) by 2050.  It includes an interim 2030 reduction target of a 40% reduction by 2030 and a requirement that all electricity generated be “zero-emissions” by 2040. The Climate Action Council is responsible for preparing the Scoping Plan that outlines how to “achieve the State’s bold clean energy and climate agenda.”  In brief, that plan is to electrify everything possible using zero-emissions electricity. 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.  After a year-long review, the Scoping Plan recommendations were finalized at the end of 2022.  In 2023 the Scoping Plan recommendations are supposed to be implemented through regulation and legislation. 

Climate Science

In the past several weeks there have been multiple articles highlighting issues that call into question the rationale for the Climate Act and Climate Act net-zero transition.   The rationale for the Climate Act is that there is an existential threat due to climate change.  However, the Epoch Times reports that is not a universally held position:

There’s no climate emergency. And the alarmist messaging pushed by global elites is purely political. That’s what 1,609 scientists and informed professionals stated when they signed the Global Climate Intelligence Group’s “World Climate Declaration.”

The article gives a good overview of the World Climate Declaration.  The declaration’s signatories include Nobel laureates, theoretical physicists, meteorologists, professors, and environmental scientists worldwide. The article quotes a few signatories who when asked by The Epoch Times why they signed the declaration stating that the “climate emergency” is a farce, they all stated a variation of “because it’s true.” 

In my case, I signed the Declaration because I do not think we understand natural climate variability well enough to be able to detect the effect of a relatively small change to the atmosphere’s radiative budget caused by mankind’s greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions.  There are so many poorly understood factors at play and the mathematical challenges of simulating the chaotic, non-linear processes are so immense that I think that claiming that Global Climate Models can simulate the atmosphere well enough to make major changes to the energy system of the world is absurd.

There is another important aspect.  One of the key points made in the Declaration is that climate science is overly politicized:

“Climate science should be less political, while climate policies should be more scientific,” the declaration begins. “Scientists should openly address uncertainties and exaggerations in their predictions of global warming, while politicians should dispassionately count the real costs as well as the imagined benefits of their policy measures.”

It seems to me that every day there is another mass media story attributing any extreme weather event to climate change and insinuating that the “science” has unequivocally shown that there is a link to mankind’s GHG emissions has made the weather more extreme.  The fact is that the latest research and the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change are finding that as Roger Pielke, Jr. explains the “projected climate futures have become radically less dire”.  He argues that the consensus has accepted a large change in expected warming due to a doubling of GHG emissions — from 4^oC to 2.5^oC or less.   Pielke notes that he has documented this trend  for years and has “been talking about the incredible shift in expectations for the future” recently.  Unfortunately he also notes: “Despite the growing recognition that our collective views of the future have changed quickly and dramatically, this change in perspective — a positive and encouraging one at that — has yet to feature in policy, media or scientific discussions of climate.”   He concludes “That silence can’t last, as reality is persistent.”

Affordability

I think this is the one issue that might force political change to the Climate Act net-zero transition.  A coalition of business organizations have called for a “reassessment” of how the Climate Act is being implemented highlighting current policies to determine “what is feasible, what is affordable and what is best for the future of the state.”  In response, Department of Environmental Conservation Commissioner Basil Seggos told Capital Tonight that “the costs of inaction are much higher.”  He goes on: “Listen, we know from two years of very intensive research that the cost of inaction on climate in New York far exceeds the cost of action by the tune of over $100 billion”. I disagree.

The Scoping Plan that documents this claim by Seggos has been described as “a true masterpiece in how to hide what is important under an avalanche of words designed to make people never want to read it”.  No where is this more evident than in the tortuous documentation for this cost claim.  I documented the issues with costs and benefits in my  comments (social cost of carbon benefits, Scoping Plan benefits, and electric system costs).  In brief, the Hochul Administration has never provided concise documentation that includes the costs, expected emission reductions and assumptions used for the control strategies included in the Integration Analysis documentation making it impossible to verify their assumptions and cost estimates. 

The claim that the costs of inaction are more than the costs of action compares real costs to New Yorkers relative to societal benefits that can be charitably described as “biased high” or more appropriately “cherry picked” to maximize alleged benefits and, more importantly, do not directly offset consumer costs.  The benefits claimed are also poorly documented, misleading and the largest benefit is dependent upon an incorrect application of the value of carbon.  The plan claims $235 billion societal benefits for avoided greenhouse gas emissions.  I estimate those benefits should only be $60 billion.  The Scoping Plan gets the higher benefit by counting benefits multiple times.  If I lost 10 pounds five years ago, I cannot say I lost 50 pounds but that is what the plan says.  The cost benefit methodology was duplicitous because the cost comparisons were relative only to Climate Act requirements that did not include “already implemented” programs.  For example, this approach excludes the costs to transition to electric vehicles because that was a requirement mandated before the Climate Act.  I maintain that the total costs to transition to net-zero should be provided because that ultimately represents total consumer costs.  

It is also frustrating that the State ignores that other jurisdictions are finding costs are an issue.  In a recent article I noted that the Prime Minister of Great Britain, Rishi Sunak, said he would spare the public the “unacceptable costs” of net zero as he scaled back a string of flagship environmental policies. The fact is that every jurisdiction that has tried to transition away from fossil-fueled energy has seen a significant increase in consumer costs.  For example, Net Zero Watch recently published a report that describes six ways renewables increase electricity bills that makes that inevitable.   The article explains:

In order to reduce bills, a new generator generally has to force an old one to leave the electricity market — otherwise there are two sets of costs to cover. But with wind power, you can’t let anything leave the market, because one day there might be no wind.

The article goes on to explain that as well as adding excess capacity to the grid, renewables also have a series of other effects, each of which will push bills up further:

Renewables need subsidies, they cause inefficiency, they require new grid balancing services that need to be paid for; the list of all the different effects is surprisingly long. There is only one way a windfarm will push your power bills, and that’s upwards.

Reliability

Another flawed aspect of the Climate Act narrative is that a transition to a zero-emissions electric system is straight-forward and there are no significant technological challenges.  Terry Etam summed up the issues evident in the German transition that will also occur in New York.  In an article about the ramifications of the energy requirements for implementing artificial intelligence applications, he argued that the fossil-fired energy growth in the developing nations has been discouraged by the G7 nations.  However, those nations are pushing back on anything that is not in their best interests.  He writes:

The second big tectonic shift was on full display at the recent G20 summit. The African Union was admitted as a member, which was kind of a big deal, particularly for Africa, but also for the world in general. The addition acknowledges that other voices need to be on the world stage, a sense of humility the G7 has long lacked. The final communique issued at the end of the G20 summit included doses of common sense lacking from typical utterances of the G7: “We affirm that no country should have to choose between fighting poverty and fighting for the planet…It is also critical to account for the short-, medium-, and long-term impact of both the physical impact of climate change and transition policies, including on growth, inflation, and unemployment.” 

Contrast that with the west’s bizarre self-lobotomization when it comes to energy, as best personified by the entity furthest along the rapid-transition path, Germany: the dwindling economic powerhouse is chained to a green freight train it insists is under control, has shut down nuclear power plants with no low-emissions baseload to replace it, and in a final stunning swan dive to the pavement, is orchestrating the installation of 500,000 heat pumps per year to the grid, which will be in most demand in cold weather and will perform worst in cold weather, and will add a potential 10 gigawatts of cold-weather demand at the very instant the grid is least able to afford it, and for which there is no supply available anyway. A German energy economic university think tank says the additional cold-weather demand could only be met by new gas-fired power plants, which are not being built. In sum: Germany has shuttered its cleanest, most reliable energy; it has or is trying to banish hydrocarbons and replace them with intermittent power; and finally, is hastening adoption of devices that will function very well in 80 percent of conditions when it doesn’t matter much but will fail in a spectacularly deadly way at the point in time when they are needed the very most, because heat pumps will be turned up to 11 at the very time the grid will be the most taxed. German engineering isn’t what it used to be.

In the last several years I have concluded that intermittency of wind and solar is the fatal flaw for that technology.  The most important consideration is the need for energy storage.  Francis Menton writing at the Manhattan Contrarian summarizes energy storage problems in a recent post on a new British Royal Society report “Large-scale energy storage.”  This report suffers from the same problems afflicting the Climate Act Scoping Plan.  Menton explains:

Having now put some time into studying this Report, I would characterize it as semi-competent. That is an enormous improvement over every other effort on this subject that I have seen from green energy advocates. But despite their promising start, the authors come nowhere near a sufficient showing that wind plus solar plus storage can make a viable and cost-effective electricity system. In the end, their quasi-religious commitment to a fossil-fuel-free future leads them to minimize and divert attention away from critical cost and feasibility issues. As a result, the Report, despite containing much valuable information, is actually useless for any public policy purpose.

I believe that the insurmountable problem with energy storage backup for wind and solar is worst-case extremes.  The Royal Society report notes that “it would be prudent to add contingency against prolonged periods of very low supply”.  This contingency is the theoretical dispatchable emissions-free resource that the Integration Analysis, New York State Independent System Operator, New York State Reliability Council, and Public Service Commission in the Order Initiating Process Regarding Zero Emissions Target in Case 15-E-0302 all acknowledge is necessary.  Incredibly, the loudest voices on the Climate Action Council clung to the dogmatic position that no new technology like this resource was necessary and excluded any consideration of a backup plan to address the contingency that a not yet commercialized technology might never become commercially viable and affordable.

If New York State were to embrace nuclear energy, then there might be a chance to significantly reduce GHG emissions without affecting reliability.  Instead, the Scoping Plan placeholder option for this resource is green hydrogen.  Menton describes the hydrogen option proposal in the Royal Society report:

Since hydrogen is the one and only possible solution to the storage problem, the authors proceed to a lengthy consideration of what the future wind/solar/hydrogen electricity system will look like. There will be massive electrolyzers to get hydrogen from the sea. Salt deposits will be chemically dissolved to create vast underground caverns to store the hydrogen. Hydrogen will be transported to these vast caverns and stored there for years and decades, then transported to power plants to burn when needed. A fleet of power plants will burn the hydrogen when called upon to do so, although admittedly they may be idle most of the time, maybe even 90% of the time; but for a pinch, there must be sufficient thermal hydrogen-burning plants to supply the whole of peak demand when needed.

The Scoping Plan proposal is slightly different.  It envisions that the electrolyzers will be powered by wind and solar to create so-called “green” hydrogen.  Menton and I agree that the biggest unknown is the cost.  He raises the following cost issues:

• How about the new network of pipelines to transport the hydrogen all over the place?
• How about the entire new fleet of thermal power plants, capable of burning 100% hydrogen, and sufficient to meet 100% of peak demand when it’s night and the wind isn’t blowing.
• They use a 5% interest rate for capital costs. That’s too low by at least half — should be 10% or more.
• And can they really build all the wind turbines and solar panels and electrolyzers they are talking about at the prices they are projecting?

It gets worse in New York.  Ideologues on the Climate Action Council have taken the position that “zero-emissions” means no emissions of any kind.  They propose to use the hydrogen in fuel cells rather than combustion turbines because combustion turbines would emit nitrogen oxides emissions.  This adds another unproven “at the scale necessary” technology making it even less likely to succeed as well as adding another unknown cost.  In addition, it ignores that there are emissions associated with the so-called zero-emissions technologies that they espouse.  All they are advocating is moving the emissions elsewhere.

Environmental Impacts

I addressed the implications that the Scoping Plan only considers environmental impacts of fossil fueled energy in my Draft Scoping Plan Comments.  The life-cycle and upstream emissions and impacts are addressed but no impacts of the proposed “zero-emissions” resources or other energy storage technology are considered.  The fact is that there are significant environmental, economic, and social justice impacts associated with the production of those technologies. Furthermore, the most recent cumulative environmental impact analysis only considered a fraction of the total number of wind turbines and area covered by solar PV installations proposed in the Scoping Plan.  As a result, the ecological impacts on the immense area of impacted land and water have not been adequately addressed.

One of the more frustrating aspects of the Hochul Administration’s Climate Act implementation is the lack of a plan.  For example, consider utility-scale solar development.  There are no responsible solar siting requirements in place so solar developers routinely exceed the Department of Agriculture and Markets guidelines for protection of prime farmlands.  My solar development scorecard found that prime farmland comprises 21% of the project area of 18 approved utility-scale solar project permit applications which is double the Ag and Markets guideline. 

I am particularly concerned about environmental impacts associated with Off Shore Wind (OSW).  This will be a major renewable resource in the proposed Climate Act net-zero electric energy system.  The Climate Act mandates 9,000 MW of Off Shore Wind (OSW) generating capacity by 2035.  The Integration Analysis modeling used to develop the Scoping Plan projects OSW capacity at 6,200 MW by 2030, 9,096 MW by 2035 and reaches 14,364 MW in 2040.  I summarized several OSW issues in a recent article that highlighted an article by Craig Rucker titled Offshore Wind Power Isn’t ‘Clean and Green,’ and It Doesn’t Cut CO2 Emissions.  He explains:

A single 12 MW (megawatts) offshore wind turbine is taller than the Washington Monument, weighs around 4,000 tons, and requires mining and processing millions of tons of iron, copper, aluminum, rare earths and other ores, with much of the work done in Africa and China using fossil fuels and near slave labor.

Relying on wind just to provide electricity to power New York state on a hot summer day would require 30,000 megawatts. That means 2,500 Haliade-X 12 MW offshore turbines and all the materials that go into them. Powering the entire U.S. would require a 100 times more than that. 

These numbers are huge, but the situation is actually much worse.

This is because offshore turbines generate less than 40% of their “rated capacity.” Why? Because often there’s no wind at all for hours or days at a time. This requires a lot of extra capacity, which means a lot more windmills will have to be erected to charge millions of huge batteries, to ensure stable, reliable electricity supplies.

Once constructed, those turbines would hardly be earth or human friendly, either. They would severely impact aviation, shipping, fishing, submarines, and whales. They are hardly benign power sources.

The environmental impacts on whales of the OSW resources necessary to meet the net-zero transition are especially alarming.  Earlier this year I described the Citizens Campaign for the Environment virtual forum entitled Whale Tales and Whale Facts.  The sponsors wanted the public to hear the story that there was no evidence that site survey work was the cause of recent whale deaths.  I concluded that the ultimate problem with the forum was that they ignored the fact that construction noises will be substantially different than the ongoing site surveys and will probably be much more extensive when the massive planned construction starts.  The virtual forum noted a lack of funding for continued monitoring necessary to address the many concerns with massive offshore wind development to allay the concerns of the public.   Since then, the Save Right Whales Coalition (SRWC) has found issues with the incidental harassment of whales associated with the noise levels associated sonar surveys done in conjunction with OSW development.  I am very disappointed that the Hochul Administration is not investing in an adequate monitoring program that confirms that whales are not being harmed. 

Conclusion

This article was intended to summarize my current concerns about the impacts of the Climate Act transition on affordability, reliability, and the environment.  There is a growing realization that the alleged problem of global warming is not as big a threat as commonly assumed. Combined with the fact that New York GHG emissions are less than one half of one percent of global emissions and global emissions have been increasing on average by more than one half of one percent per year since 1990 the rationale for doing anything is weak.  It may not mean that we should not do something, but clearly we have time to address the affordability, reliability and environmental impact issues.

The Scoping Plan has not provided comprehensive and transparent cost estimates so New Yorkers have no idea what this will cost.  I explained why the Hochul Administration claim that the costs of inaction are more than the costs of action is misleading and inaccurate.  I believe that all New Yorkers should let it be known that they need to know the expected costs so they can determine if they support the transition.

When the energy system becomes all-electric the reliability of the electric system will be even more critical than today.  The State plan is to proceed as if there are no implementation issues.  The rational thing to do would be to develop demonstration projects to prove feasibility and cost of the new technology needed before dismantling the current system.  Francis Menton explains why this is necessary and how it could work.  There is no sign that is being considered.

It is particularly galling that organizations who claim to be in favor of a better environment have failed to support comprehensive cumulative environmental impact assessment and on-going impact monitoring assessment to potential impacts from wind, solar, and energy storage development on the scale necessary for the net-zero transition.  Maybe they don’t want to know that the concerns are real.

Mark Twain said: “It is easier to fool someone than it is to tell them they have been fooled.”    The politicians who support the Climate Act net-zero transition have been fooled into thinking it is affordable, will not affect reliability, and benefits the environment.  Unfortunately, it is very difficult to slow down, much less stop the unfolding train wreck of these policies.  I encourage readers to keep asking for a full cost accounting of all the proposed programs as the most obvious concern.