Long Island Power Plans         

Mark Sertoff, a science/technology educator, occasionally sends me information.  This post describes his comments on the Long Island Power Authority’s (LIPA) Integrated Resource Plan “where they want to replace fossil generation  with mythical wind, battery and solar power.” 

Integrated Resource Plan Comments

I have lightly edited Mark’s comments and added some references.

LIPA’s plunge into wind and solar power replacing reliable, cost-effective, clean fossil generation is the path to energy disaster.  Through decades of solid engineering and execution, Long Island has developed the most reliable and economical above ground power distribution system in New York State.  The defective initiative to wind and solar generation will leave Long Island with seriously unreliable and costly power.

Wind and solar work about 20% of the nameplate capacity.   They need battery backup, which is very expensive, requires rare earths mined in unfriendly countries with child labor that creates environmental pollution in refining.  Existing storage technology only lasts a few hours when a week may be required.  To top it off the batteries have safety issues because they can explode and burn in unquenchable fires emitting toxic fumes.  Europe tried wind and solar with massive problems in reliability and cost so is reopening fossil generation plants. Germany, the former industrial powerhouse of Europe, is losing its industrial base due to high energy costs.

There are significant environmental impacts.  Wind turbines in the marine environment have drastically shorter lives and kill land and sea birds.  Solar panels are negligibly recyclable and require rare earths sourced from unfriendly foreign countries via child labor and create copious pollution in fabrication while being barely recyclable.  There are mountains of scrap wind turbine blades now that can’t be recycled.  Marine wind turbines in construction and operation have caused the deaths of many whales along the East Coast. Machine gun sonar, pile driving, and sub sonic rotor vibrations injure and disorient sea mammals leading to beaching and ship collisions. Solar panels have such low energy density that habitats are destroyed to install solar when conventional generation would make many times more reliable power in a fraction of the land area at lower per-watt cost.

There are questions about the renewable energy business model.  No wind or solar generation would be viable without government taxpayer subsidies. That says it all. It’s a defective business and energy plan. If it were a real upgrade, the market would support it without subsidies.

 Finally, there is no climate crisis.  This “crisis” is based on defective UN climate computer models. Thousands of scientists around the world concur. The greenhouse gas effect is real, but it is only one of many different drivers of climate.  We experience cyclical weather in decadal, century, and millennial cycles and we do not understand those natural cycles well.  It is likely that those cycles are the primary drivers of the observed changes in global temperatures observed and that the greenhouse effect has a minor impact,  Certainly nothing that warrants the proposed changes to our energy system.

Conclusion

I published this because it is a concise summary of the myriad issues associated with New York’s net-zero obsession. It cannot end well and won’t make a difference.