Category: Climate Act

New York Building Decarbonization is Destined to Fail

Richard Ellenbogen frequently copies me on emails that address various issues associated with New York’s Climate Leadership and Community Protection Act (Climate Act).  I asked his permission to present his analysis explaining why New York’s building decarbonization push it is going to fail, just as Germany’s has, and will drive up state GHG emissions and raise utility costs for decades.  He has consolidated all of his material on this topic in one document and has included recommendations for an alternative approach.

I have published other articles by Ellenbogen because he truly cares about the environment and the environmental performance record of his business shows that he is walking the walk.   Ellenbogen is the President of Allied Converters  that manufactures food packaging.  His facility is about 55,000 square feet and does a lot of manufacturing with heat to seal the bags, all electrically driven.  The facility has solar panels and uses co-generation.  He explains:

In 2008, the average energy cost per square foot for a commercial facility in  Westchester was $1.80.  We were at 16% of that 12 years later and even with the increases, we are at 62% of that 14 years later.  That has been done while having a carbon footprint 30% – 40% lower than the utility system.  The $1.80 per foot  also included commercial office space and our operation is far more energy intensive than an office.  We use energy extremely efficiently and as a result, our bills are much lower than everyone else. 

Ellenbogen on Building Decarbonization

While it is being proposed with good intentions, NY State’s building decarbonization push is going to fail, just as Germany’s has, and will drive up state GHG emissions and raise utility costs for decades.  The analysis to justify that conclusion follows.  While there is new material included, a portion is a synopsis  of prior emails but as NY State gets closer to committing energy suicide, I felt obligated to put it all in one document.  As it is written, the state’s energy plan is going to be the fossil fuel company’s best friend.  NY State is adopting a “Chicken Little” approach to energy policy.  It is so focused on the acorn of fossil fuels and a belief that the sky is falling that it is ignoring science in the process.  As a result, the state will fall victim to the fox of energy failures, high GHG emissions,  and incredibly high utility rates that are going to eat NY State citizens and businesses.  For those who declare that  NY State must exhibit “Climate Leadership”, this policy isn’t that.  It is copying a failed policy from Germany.  For those not interested in the minutiae of the reasoning, the figure headlines and the final recommendations will give an accurate picture of the problems.

There is a way to get about a 44% GHG reduction in NY State while also having enough generation to support the system without imposing extremely high costs on the state’s residents and businesses.  It can be implemented in one-quarter  the time of the state’s current plan using a combination of improved fossil fuel plants and renewables, while replacing old gas equipment with newer gas equipment that won’t require an entire rewiring of NY State.

In lieu of doing something that will actually work, the state’s plan will face the following issues:

1 – Cost – Trillions of Dollars

First of all, the cost of the project will not be anywhere near as inexpensive as the $200 billion figure that is being thrown around.  Going through all of the figures, it will be at least $600 billion for the electrification portion, before adding storage and renewable generation to the totals.   For anyone that doubts that, the cost of a single 400 mile cable from Quebec to NY City has now risen to $6 billion and try to name a single infrastructure project in NY State that has come in on budget.  The Champlain Hudson Power Express Cable was projected to cost $2 billion in 2013.  That cost is now up to $6 billion, a 232% increase in inflation adjusted dollars.  Does anyone seriously believe that the entire state can be rewired for less than 100 times that cost?  If you add in storage costs at the present cost of Lithium Ion Batteries, the cost rises to approximately $4 trillion plus the cost of the renewable generation.  Even if you could get a 75% reduction in storage costs using a different technology, the total cost will be well over $1.5 trillion and much of that will depend on the usable life of the new storage.   At present, battery storage only lasts 10 years.   Pumped Storage would likely be much more cost effective but where in NY State can a utility site a large reservoir.  Also, based upon Con Ed’s experience with Storm King Mountain between 1960 and 1980, no utility will even try to build a pumped storage facility.

2 – Logistics – Size of Project and Lack of Labor will result in it requiring Over 60 Years – Policy is going to create situations where the mandates cannot be fulfilled

There are 112,000 miles of roads in NY State.  Of those, about 22,000 miles are major highways and likely don’t have electric distribution lines on them, leaving about 90,000 miles of distribution lines that were designed and sized for an era where onsite heating was delivered from fossil fuels or wood.  The vast majority of the transformers and conductors will not handle a tripling of the electric load during the during the winter.  If you eliminate 18,000 miles (20%) for areas upstate that are already using electric heat, that leaves 72,000 miles of distribution network to be rewired.  8,000 of those miles are in NY City where a substantial portion of the infrastructure is buried and the costs will be higher still.

When I did the utility project with Con Ed back in 2010 where we demonstrated that we could reduce transmission loads and line losses using reactive power correction on the local distribution system,  I added power monitoring devices to four transformers.  On hot days during the summer, three of the four transformers where the project was executed were operating at or near their capacity on a hot summer day. If heat pumps are added to the system, the winter time load on a cold day will be substantially higher than the summer time load on a hot day.  That is not my speculation.  The NYISO has determined that NY State will need an additional 25 Gigawatts of generation to support heat pumps in NY State. during the winter.  Winter peaks are expected to exceed summer peaks starting in the early 2030’s.

As a result, a substantial portion of that 90,000 miles will need to be rewired to support onsite electrification.  Using an existing project in California as a reference, PG&E has been required to bury 10,000 miles of high voltage transmission lines in the fire prone areas.  In 2022, they replaced 71 miles of cable.  By 2025, they expect to increase that to a rate of 1200 miles per year.  That doesn’t include replacing transformers or services to people’s homes which would be required to electrify onsite heating.  Even larger conductors will have to be added in rural areas of NY State where they expect to interconnect large solar arrays so that the projects don’t keep getting canceled because of interconnection costs.  While replacing overhead lines would take less time than burying them, replacing old equipment with higher capacity equipment for the larger heating loads and the additional time needed to increase the service sizes into people’s homes would about offset the time difference.

At 1200 miles per year, rewiring 72,000 miles of distribution lines in NY state will take 60 years to upgrade.  They have been burying larger electric and gas services in New Rochelle to support the extra 9,000 units of housing that they are building here and the roads have been like a slalom course for about 4 years to fix about 10 miles of services so the 60 years is not an unrealistic estimate.  NY City may take even longer to rewire and that is 40% of the state’s population.  What is going to happen to the people that cannot replace their gas equipment in areas where the service has not been upgraded to support the higher electric loads imposed on the system by NY State policy ?

3 – Bad Science Is Driving Initiatives – Results Will be Far worse than Estimated and It will add Enormous Costs On the Backs of the State’s Citizens

I have read extensively about the PAF (Population Attributable Fraction) technique that was used as the analytical tool to do the analysis for the recent paper about gas stoves and childhood asthma.  A slide from an upcoming PowerPoint that I will be presenting is below.  The caption at the bottom of the slide was copied from the introduction of a paper discussing PAF by people that developed an improvement to PAF.  However, the improved version needs very specific data directed at the variables involved, and not 30 – 40 year old data that was not asking the necessary questions from a time when the focus on health issues was very different.   Every PAF study with multiple variables warns of bias in the study and questionable results, whether it is from sugar intake  and type 2 diabetes to comorbidities and Covid.  Asthma falls into the multiple variable category.  Risk factors can include tree pollen, second hand smoke, proximity to large emission sources such as factories or power plants, pet dander, vehicle exhaust, nutrition, and yes, even gas stoves, among others.  But unless all of the data on the other variables was collected in the survey, PAF will return garbage, even in the updated format proposed by the authors of the PAF improvement.  Thus, the conclusions of the gas stove report have no validity.  

Another issue never explained by the authors of the gas stove study is why the top ten states for cases of asthma in the US are all 80% electric stoves and the top eight states for childhood asthma are 80% electric stoves.  If gas stoves were that large of a factor, at least one of the five states that is primarily gas stoves would appear higher on those lists.   The conclusions of the study could possibly be correct, but no one could be sure because the study was so poorly conceived, conducted, and analyzed.  It certainly should not be used as the basis for a public policy affecting 19.5 million people that is going to add an additional $72 billion in costs onto the backs of the state’s utility customers.  Results that will be at least 95% – 98% as effective can be obtained at a fraction of that cost using other techniques.

4 – Existing Transmission and Distribution System Will Not Support Installation of Large scale Renewable Generation – Too Many Resources are Being Wasted on Projects that will Yield No Environmental Benefits.  Not Enough is being spent On Grid Infrastructure to support renewables and vehicle electrification.

Another major issue, and one that is severely impacting the installation of renewables is the fact that the state’s utility system is wired backwards for what policy makers are trying to do with it.  The utility system was wired to have large sources of generation distributing energy outward from a few locations.   Now, the state is trying to site large generation sources in remote locations where the infrastructure won’t support it.  As a result, renewable generation installers are faced with long transmission line runs to interconnect into the system, making the projects non-cost effective.  The projects are being cancelled and as a result, NY State is falling well behind in their installation schedule that was already insufficient to fulfill the state’s requirements. 

This is also apparent with regard to the 9 GW of offshore wind.  There is a major concern about the availability of space to run the cables to interconnect the energy to where it is needed.  One possibility is running the cables across Long Island in an environment where every infrastructure project is faced with lawsuits.  As a result, even if they can build the 9 GW of Atlantic Wind, they may only be able to interconnect about 6 GW to where it is needed.  That is clearly  shown in another slide from the upcoming PowerPoint documenting a critical page in a NY State Power Grid report,  below.  Transferring renewable generation installation projects to NYPA may increase the rate of installation slightly but the node analyses will still have to be done that takes five years at present and the transmission lines will still have to be installed so the price will not be reduced.

5 – Air Source Heat Pumps On a System Not Fully Supported By Renewable Generation Will Not Reduce GHG.  There are not Enough Drillers to install Ground Source Heat Pumps, which actually work, in any time frame that will yield significant results.

As is clearly documented in the slide below, putting electric onsite heating into buildings that are not fully supported by renewables just shifts the load to existing generating plants.  In Germany, heat pump installation, primarily air source,  exceeds gas combustion installation.  However, despite installing massive amounts of renewable generation, while their household carbon emissions have declined by 28% since 1999, their utility system carbon emissions only declined by 3.4%.  While they closed nuclear plants, they actually installed more Gigawatt hours of renewables.  They should have seen a large GHG decrease, but heat pumps running on a system that uses fossil fuel generation add marginal additional load to the fossil fuel plants with higher emissions than an efficient gas boiler/furnace.   

Germany is playing “Whack-A-Mole” with its building emissions and NY State is about to do the same thing.  They beat down the emissions in one place and they pop up somewhere else.  That chart was copied from a Yale publication “Can Germany revive its stalled energy transition?” published in about 2018.  Based upon events 4 years later, the answer has been a resounding “NO”  Even prior to the war in Ukraine, Germany was reopening coal plants.  After the war started and they lost their gas supply, they opened even more coal plants and there were news articles about people across Europe stealing firewood,  cutting down trees, and burning anything that they could find to stay warm.  That will be the future of NY State with the proposed policies.  Germany has been exceedingly lucky this year with a relatively warm winter, however they recently signed an agreement with Qatar to import 20 million metric tons of Liquid Natural Gas over the next ten years.

As the chart shown below from a Cornell Geothermal report clearly show, all additional load added to the system is supported by fossil fuel generation.  Blue and Brown lines were added after to explain the difference between the upstate and downstate generation sources which in 2019 were within 5% of each other.  However, in terms of zero emissions sources, they were worlds apart.  The downstate system is almost entirely supplied by fossil fuels.

6 – Battery Storage is being added to the System Prematurely.  The batteries will wear out at least 50 years before the state has enough renewable generation to charge them.  As a result, they will be charged with fossil fuel generation with a 15% – 20% higher carbon footprint than the actual generation.

As all marginal generation in NY State is provided by fossil fuel generation, all new battery systems that are added will increase fossil fuel generation by a minimum of 15% related to that stored energy as 15% of the battery’s energy is lost in the Charge/Discharge cycle.  The batteries will need to be replaced after about 10 years, well before the system will be supported by renewable generation.  This is great news for Elon Musk, but not that good for the taxpayers and utility customers in NY State.  The following slide was also borrowed from the same report.

7 – An Energy “Shell Game” is Being Used to Make the New Micron Technology Facility Appear Greener than it Actually Will Be under CLCPA rules.  However, it could be made far “Greener” in reality by siting a combined cycle generating plant next to the Micron Facility.  Nuclear generation would be better still, but that would take far longer to build and would have much higher upfront costs.

The New Micron Technology Facility in Clay, NY will eventually use more energy than the state of Vermont.  NY State and NYPA have said that they will provide 140 Megawatts of NY Hydro to the plant.   For lack of a better word, that policy is a farce.  All of the NY State Hydro has been allocated for years.  If they allocate it to the Micron Facility, those customers that are currently using it will then effectively be using fossil fuels.  They want Micron to use all renewable energy.  From Where?  A solar array that could generate enough energy to support that facility would occupy 100 square miles.  They want Micron the buy Carbon Credits.  From whom?  NY State’s two largest neighbors to the south and west, Pennsylvania and Ohio, average 1.5% renewable energy.  If NY State has to import energy from either of those states to support the Micron facility, it will all be from fossil fuel generation, gas or coal fired, at a lower efficiency than a combined cycle generator.  The import of energy from long distances to the Micron Site will increase transmission line losses by approximately 350 Gigawatts compared with a generator on-site.  The new rules are going to make the Micron facility less energy efficient, more polluting,  and also increase Micron’s operational costs while imposing environmental costs on the state.  Forcing Micron to buy Carbon Credits does nothing to help the environment.  It literally papers over the problem while raising Micron’s costs and doing nothing tangible to reduce greenhouse gas emissions.

8 – Renewable Generation Installation Rates are Insufficient to Support NY State’s Plan

Even prior to many of the recent cancellations of renewable generation projects, NY State was not going to have enough renewable generation installed for about 60 years.  Prior to the cancellations, NY State was going to be at least 120,000 Gigawatt hours short of what it would need to support the system on all renewables by 2035 as is shown in the slide below.  With onsite fossil fuel combustion about to be banned in new building and replacement equipment banned after 2035,  while EV’s are mandated for all sales after 2035, the system load is going to grow far more rapidly than the expansion of renewable generation resulting in an energy shortfall.  Beyond the transmission issues facing the Atlantic Wind projects mentioned earlier, the Jones Act is going to slow the rate of installation for offshore wind by limiting the number of jack ships that will be available.   While NY State is short on land, money, and grid capacity, the one thing that NY State has in abundance is lawyers so that any renewable project will be faced with years of NIMBY lawsuits and the resulting delays.

Just because California tried it that doesn’t mean that NY State should.  California has a Mediterranean climate and is 20 degrees warmer in the winter so the orange and gray “energy blocks” in the fossil fuel column A on the chart below are much smaller.  If NY State had the same climate as California, it would eliminate a need for about 150,000 Gigawatt hours of renewable generation on the future system.  Keep in mind that California is having difficulty keeping the lights on without the albatross of onsite heating around their neck.

Four columns on the chart above are labeled A,B,C,D and are referred to in the conclusion. 

“A” is the Existing Fossil Fuel Consumption in NY State.  “B” is the Electric Load if all of that was converted to  electric technologies on a fully GHG free generation system.  “C” is 6 GW of 1000 hour storage as mentioned in the NY State Energy Storage report.  Current cost using Lithium-Ion batteries, $3.4 Trillion.  NY State is betting on technologies that don’t exist commercially yet and at present, have shorter lifespans than the 10 years of Lithium-Ion.  “D” was the projected renewable installation for 2035 estimated in 2019 using figures provided by NY State.  With solar projects being canceled, in 2023 that is an overly optimistic estimate.

Even if all of the existing fossil fuel generation remained static and no fossil fuel plants are closed, the additional load being mandated is going to outstrip the rate of renewable installation.  As NY State is not allowed to build any new fossil fuel generation, one of two things will happen as a result of the energy shortfalls shown in the slide above.  NY State citizens will be without lights and heat, or NY State will have to import large amounts of fossil fuel generation from out of state, just as California has had to do.  When the neighboring states don’t have it available, NY State will have to impose rolling blackouts just as California now does, only the blackouts will occur on the coldest days of winter which will be far more deadly than the hot days during the California summer.

If Climate Change is truly the existential crisis that the authors of the CLCPA claim it to be, and if the recent UN report about the need to halve atmospheric carbon within 10 years is true, then NY State’s 60 – 70 year plan that is going to increase carbon emissions for at least the first 30 years needs some rethinking.

 Keep in mind that NY States total GHG emissions are 350 million metric tons annually.   Worldwide GHG emissions increased in 2021 by 2 billion metric tons, 40% of that from increased coal combustion in China, India, Germany, Japan, and other countries.  So, the increase in worldwide GHG emissions in 2021 was six times NY State’s total annual emissions. 

Because of the above fact, it is apparent that the rate of Climate Change is not in the purview of NY State policy makers.  As resources are limited, instead of wasting money on building electrification that will yield no holistic improvements in GHG emissions, resources should be used to harden infrastructure against the inevitable negative effects of Climate Change, whether that is on grid infrastructure or flood mitigation.  The most expensive and severe impacts of Sandy were on the underground infrastructure of NY City and along the Hudson River.  Venice type barriers might be considered for under the Verrazano and the Triborough Bridges, however that will never happen if the state wastes $600 billion on an electrification plan with no positive upside.

A Better Plan –

The following, if executed properly could result in the energy chart, below, where the right hand column actually can supply NY State’s energy needs at a fraction of the cost of the current plan while also reducing fossil fuel energy use and the associated GHG emissions by 44%.  However, people will have to allow techniques that don’t meet the current standard of ideological purity in NY State.

By eliminating the push to electrify buildings, the energy savings and carbon reductions will actually be greater than what the CLCPA will yield in practice.  This alternative plan will need far less labor and storage resources.  Existing resources can be allocated to grid infrastructure to support renewable installation and vehicle electrification.  Vehicle electrification is the fastest way to improve GHG emissions.   Eliminating storage requirements will reduce battery demand and costs, making EV’s cheaper.

All is not Doom and Gloom

What can be done to reduce GHG emissions considering the state’s lack of financial resources and the lack of sufficient renewable generation for at least seven decades?  The following is a list of ten ideas that can be implemented relatively quickly that will help to rapidly lower GHG without breaking the piggy bank while also slowing or reversing the increase in utility bills

  1. Do not electrify buildings that run on natural gas – while it will reduce GHG at the building, it will increase it as much at the generating plants while forcing residents and the utilities to incur enormous rewiring costs. There will be no reduction in current fossil fuel energy, Column A in the New York Fossil Fuel Energy Load figure. Also, the gas stove analysis that was done recently was mathematically flawed and should not be used to set public policy.
  2. Focus heat pump efforts on locations that use oil heat or that use radiant electric heat. Those locations will see a significant reduction of GHG and heat pumps will reduce grid load when compared to radiant electric heat.
  3. Focus resources on expanding grid infrastructure. This will reduce the cost of installing solar in Upstate locations and reduce the number of system cancellations allowing the state to increase the proposed renewable generating resources, Column D in the New York Fossil Fuel Energy Load figure.
  4. Increasing grid infrastructure will also help with the installation of chargers for the electric vehicle wave that is about to arrive, with or without the state mandate.
  5. Do not install large amounts of battery storage until there is sufficient renewable generation to support the storage. It will increase current fossil fuel energy (Column A in the New York Fossil Fuel Energy Load figure) while incurring an enormous capital outlay and starving other projects of funding. They will also decay well before sufficient renewable generation is installed.
  6. Replace older generating plants with higher efficiency combined cycle natural gas generating plants. The state will need the energy to support the EV’s and the newer plants are far more efficient. It will lower Column A, reduce gas usage and put downward pressure on the commodity price.
  7. Place an emphasis on hydrogen injection into natural gas combustion plants. It will decrease gas usage and increase combustion temperatures which reduces NOx emissions and lowers current fossil fuel energy, Column A. It will greatly lower GHG emissions related to those generating plants
  8. Focus available natural gas resources on combined heat and power systems. It will reduce the utility bills for the system owners while also reducing requirements for grid infrastructure. Allow multiple building to form micro-grids to utilize the thermal output and increase the generation capacity. It will greatly reduce Column A
  9. Allow Micron Technolgies to build a combined cycle plant the size of Cricket Valley Energy Center on their property. The Micron facility will use more energy than the state of Vermont. Instead of letting them be “green” on paper by buying carbon credits, let them be green in reality with high efficiency generation and have lower energy costs to make them more competitive and able to recoup the $5 billion rebate without faking it. That will eliminate the increase in column a related to the facility.
  10. Figure out how the utilities can interconnect the 9 GW of offshore wind because at the moment, no one is certain how to do it. There is limited space for underwater cables. Without that, energy curtailments will occur and impede the increase of column d, unless they use the alternative idea which is to run transmission lines across Long Island.

Ellenbogen Conclusion

Ellenbogen Follow Up

The next day Ellenbogen followed up with another email with this warning.

In a speech to the British Parliament in 1948, Winston Churchill said, ‘Those who do not learn history are doomed to repeat it”.

As a conclusion to my email of yesterday, March 28, the following should serve as a warning to those proposing the current NY State Energy plan and expensive projects that are going to raise utility rates but do little for the environment. 

The statement above by Churchill not only applies to NY State following Germany’s failed energy program.  It also applies to something that happened just across Lake Ontario, much closer to home.

In 2009, Ontario, Canada passed the Green Energy Act.  Ontario has a similar population distribution to NY State with large population centers to the south and more rural areas to the north. Hardships were incurred by the more rural areas in the building of renewable generation and sending the energy to the wealthier, more densely populated southern areas.  In reading some articles on the subject, it was portrayed as a class war.   The act might have survived that issue, except energy costs skyrocketed along with the perceived injustices and the combination led to the repeal of the Act after only 10 years.   The Green Energy Act from 2009 is available here and an article documenting the repeal is here.

As I documented above, the state’s energy policies are going to cost trillions of dollars with far fewer carbon emission reductions than could otherwise be obtained at a far lower cost.  Hundreds of square miles of solar arrays and wind farms are going to have to be built in rural areas that are already exhibiting a substantial resistance to the projects.  The 2019 repeal of the act gave municipalities the right to control  what energy projects could be built within their borders, just the opposite of NY State’s proposed legislation.

The quest for the perfect will be anything but and the inevitable voter rebellion that is going to occur in the not-too-distant future is going to leave the state with massive debt, extremely high utility costs, and little to no GHG reduction to show for it.  In the interim, a decade will have passed where functional, inexpensive programs could be implemented that will actually reduce GHG in the real world, as opposed to the current program that only might work in Mark Zuckerberg’s fantasy Metaverse.  It certainly hasn’t worked in any cold climate on Earth where it has been tried.

Utility customers are already feeling enormous amounts of pain.  I have been receiving emails of late from politicians excoriating Con Ed for raising rates, however most of the increase is needed to comply with the mandates of the CLCPA.   The increases are due to terrible policy and not utility rate gouging.   As a clear example of how upside down this policy is, it actually has me defending Con Ed after they said some rather nasty things about me in a tariff hearing 12 years ago.  I have a long memory and no love for Con Ed but this energy policy is going to end up turning the state’s utilities into piñatas through no fault of their own. 

The utility rate increases are going to be far worse going forward as the costs documented in my email of yesterday are not figments of my imagination.  The plan will not be sustainable.  The state can’t borrow its way out of trillions of dollars of costs in an effort to subsidize utility rate payers to ease the pain that will be caused by this.

Beyond the actual costs, there is going to be a huge opportunity cost in terms of lost time imposed by the CLCPA that prevents working solutions from being executed, along with a souring of popular attitudes towards any future programs to reduce GHG. 

In their overreach for an unrealistic fantasy, they are going to achieve nothing.  Unfortunately, as bad as that is, that situation will be the best-case scenario.  The worst-case scenario will be that they continue to push forward, ignoring utility customers pain, still achieving no GHG reductions, while creating energy shortages that result in loss of life. 

The current energy policy has no long-term positive outcomes.

Caiazza Concluded Remarks

I could quibble with a few numbers and my take is slightly different for a few aspects but I am in complete agreement that this cannot possibly work.  The biggest flaw in the Hochul Administration’s net-zero transition plan is the lack of a feasibility analysis.  In 2018 I wrote the following.

We’re choosing between as yet undefined but surely expensive options trying to understand which one (or what mix) will be the least expensive. Unfortunately we don’t know but we need to start now because we’ve been told that we have to make reductions by 2030.  If we make a good pick then we’ll spend the least amount of a lot of money and will be left with the fewest negative outcomes, but if we get it wrong, we will be left with many more negative outcomes and even higher costs for a long time. 

Since then, the only thing I would change is that it is not just about the money, the possibility of catastrophic reliability outcomes must be considered because present wind, solar, and energy storage technology must be coupled with other ill-defined and speculative resources in order to work reliably.  Clearly the first step and priority should be a feasibility analysis before anymore time and money is spent on this. 

Other Voices on the Futility of the Climate Act

This blog post highlights an article and report that address New York’s  Climate Leadership & Community Protection Act (Climate Act).   I am highlighting them here because they make good points in ways that I think clearly show the futility of the Climate Act. 

I submitted comments on the Climate Act implementation plan and have written over 300 articles about New York’s net-zero transition 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.  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. 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 and power the electric gride with zero-emissions generating resources by 2040.  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 write a 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.

Trying to Head Off New York’s Total Self-Destruction

Francis Menton writing at the Manhattan Contrarian blog wrote an excellent story about New York’s budget proposals that includes a section on energy policy.  He described the Empire Center’s just released Next New York report that offers “counter-proposals in the major policy areas: public safety, K-12 education, Medicaid and healthcare, energy, transportation and transit, housing, and so forth”.  

Menton’s article addressed energy policy. The energy section of the Next New York report, titled “Heading off New York’s Home-Made Energy Crisis,” begins at page 69, and was written by the Empire Center’s energy guru, James Hanley.  The following is a direct quote from the Menton’s article :

I guess it’s fair to say at this point that we do have an “energy crisis” in New York, but the key word is “home-made.” Everything about energy in New York that could remotely be called a “crisis” is entirely the creation of our politicians. There is no rational reason why energy policy should even be a significant political issue in New York. We have a perfectly good, functional energy system. By far the larger part of it — the non-electrified part, including nearly all transportation, industry, agriculture, and home heat outside the large cities — came into being through private initiative and works with little to no input or interference from politicians and bureaucrats. The other, smaller part — the electrified portion plus urban natural gas distribution — has historically been subject to substantial government regulation, but until quite recently the whole point of the regulation was only to prevent the monopoly utilities from raising their rates to a point of overcharging the customers.

Then our politicians got the idea that there was an imperative to address and solve “climate change” through the device of a politically-directed total re-do of the energy system into something that has never previously been tried nor proven to work. (Don’t get me started on the question of how a place like New York, with a fraction of 1% of world greenhouse gas emissions, is supposed to be able to affect “climate change” by using less fossil fuels, when the places that emit the large majority of world GHGs, like China and India, are adding new coal power plants as fast as they can build them.).

At pages 69-75 of the Report, Hanley provides a brief history of how this subject of reducing GHG emissions got a toe-hold in New York and then rapidly metastasized. Governors Pataki and Paterson began the game in the 90s and 00s, with things like a “renewable portfolio standard” and joining the Regional Greenhouse Gas Initiative (2005). Andrew Cuomo (first elected Governor in 2010) ramped things up by blocking fracking in the extensive Marcellus Shale that underlies a large part of the state, and by having his environmental bureaucrats block natural gas pipelines on bogus “water quality” concerns. But the full suppression of fossil fuels and the wind/solar mania did not really take full control in New York until 2019, when the progressive Democrats finally took both houses of the State Legislature. They used that control to pass something called the Climate Leadership and Community Protection Act (CLCPA), which was then signed by Cuomo.
Suddenly, we are on a crash program to get rid of all fossil fuels, electrify everything, and depend completely on the wind and sun for the generation of our energy. Hanley:

The CLCPA’s overarching goal is an 85 percent reduction in greenhouse gas emissions and a net-zero state economy by 2050. Intermediate steps on the way include 6,000 megawatts of installed solar and 185 trillion BTU savings in energy efficiency by 2025, 70 percent renewable energy production and 3,000 megawatts of battery storage by 2030, 9,000 megawatts of offshore wind production by 2035 and 100 percent zero-emissions electricity production by 2040.

I believe that I have used terms like “ridiculous,” “preposterous,” “incompetent,” and “irresponsible” to characterize the legally-mandated goals to which the CLCPA commits our state. Hanley is much more gentle in his use of words:

To say the CLCPA’s goals are ambitious is an understatement, and yet they will not be adequate to provide the state with sufficient clean energy to ensure the continuing reliability of the electrical grid.
One place where Hanley makes a real contribution to the debate is by producing a chart, based on data from the federal Energy Information Administration and Department of Energy, that makes the absurdity of the CLCPA goals apparent:

In the eleven years from 2010 to 2020, the percent of New York’s electricity coming from “renewables” inched up from about 22% to about 28%. But most of that 6% increase came from that blue line, “hydro,” aka almost entirely the Niagara Falls power plant, going from about 18% to about 22% of state electricity production. Meanwhile, in that 11 year period when everyone was starting to obsess about wind and solar and federal subsidies ramped up dramatically, the percent of electricity from wind (the orange line near the bottom of the graph) went all the way from about 2% to about 4%. And the percent from solar remained a barely-perceptible 1% or so, represented by a gray line that is so close to the x-axis of the graph that you can barely see it next to the brown line representing wood.

And then supposedly the percent of electricity from renewables takes off like the blade of a hockey stick in 2020 and gets to 70% by 2030. Unmentioned is that we don’t have another Niagara Falls. Therefore this whole increase now has to come from wind and solar. Oh, and we’re already two years in since the data in Hanley’s graph. How much of this has happened so far? Almost none.

Meanwhile the consumption of electricity is supposedly going to double or so, due to the electrification of automobiles and home heating.

I’ll throw in a few figures from research of my own to further illustrate the absurdity. According to EIA data here, New York’s electricity consumption in 2021 was 141,423,778 MWh. If that doubles from electrification of automobiles and heating, then we’ll need about 280 million MWh in a year. Per Hanley’s summary of the CLCPA above, the state authorities are calling for adding 6000 MW of solar and 9000 MW of offshore wind by 2035. At highly optimistic capacity factors of 25% for solar and 40% for wind, here’s what that will get you:

6000 x 0.25 x 8760 + 9000 x 0.40 x 8760 = 44,676,000 MWh

In other words, as ambitious as the plans for wind and solar may be, even if all gets built this will provide less than a sixth of the electricity that will be needed. And with wind and solar generation, such electricity as gets generated will come at random times that could include long weeks of no wind and almost no sun in the dead of winter.

But meanwhile they are proceeding apace to shut down the existing natural gas capacity.

Hanley concludes his section of the Report with a series of highly sensible recommendations, like ending the fracking ban, ending the pipeline moratorium, and scaling back renewable energy subsidies and tax credits. I actually think we will likely be better off going full speed ahead on the innumerate nonsense and running hard into the green energy wall.

Conclusion

The demand that we do something as quickly as possible does not square with reality. New York GHG emissions are less than one half a percent of global GHG emissions and global GHG emissions have been increasing by more than one half a percent per year.  Anything we do will be replaced by global GHG emission increases in less than a year.  That does not mean that we should not do something but it does mean that we should take the time to do “something” that it does not do more harm than good. Menton and Hanley show that the proposed implementation timeframe is extraordinarily risky and unlikely.  Their concerns must be addressed or the reliability and affordability of New York electricity will be unacceptably at risk.

The demand for compliance certainty inherent in the cap and invest proposed plan exacerbates the risks and impacts. In my last post on the cap and invest program proposal I noted that developing sufficient zero-emissions renewable energy to displace enough fossil-fired electric generation to meet the mandated emissions targets would be a challenge.  Both Hanley and Menton clearly show that the expectation that New York State can convert the electric energy system to meet the 2030 goal of 70% renewable energy is a dream and that meeting the emissions targets is a stretch.  Of particular concern is that the cap and invest approach includes penalties when those targets are not met.  Affected sources are going to err on the side of caution relative to their compliance obligations.  These results and that outlook increase the chance of an artificial energy shortage.

New York State Cap and Invest Politician Briefing

On January 10, 2023 New York Governor Kathy Hochul delivered her 2022 State of the State Address and provided legislation in her Budget Bill that proposed market-based Cap and Invest program.  Since then legislative amendments (Senate Bill 4008-B) to the Hochul Administration bill have been proposed.  I developed this briefing for politicians that provides specific comments about the proposed legislation and background information about market-based pollution control programs.  This article consolidates information from previous articles on Cap and Invest programs so there is a lot of repetitive information.

I submitted comments on the Climate Act implementation plan including one that specifically addressed the economy-wide strategy that recommended a Cap and Invest approach.  I have written over 300 articles about New York’s net-zero transition 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.  I also follow and write about the Regional Greenhouse Gas Initiative (RGGI) market-based CO2 pollution control program for electric generating units in the NE United States.    I have extensive experience with air pollution control theory, implementation, and evaluation having worked on every cap-and-trade program affecting electric generating facilities in New York including the Acid Rain Program, RGGI, and several Nitrogen Oxide programs. 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.

I want to publicly thank my Senator, John Mannion (D 50th Senate District), for giving his time to Ken Pokalsky, (VP New York Business Council) and myself for a briefing on this topic.  Ken and I both have spent a lot of time recently trying to understand the implications of the proposed Cap and Invest program but it seems like no one is listening.  Ken described the general issues facing the state’s business community and his concerns (summarized here)  I covered the technical side of the plan.  The slides used are available and the following material was submitted as backup.  Both the slides and the documentation are boiled down to the key points in the summary that was all we had time to address.

Overview Issues Summary

Market-based pollution control programs are a well-established strategy but past success does not guarantee future results.  The most common market approach is to use emissions trading whereby a limit is set on pollution levels and tradable allowances equal to the cap limit are issued to affected sources.  The Federal Acid Rain cap and trade program lowered sulfur dioxide (SO2) and nitrogen oxides (NOx) emissions more than expected at far lower costs.  The Regional Greenhouse Gas Initiative has generated over $1.7 billion in revenues for New York.  There are differences between the goals and results of those programs relative to the New York Cap and Invest proposal that cast doubt on the optimistic projections of its proponents.  More importantly, there are components in the proposed legislation that will work against future success.

There are multiple challenges for a New York only Cap and Invest program.  Greenhouse gases (GHG) are difficult to reduce because there are limited control options available.  There are no viable add-on controls for most GHG emissions so switching fuels has been the primary driver of recent observed emission decreases.  The only remaining options are to displace the use of fossil fuels with zero-emissions resources or to run less.  That raises the threat of an artificial energy shortage if there are insufficient allowances for sources to run.

This documentation describes the current status of emissions relative to the Climate Act 2030 limit of a 40% reduction in GHG  emissions from the 1990 baseline.  In order to meet that mandate an unprecedented buildout of wind and solar are necessary to provide the energy needed to displace fossil-fired electric generation.  At the same time, electrification is the primary emission reduction strategy for buildings and transportation which is going to increase load.  The Scoping Plan recommendations for changes to New York’s Energy Plan did not include a feasibility analysis casting doubts on the viability of this effort.

Of particular concern is that there are features in the legislation that undermine aspects of previous market-based pollution control programs.  Climate Act § 75-0109, Promulgation of regulations to achieve statewide greenhouse  gas emissions reductions (1) lays out a public stakeholder process to promulgate rules and regulations to ensure compliance with the statewide emissions reduction limits that should be allowed to play out before any new legislation is promulgated.  There are numerous technical and logistical issues that must be addressed so that a Cap and Invest market-based program can be successfully implemented.  Naïve legislation could thwart an effective program.

Background

Emission market-based pollution control programs have proven to be an efficient approach if implemented correctly.  The reasons that such a program is being considered in New York were laid out in the Final Scoping Plan:

The Climate Action Council (Council) has identified the need for a comprehensive policy that supports the achievement of the requirements and goals of the Climate Act, including ensuring that the Climate Act’s emission limits are met . A well-designed policy would support clean technology market development and send a consistent market signal across all economic sectors that yields the necessary emission reductions as individuals and businesses make decisions that reduce their emissions. It would provide an additional source of funding, alongside federal programs, and other funding sources, to implement policies identified in this Scoping Plan, particularly policies that require State investment or State funding of incentive programs, including investments to benefit Disadvantaged Communities.  Equity should be integrated into the design of any economywide strategy, prioritizing air quality improvement in Disadvantaged Communities and accounting for costs realized by low- and moderate income (LMI) New Yorkers. Pursuant to the Climate Act, a policy would be designed to mitigate emissions leakage. Finally, an economywide strategy would be implemented as a complement to, not as a replacement for, other strategies in the Scoping Plan. A well-designed economywide program will bring about change in the market and promote equity in a way that does not unduly burden New Yorkers or with the global economy.

In general, emission reductions based on market signals rather than explicit directives offers flexibility which should reduce costs and encourages innovation.  The most common market approach is to use emissions trading whereby a limit is set on pollution levels and tradable allowances equal to the cap limit are issued to affected sources.  In order to comply, the sources must surrender one allowance for each ton of pollution emitted.  In order for such a program to succeed there has to be a realistic cap and reduction trajectory, the pollutant has to be have regional or global impacts, and the implementation schedule has to provide time for the market to react.

New York has participated in successful emissions trading programs.  It is unfortunate that the important condition that past success does not guarantee future results has been overlooked particularly because there are conditions on the past successes.  The Clean Air Act Amendments of 1990 established the Acid Rain Program to reduce acidic deposition.  This was a cap-and-trade program for the electric generating sector that issued free allowances based on historical operating characteristics.  Initially intended to provide a 50% reduction in sulfur dioxide and nitrogen oxides emissions it was ratcheted down because emissions were reduced lower and at costs significantly lower than expected.  There is an important caveat.  The original concept was that coal-fired power plants would install control equipment to get the reductions necessary.   However, railroad deregulation at the same time lowered coal transportation costs so much that it enabled switching to low sulfur coal from Wyoming across the country.  Power plants figured out how to burn that coal and achieved reductions on the order of 90%.  The Acid Rain Program incentivized the electric industry to reduce emissions but the ultimate results were influenced by other factors.

New York was an original participating state in the Regional Greenhouse Gas Initiative (RGGI).  This is a Cap and Invest program in which the affected sources purchase their allowances in auctions. New York was a primary driver for RGGI and has consistently touted its success by pointing out that carbon dioxide emissions are down by more than 50% since 2000 and that they have raised over $1.5 billion.  However, I have shown that this success is conditional.  The primary reason New York generating unit RGGI emissions are down is because the fracking revolution reduced the cost of natural gas so much that it displaced coal and residual oil fuels. I have determined that since the beginning of the RGGI program RGGI funded control programs have been responsible only for 5.6% of the observed reductions. I believe that RGGI had very little to do with these fuel switches because fuel costs are the biggest driver for operational costs and the cost adder of the RGGI carbon price was too small to drive the use of natural gas over coal and oil.  

There is no question that RGGI has successfully raised revenues but the results of those investments are disappointing.  According to the latest NYSERDA RGGI funding status report the projected costs of the current programs are $776.1 million, the net greenhouse gas emission savings are 1,656,198 tons and that works out to emission cost per ton removed of $469.  If all the RGGI administrative and operating costs are included another $113 million is added to the total and the emissions cost per ton removed is $537 per ton.  

There is a very important pollution control consideration.  Sulfur Dioxide (SO2) emissions can be controlled with add-on pollution control equipment or by switching to a lower sulfur fuel.  Nitrogen Oxides (NOx) emissions can also be controlled with add-on control equipment or by combustion modifications but fuel switching does not provide much of a reduction.  On the other hand, Carbon Dioxide (CO2) add-on carbon capture and sequestration control systems are not viable as an add-on control system.  The only ways to reduce CO2 is to switch to a lower emitting fuel or combust less fuel.  However, combusting less fuel means that less energy (for electricity, transportation, or heating) is available to meet societal needs.

Hochul Cap and Invest Proposal

I have consolidated in one document the Hochul Administration description of Cap and Invest including links to the Climate Act Scoping Plan Toolkit , references to Cap and Invest in the Scoping Plan Executive Summary, references to it in the State of the State materials, and the relevant Chapter from the Final Scoping Plan.

Hochul has said “New York’s Cap-and-Invest Program will draw from the experience of similar, successful programs across the country and worldwide that have yielded sizable emissions reductions while catalyzing the clean energy economy.”  My main concern is that drawing from the experience of previous programs is not nearly as simple as implied, particularly for people not familiar with the caveats and conditions associated with previous program “success”.

Hochul’s Budget Bill claims that it would be based on “best practices” gleaned from RGGI success.  It goes on to note that RGGI auction proceeds were invested in “energy efficiency, renewable energy, and other programs that save consumers money on energy bills and hasten the transition to cleaner energy”; that the proposed Cap and Invest will be specifically designed to “enable public agencies to focus the investment of allowance auction proceeds in communities with particular needs”; that

“A portion of the auction revenue generated will be returned to consumers to mitigate average costs to New Yorkers”; and that the program will be designed with the capacity to join other current or future programs.

In the previous section I noted that there are caveats to RGGI success claims.  One of my primary concerns is that RGGI investments did not produce cost-effective GHG emission reductions or very many reductions.  I have argued that the State has to change its investment strategies to focus on emission reductions to improve that performance because future reductions are going to depend on effective investments.  The low-hanging fruit of potential reductions is disappearing and that has compliance target ramifications.

Unfortunately, many programs that save consumers money on energy bills or focus on investments in disadvantaged communities with particular needs are not very effective producing significant emission reductions.  Policy makers should keep this conundrum in mind.  There is no resolution to the tradeoff between the need to provide ratepayers, especially those with least ability to pay, with the means to reduce energy use and the need to make emission reductions to reach the targets. 

To this point I have not addressed costs.  In no small part that is because so little information is available.  Hochul mentioned that there would be climate rebate fund of $1 billion and I saw somewhere that represented 30% of the total expected revenues.  That yields $3.3 billion for total revenues and an economy wide allowance price of $8.66.  If the allowance price equals the current RGGI price of $13 per ton, then the total revenues rises to $5 billion.  The New York Value of Carbon in 2022 is $129 per ton and using that would provide $50 billion per year.  If the Cap and Invest proceeds are set at the rate necessary to meet projected required emission reductions, a cost estimate using the historical cost per ton reduced from RGGI investments and tons reduced per year can be determined.  Depending on the interpretation of how the funding is allocated I estimate the revenues would range between $46 and $10 billion.  For this spread of revenues I estimate that this will translate to $0.08 and $1.14 per gallon of gasoline and between $0.47 and $7.04 for Mcf of natural gas.

The final Hochul goal was the capacity to join other current or future programs.  There are two reasons that this is unlikely.  Firstly, the Climate Act has a unique emission accounting system that is incompatible with other jurisdictions.  That would have to change to join other programs. The

Climate Act emission accounting system also mandates consideration of upstream emissions.  Trying to extract another jurisdiction from upstream emissions would be difficult if not impossible.

Scoping Plan Evaluation Criteria

The Final Scoping Plan recommendation included evaluation criteria for an economy-wide strategy.  Those criteria included certainty of emission reductions, price certainty, prioritizing emission reductions and avoiding hotspots in disadvantaged communities, and mitigating risk of leakage.

Advocates claim that the emissions cap guarantees emission reductions consistent with the Climate Act mandate. This is a naïve presumption apparently based on the fact that all the Acid Rain Program, RGGI, and the other cap and trade programs for NOx have all had emissions compliant with the caps.  EPA explains that “The cap is intended to protect public health and the environment and to sustain that protection into the future, regardless of growth in the sector.”  For the Acid Rain Program, the cap was originally intended to reduce emissions by 50% but later was tightened down.  In the NOx cap and trade programs the caps were set based on a technological evaluation of the control technology available to affected sources.  The industry – agency issues with those caps centered on whether the agency estimates for additional control levels were reasonable.  Importantly, the SO2 and NOx caps were based on the feasibility of affected source characteristics and were not binding in and of themselves.

On the other hand, the CO2 cap in RGGI and the New York cap-and-invest caps are not based on technical evaluation.   I define a binding cap as one chosen arbitrarily without any feasibility evaluation.  In 2030 New York GHG emissions must be 40% lower than the 1990 baseline but this is an arbitrary target mandated by the Climate Act.  The  Scoping Plan for this transition did not include an analysis to see if this target was feasible so I think this will be risky.

The following graph lists NY GHG emissions by sector from 1990 to 2030.  The data from 1990 to 2020 is from the New York 2022 GHG emission inventory.  Electric sector emissions are available through 2022 and I used those with estimates based on recent averages to project emissions for the other sectors in 2021 and 2022.  The emissions shown for 2023-2030 simply represent the straight-line interpolation between the 2022 emissions and the 2030 emission limits consistent with the state’s Climate Act mandate that 2030 emissions must be 40% less than the 1990 baseline emissions.

I estimate that meeting the 2030 emissions limit will require a 4.5% annual decrease from each sector from 2023 to 2030.  That is an unprecedented reduction trajectory.  Those percentages translate to annual reductions of 2.73 million metric tons of CO2e (MMT) for the electricity sector, 0.97 MMT for agriculture, 5.32 MMT for buildings, 1.59 MMT for industry, 4.89 MMT for transportation, and 1.88 MMT for the waste sector. 

The Climate Act has exemptions for certain sectors.  All components in the agriculture sector are not required to meet the 40% mandate and energy-intensive and trade exposed industries also get some sort of a pass.  Even a cursory examination of the data in the graph suggests that the presumption that a binding cap will necessarily ensure compliance is magical thinking.  The historical trend in electricity sector emission reductions appear similar to the trend necessary to meet the 2030 target but the historical trend was caused by fuel switching and there are no more reductions to be had in that regard.  In order to reduce electricity sector emissions, the energy output will have to be displaced with wind and solar.  Waste sector emissions have been more or less constant since 1990.  An entirely new technology has to be implemented in the next seven years to get a 4.5% per year reduction in emissions. 

Transportation can only reduce emissions if the transition to zero-emissions vehicles accelerates a lot.  When I point out that there has been no feasibility analysis, my concern is that the Scoping Plan did not analyze whether the necessary technologies are likely to be available and deployed as needed and there was no consideration of what if questions.  At the top of that list is “what if technology rollout is delayed?”

Another Scoping Plan criterion was price certainty.  The RGGI design includes s price control mechanism.  If the price gets higher than the RGGI ceiling price, additional allowances are added to the auction.  If the price gets too low, then subsequent auctions reduce the number of allowances available.  Obviously, adding allowances to limit high prices is incompatible with the compliance certainty criterion.  Also note that these mechanisms only affect auction prices.  There will be a secondary market price that will be largely unaffected by any similar mechanisms in the Cap and Invest program.  The important point is that the cost of allowances that consumers pay is the uncontrollable secondary market price.

The Climate Act, Scoping Plan, the Hochul Budget Bill and at least one amendment to the Budget Bill establish a goal of prioritizing emission reductions and avoiding hotspots in disadvantaged communities.  Chapter 6. Advancing Climate Justice in the Scoping Plan states:

Prioritizing emissions reduction in Disadvantaged Communities should help to prevent the formation or co-pollutant emissions despite a reduction in emissions statewide. A broad range of factors may contribute to high concentrations of pollutants in a given location that create a hotspot. The result can be unhealthy air quality, particularly for sensitive populations such as expectant mothers, children, the elderly, people of low socio-economic status, and people with pre-existing medical conditions.

The poster child for egregious harm from hotspots is fossil-fired peaking power plants. I believe the genesis of this contention is the arguments in Dirty Energy, Big Money and I have shown that that analysis is flawed because it relies on selective choice of metrics, poor understanding of air quality health impacts,  unsubstantiated health impact analysis, and ignorance of air quality trends.  In this context, I have seen indications that there are some people who believe that GHG emissions themselves have some kind of air quality impact exacerbated in disadvantaged community hot spots.  That is simply wrong – there are no health impacts associated with carbon dioxide emissions at current observed ambient levels.  Dirty Energy, Big Money and arguments in the Scoping Plan are based on co-pollutant emissions (NOx and PM2.5) that allegedly cause impactful hot spots that result in unhealthy air quality.  Note that all facilities in New York State have done analyses that prove that their emissions do not directly produce concentrations in the vicinity of power plants that contravene National Ambient Air Quality Standards (NAAQS) mandated to protect human health and welfare.  Trying to make the Cap and Invest program, that is appropriate for controlling GHG emissions to mitigate global warming, also address a neighborhood air quality problem already covered by other air quality rules is not in the best interests of a successful Cap and Invest program.  I do not know how the allowance tracking system could be modified to address hot spots without creating major unintended consequences.

The final evaluation criterion in the Scoping Plan is mitigating risk of leakage.  Pollution leakage refers to the situation where a pollution reduction policy simply moves the pollution around geographically rather than reducing it.  Ideally the carbon price should apply to all sectors across the globe so that leakage cannot occur. Preventing leakage in an area as small as New York is impossible because, for example,  car owners on the border will simply cross the border to purchase fuel.  Any program conditions to limit emissions in smaller areas of New York will guarantee problems.

Cap and Invest Concerns

Implementation of a Cap and Invest program requires consideration of a myriad of technical and logistical issues best addressed by subject matter experts unencumbered by restrictive legislation.  Climate Act § 75-0109, Promulgation of regulations to achieve statewide greenhouse  gas emissions reductions lays out a public stakeholder process to promulgate rules and regulations to ensure compliance with the statewide emissions reduction limits that should be allowed to play out before any new legislation is promulgated. 

There are numerous technical and logistical issues that must be addressed so that a Cap and Invest market-based program can be successfully implemented.  Previous Cap and Trade programs relied on emissions estimates from instruments and EPA has developed a comprehensive and transparent reporting methodology.  Instruments cannot be used to estimate emissions from every automobile in the state so emissions estimates based on fuel use must be used.  The logistics to develop such a system will take time and must be considered when deadlines are set.

The arbitrary 40% reduction by 2030 target codifies an aggressive reduction schedule by limiting allowance availability in the Cap and Invest proposal. The required emission reductions per year to meet the 2030 mandate are so aggressive that it is unlikely that there will be sufficient allowances available for all sectors to meet that mandate.  The result will be an artificial energy shortage that will limit electric production as well as gasoline and natural gas availability.  The stakeholder process must develop a plan to address this potential outcome.

The stakeholder process cannot operate in a vacuum.  In order for the stakeholder process to function properly the Hochul Administration is going to have to commit to some revenue target and allocation of funds.  Although emission reduction priorities in certain areas of the state is a noble concept it is incompatible with the global impacts of GHG emissions.  More importantly putting it into practice is extraordinarily difficult.

Senate Bill 4008-B

The legislative amendments (Senate Bill 4008-B) to the Hochul Administration bill should be rejected out of hand because they are not based on how emissions market systems work.  They represent nothing more than ideological misunderstanding of these systems.  If implemented the Cap and Invest program will fail.  The problematic provisions address hot spots, allowance banking, allowance trading, and emission offsets.

I already addressed hot spots above.

The allowance banking proposed amendments to Hochul’s budget bill include a new section to the existing Climate Act law.  Proposed § 75-0123. Use of allowances states that:

  1. Allowances must be submitted to the department for the full amount of greenhouse  gas emissions emitted during such compliance period.  If greenhouse gas emissions exceed allowances submitted for the  compliance  period, such shortfall shall be penalized pursuant to section 75-0129 of this article.
  2. Any allowances not submitted at the end of the compliance period in which  they  are  issued by the authority shall automatically expire one hundred eighty days after the end such compliance period if not  submitted prior to such date.

The provision for expiring allowances would prohibit allowance banking.  Allowance banking is a feature of all existing cap and trade programs and is one of the reasons that they have been successful.  Banking enables affected sources to handle unexpected changes in operation, compliance monitoring problems, and long-term planning.

The authors of this amendment have not figured out that the primary source of GHG emissions is energy production.  One major difference between controlling CO2 and other pollutants is that there are no cost-effective control technologies that can be added to existing sources to reduce emissions.  Combine that with the fact that CO2 emissions are directly related to energy production, the result is that after fuel switching the primary way to reduce emissions is to reduce operations.  Consequently, CO2 emission reductions require replacement energy production that can displace existing production. 

A feature of RGGI that addresses the link between energy use and CO2 emissions is a three-year compliance period with banking.  It is included because it was recognized that in a year when it is either really cold or really hot GHG emissions go up as energy use goes up.  In a year when it is mild, energy use goes down and emissions go down.  To address that variability RGGI has a three-year compliance period and allows sources to bank allowances for this balancing inter-annual variability.  The inevitable result of this amendment language would be insufficient allowances in a year with high energy use and that translates to an artificial shortage of energy.

There also is a provision addressing allowance trading.  There is no better example of ideological passion over-riding reality than language in the proposed amendments to Hochul’s budget bill that prohibits allowance trading.  Proposed § 75-0123. Use of allowances states that:

3. Allowances shall not be tradable, saleable, exchangeable or otherwise transferable.

Words cannot describe how little I think of the authors’ understanding of cap and invest based on this language.  Cap and invest programs are a form of cap-and-trade programs.  Anyone who thinks that a program that excludes allowance exchanges has no concept whatsoever of how these programs are supposed to work and how they have been successfully working.

There is one aspect of the proposed cap and invest legislation that is conspicuous by its absence – offsets.  In RGGI a CO2 offset allowance represents “a project-based greenhouse gas emission reduction outside of the capped electric power generation sector.”  In the California program  Offset Credits are issued to “qualifying projects that reduce or sequester greenhouse gases (GHG) pursuant to six Board-approved Compliance Offset Protocols.”  Recall that Hochul stated that “New York’s Cap-and-Invest Program will draw from the experience of similar, successful programs across the country and worldwide that have yielded sizable emissions reductions while catalyzing the clean energy economy.” Furthermore, the Climate Act has a net-zero target.  In other words, emissions from certain sectors that can never be expected to reduce their GHG emissions to zero (like aviation) will have those emissions offset by programs that reduce or sequester GHG emissions. 

In a rational world, it is obvious that the agriculture and forestry sectors that are the likely sources of most offsets in New York would get incentives to develop offsets compliant with qualification protocols used in other successful programs.  After all the Climate Act needs offsets to meet its net-zero targets and offset programs are components of the similar, successful programs New York wants to emulate.

New York’s Climate Act is not rational.  Chapter 17 in the Final Scoping Plan explains why offsets are not mentioned:

The inclusion of offset programs in some cap-and-invest programs, such as RGGI, has engendered some criticism, particularly from environmental justice organizations that contend that the availability of offsets reduces the certainty of emission reductions from the regulated sources. In any cap-and-invest program adopted to meet Climate Act requirements, the role of offsets would have to be strictly limited or even prohibited in accordance with the requirements of ECL § 75-0109(4). Under that provision, DEC would have to ensure that any Alternative Compliance Mechanism that is adopted would meet various requirements specified in that provision of the Climate Act. Therefore, offsets would have little, if any, role under a cap-and-invest program designed to comply with the Climate Act.

In short, because there was “some criticism” from environmental justice organizations, the Progressive Democrats in control of the Administration and Legislature are excluding this “important cost-containment element” used in other successful programs.  Given that offsets are a necessary component for meeting the net-zero by 2050 target I expect that a different subsidy will be used to incentivize offsets.

Conclusion

I have tried very hard to not get involved with politicians over my career because I don’t think there is much interest in my nuts-and-bolts concerns.  Unfortunately for me, the Climate Act is at its heart a political construct.  In order to try to get some rationality into the implementation process it is apparent that I have to engage with politicians.  In that regard, Senator Mannion is to be commended for listening to the technical side of the Cap and Invest proposal and I appreciate his time very much.

There have been a couple of positive notes.  According to Buffalo Business First, New York DEC Commissioner Basil Seggos says the regulations forming the state’s cap-and-invest program likely won’t be ready before a deadline this year.  Both Senator Mannion and Ken Pokalsky said they don’t believe the Cap and Invest program language will be included in the final Budget Bill.  That suggests that there will be time to develop a plan that addresses all the technical and logistical issues inherent in a New York only Cap and Invest program without legislative naïve interference.

NY Climate Act Cap and Invest Plan Going Off the Rails

One of my pragmatic interests is market-based pollution control programs. As part of New York’s budget process Governor Kathy Hochul announced a plan to use a market-based program to raise funds for Climate Leadership & Community Protection Act (Climate Act) implementation that is included in the Budget Bill.  I have looked at the language for proposed amendments to the original Budget Bill proposal and am stunned at the disconnect between reality and the perceptions of the authors of the amendments.

I submitted comments on the Climate Act implementation plan and have written over 290 articles about New York’s net-zero transition 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.  I also follow and write about the Regional Greenhouse Gas Initiative (RGGI) market-based CO2 pollution control program for electric generating units in the NE United States.    I have extensive experience with air pollution control theory, implementation, and evaluation having worked on every cap-and-trade program affecting electric generating facilities in New York including the Acid Rain Program, RGGI, and several Nitrogen Oxide programs. 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. 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 and power the electric grid with zero-emissions generating resources by 2040.  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 write a Draft Scoping Plan that was released for public comment at the end of 2021 and approved on   December 19, 2022. 

The Final Scoping Plan included recommendations for a comprehensive economy-wide policy to support implementation.  The recommendations included a cap and invest market-based emissions control approach similar to the Regional Greenhouse Gas Initiative (RGGI).  The policy is supposed to provide compliance certainty and “support clean technology market development and send a consistent market signal across all economic sectors that yields the necessary emission reductions as individuals and businesses make decisions that reduce their emissions.”  The “market signal” translates into an additional source of funding to implement policies identified in the Scoping Plan.  But that’s not all.  A key narrative in New York’s version of the Green New Deal is equity and the cap and invest recommendation includes “prioritizing air quality improvement in Disadvantaged Communities and accounting for costs realized by low- and moderate income (LMI) New Yorkers.”   

New York Cap and Invest

Hochul’s state of the state address included a proposal for a cap and invest program.  It stated that “New York’s Cap-and-Invest Program will draw from the experience of similar, successful programs across the country and worldwide that have yielded sizable emissions reductions while catalyzing the clean energy economy.”  Subsequently other legislators have jumped on the bandwagon and offered legislation to modify the Hochul proposal.  My first article on this plan, initial impression of the New York cap and invest program, gave background information on the Climate Act’s  economy-wide strategy and my overarching concerns.  I looked at potential revenue targets in a couple of subsequent posts here and here.  More recently I compared the emissions reduction trajectory necessary to meet the 40% GHG emission reduction by 2030 mandate relative to observed emissions trends.

My analyses to date indicate that New York’s belief that the proposed cap and invest program can build on “the experience of similar, successful programs across the country and worldwide” is misplaced. The idea that the RGGI market signal was a significant driver for the observed emissions reductions is inaccurate because the primary driver was fuel switching to cheaper natural gas caused by the fracking success in other states.  New York has been investing RGGI auction proceeds for years and the cost per ton reduced is no less than $469.  At that rate, if the program were to fund all of the reductions necessary, auction revenues of anywhere between $10 billion per year and over $40 billion per year would be needed depending on the assumptions used.  Finally, the required emission reductions per year to meet the 2030 mandate are so aggressive that it is unlikely that there will be sufficient allowances available for all sectors to meet that mandate.  The result will be an artificial energy shortage that will limit electric production as well as gasoline and natural gas availability.

Incredibly, the legislative amendments (Senate Bill 4008-B) to the Hochul Administration bill proposal described below would make things worse for New Yorkers.

Fatal Flaws for Cap and Invest

In my opinion, the Hochul Administration and other Progressive legislators have been trying too hard to incorporate environmental and climate justice concerns into the net-zero transition plans.  In the first place, I don’t think that constituency will ever be satisfied because their insistence on zero-risk policies ultimately requires a shut down of all power sources.  There is no benign way to make power or use energy so ignoring the possibility of pragmatic tradeoffs means they will never be placated.  Worse, their rationale for the tenets of their beliefs is flawed.

The Climate Act requires the state to invest or direct resources in a manner designed to ensure that disadvantaged communities to receive at least 35 percent, with the goal of 40 percent, of overall benefits of spending on:

  • Clean energy and energy efficiency programs
  • Projects or investments in the areas of housing, workforce development, pollution reduction, low-income energy assistance, energy, transportation, and economic development 

In order to implement these goals, the Climate Act created the Climate Justice Working Group (CJWG) which is comprised of representatives from Environmental Justice communities statewide, including three members from New York City communities, three members from rural communities, and three members from urban communities in upstate New York, as well as representatives from the State Departments of Environmental Conservation, Health, Labor, and NYSERDA.  The 22 members of the Climate Action Council were chosen mostly because of their ideology but most at least had relevant expertise.  None of the representatives appointed to the CJWG outside of the agency staff have any energy or climate science background.  Nonetheless, all of their comments on the Draft Scoping Plan were explicitly addressed and responses to their concerns are evident in the cap and invest plan.

There are four CJWG concerns that legislators are trying to incorporate into the cap and invest proposed laws or are in the Climate Act itself that make the proposed approach unworkable.  Their four concerns are “hot spots”, allowance banking, allowance trading, and the use of offsets.  I will address each one below.  In each case, CJWG members, climate activists, and environmental justice advocates have seized on an issue based on poor understanding or something else and are demanding their concerns be considered and the legislators are addressing their concerns.

Hot Spots

As mentioned previously a key consideration in the Climate Act is “prioritizing air quality improvement in Disadvantaged Communities”.  Chapter 6. Advancing Climate Justice in the Scoping Plan states:

Prioritizing emissions reduction in Disadvantaged Communities should help to prevent the formation or co-pollutant emissions despite a reduction in emissions statewide. A broad range of factors may contribute to high concentrations of pollutants in a given location that create a hotspot. The result can be unhealthy air quality, particularly for sensitive populations such as expectant mothers, children, the elderly, people of low socio-economic status, and people with pre-existing medical conditions.

The poster child for egregious harm from hotspots is fossil-fired peaking power plants. I believe the genesis of this contention is the arguments in Dirty Energy, Big Money and I have shown that that analysis is flawed because it relies on selective choice of metrics, poor understanding of air quality health impacts,  unsubstantiated health impact analysis, and ignorance of air quality trends.  In this context, I have seen indications that there are people who believe that GHG emissions themselves have some kind of air quality impact exacerbated in disadvantaged community hot spots.  That is simply wrong – there are no health impacts associated with carbon dioxide emissions at current observed ambient levels.  Dirty Energy, Big Money and arguments in the Scoping Plan are based on co-pollutant emissions (NOx and PM2.5) that allegedly cause impactful hot spots that result in unhealthy air quality.  Note that all facilities in New York State have done analyses that prove that their emissions do not directly produce concentrations in the vicinity of power plants that contravene National Ambient Air Quality Standards (NAAQS) mandated to protect human health and welfare.  Trying to make the cap and invest program, that is appropriate for controlling GHG emissions to mitigate global warming, also address a neighborhood air quality problem already covered by other air quality rules is not in the best interests of a successful cap and invest program.  I do not know how the allowance tracking system could be modified to address hot spots without creating major unintended consequences.

Allowance Banking

The proposed amendments to Hochul’s budget bill include a new section to the existing Climate Act law.  Proposed § 75-0123. Use of allowances states that:

  1. Allowances must be submitted to the department for the full amount of greenhouse  gas emissions emitted during such compliance period.  If greenhouse gas emissions exceed allowances submitted for the  compliance  period, such shortfall shall be penalized pursuant to section 75-0129 of this article.
  2. Any allowances not submitted at the end of the compliance period in which  they  are  issued by the authority shall automatically expire one hundred eighty days after the end such compliance period if not  submitted prior to such date.

The provision for expiring allowances would prohibit allowance banking.  Allowance banking is a feature of all existing cap and trade programs and is one of the reasons that they have been successful.  Banking enables affected sources to handle unexpected changes in operation, compliance monitoring problems, and long-term planning.

The authors of this amendment have not figured out that the primary source of GHG emissions is energy production.  One major difference between controlling CO2 and other pollutants is that there are no cost-effective control technologies that can be added to existing sources to reduce emissions.  Combine that with the fact that CO2 emissions are directly related to energy production, the result is that after fuel switching the primary way to reduce emissions is to reduce operations.  Consequently, CO2 emission reductions require replacement energy production that can displace existing production. 

A feature of RGGI that addresses the link between energy use and CO2 emissions is a three-year compliance period with banking.  It is included because it was recognized that in a year when it is either really cold or really hot GHG emissions go up as energy use goes up.  In a year when it is mild, energy use goes down and emissions go down.  To address that variability RGGI has a three-year compliance period and allows sources to bank allowances for this balancing inter-annual variability.  The inevitable result of this amendment language would be insufficient allowances in a year with high energy use and that translates to an artificial shortage of energy.

Allowance Trading

There is no better example of ideological passion over-riding reality than language in the proposed amendments to Hochul’s budget bill that prohibits allowance trading.  Proposed § 75-0123. Use of allowances states that:

3. Allowances shall not be tradable, saleable, exchangeable or otherwise transferable.

Words cannot describe how little I think of the authors’ understanding of cap and invest based on this language.  Cap and invest programs are a form of cap-and-trade programs.  Anyone who thinks that a program that excludes allowance exchanges has no concept whatsoever of how these programs are supposed to work and how they have been successfully working.

Offsets

There is one aspect of the proposed cap and invest legislation that is conspicuous by its absence – offsets.  In RGGI a CO2 offset allowance represents “a project-based greenhouse gas emission reduction outside of the capped electric power generation sector.”  In the California program  Offset Credits are issued to “qualifying projects that reduce or sequester greenhouse gases (GHG) pursuant to six Board-approved Compliance Offset Protocols.”  Recall that Hochul stated that “New York’s Cap-and-Invest Program will draw from the experience of similar, successful programs across the country and worldwide that have yielded sizable emissions reductions while catalyzing the clean energy economy.” Furthermore, the Climate Act has a net-zero target.  In other words, emissions from certain sectors that can never be expected to reduce their GHG emissions to zero (like aviation) will have those emissions offset by programs that reduce or sequester GHG emissions. 

In a rational world, it is obvious that the agriculture and forestry sectors that are the likely sources of most offsets in New York would get incentives to develop offsets compliant with qualification protocols used in other successful programs.  After all the Climate Act needs offsets to meet its net-zero targets and offset programs are components of the similar, successful programs New York wants to emulate.

New York’s Climate Act is not rational.  Chapter 17 in the Final Scoping Plan explains why offsets are not mentioned:

The inclusion of offset programs in some cap-and-invest programs, such as RGGI, has engendered some criticism, particularly from environmental justice organizations that contend that the availability of offsets reduces the certainty of emission reductions from the regulated sources. In any cap-and-invest program adopted to meet Climate Act requirements, the role of offsets would have to be strictly limited or even prohibited in accordance with the requirements of ECL § 75-0109(4). Under that provision, DEC would have to ensure that any Alternative Compliance Mechanism that is adopted would meet various requirements specified in that provision of the Climate Act. Therefore, offsets would have little, if any, role under a cap-and-invest program designed to comply with the Climate Act.

In short, because there was “some criticism” from environmental justice organizations, the Progressive Democrats in control of the Administration and Legislature are excluding this “important cost-containment element” used in other successful programs.  Given that offsets are a necessary component for meeting the net-zero by 2050 target I expect that a different subsidy will be used to incentivize offsets.

Conclusion

There are four CJWG concerns that legislators are trying to incorporate into the cap and invest proposed laws or are in the Climate Act itself that will make New York’s cap and invest plan fail.  All cap and invest programs are intended to reduce emissions that have regional or global impacts.  Trying to combine cap and invest global obligations with “hotspot” neighborhood air quality obligations already covered by other air quality rules would be difficult if not impossible to do without unintended consequences.  Prohibiting allowance banking eliminates a compliance mechanism widely used in all existing emission market programs.  Cap and invest is a variant of cap-and-trade emission market programs so eliminating trading is absurd.  Emission offsets are a necessary component of economy-wide net-zero targets.  If offsets are prohibited in the cap and invest plan they will be subsidized elsewhere.

A primary component of New York’s Climate Act and cap and invest legislation was to address climate justice.  I do not dispute that is a reasonable goal but appeasement of the naïve and misguided demands of the CJWG on cap and invest components will make that program unworkable and cause reliability, affordability, and safety problems.  When those problems occur, the communities that will be impacted the most will be the ones this mis-guided appeasement is intended to protect.

Climate Act and the Broken Window Fallacy

One recurring narrative by proponents of the Climate Leadership & Community Protection Act (Climate Act) is that it will create significant economic activity.  However, it has always seemed counter-intuitive to me that all this economic activity requires subsidies but I have not been able to make that point well enough for an article.  A recent post at Climate Discussion Nexus does an excellent job refuting that narrative and I reprint it in its entirety here.

Everyone wants to do right by the environment to the extent that they can afford to and not be unduly burdened by the effects of environmental policies.  I submitted comments on the Climate Act implementation plan and have written over 290 articles about New York’s net-zero transition 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.  Every indication is that the costs will be astronomical as well.  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.

Background

The Climate Act Growing Economic Opportunities webpage extolls the value of the Climate Act and jobs.

Our actions and investments are creating new economic activity right here in New York. The clean energy industry is growing before our eyes and the number of clean energy jobs in New York State reached a record level of 165,000 workers at the end of 2021. These jobs have helped lead New York’s COVID-19 economic recovery, the clean industry showing a faster recovery than other sectors. This recent growth is part of a larger trend in the State, with clean energy employment growing 17 percent since 2015 and continued growth on the horizon.

In partnership with businesses, schools, labor and trade organizations, we are supporting the creation of a clean energy workforce pipeline and providing new training opportunities for workers of all experience levels. These opportunities include programs designed to enhance skills in clean heating, energy efficiency, renewables, and other clean technology sectors. Our programs also assist businesses with recruiting, hiring, and onboarding costs for new employees. These efforts prioritize training programs for the state’s most underserved populations – low-income individuals, veterans, disabled workers, single parents, and the formerly incarcerated – and will also help integrate displaced workers into this new promising industry.

That means long-term economic opportunities for all New Yorkers.

I have looked at the New York Clean Energy Industry Report and found that the state’s clean job estimate claims are misleading and inaccurate.  However, I have not described the basic fallacy.  These jobs only occur because the entire existing energy system will be destroyed.  The Climate Discussion Nexus article explains this problem very well.  The following section presents the entire article.

 Stop them if you’ve heard it before

“Stop!” shouts Terry Corcoran in the Financial Post, saying all the “green economy” hype basically repeats the “Broken Window Fallacy” Frederic Bastiat smashed in his 1850 essay that inspired Henry Hazlitt’s 1944 Economics In One Lesson which is one more lesson than the “parade of corporate and political heavyweights, such as U.S. climate czar John Kerry” have had. As Corcoran writes, “In the parable, a boy smashes the window in a town shop, creating an expense and loss for the shopkeeper.

But a bystander observes that there is an economic benefit to smashing windows: Glassmakers get more business, a conclusion glibly summarized in one commentary: ‘It’s a good thing to break windows — money gets circulated and the industry thrives.’” And so, Corcoran laments, this nonsense is even more prevalent in 2023 than in 1850 because now there actually are formal programs to go about breaking glass on a massive scale to enhance prosperity: “as governments in the Western world attempt to smash the windows of the energy system and replace it with an all-new net-zero energy regime.” And chortle about the opportunities they’re creating for glass-makers, freight carriers, window-installers, painters, and who knows what all? For instance Canary Media burbling “Chart: US climate law to spur thousands of new jobs in every state”.

They don’t. As Corcoran growls, “The broken window fallacy in such thinking, if I can presume to condense Bastiat, is that the real cost of breaking windows is ignored.”

In some sense the Canary claim that “Each U.S. state could gain between 2,000 and 140,000 clean energy jobs by 2030 thanks to investments spurred by the Inflation Reduction Act, according to a new analysis by the think tank RMI” is a no-brainer. But we don’t mean it in a good way. They say that:

“RMI analyzed the amount of money that could be invested in the 48 contiguous U.S. states as consumers, manufacturers and other businesses take advantage of tax credits and rebates provided by the climate law.”

But quite apart from the fatuity of trying to figure out how much “could be invested” in the United States’ incredibly complex $23 trillion economy, if something is only profitable with subsidies it is another way of saying it is not profitable, which means it is worth less than it cost to make so this “investment” destroys wealth rather than creating it. Thus for David Wallace-Wells to snicker in the New York Times that “G.O.P. elites are simply lagging behind their states” because the Inflation Reduction Act offers subsidies so huge even Republicans will take the money is not proof that the climate zealots have won the debate or that they are boosting prosperity, just that far too few commentators understand the very basic economic point that you have to subtract the subsidy from the nominal profit to see if the thing actually benefited society.

Heck no, he says. Rather:

“The Inflation Reduction Act is a spigot of spending designed to produce a decarbonization boom — indeed, while it is often described as a $370 billion piece of legislation, that analysis seems likely to significantly underestimate the ultimate size of its tax incentives, which could stretch much closer to $1 trillion with rapid renewable development.”

To borrow from Adam Smith, since we’re taking a trip to the land of economic fundamentals, for a trillion dollars you could support a wine industry in Wales. But the net cost would be huge.

It may seem futile to seek to refine economic theory in the face of such persistent obtuseness. Including Clean Prosperity’s:

“The government could also look at strategic financial support for industries where Canada can compete globally and generate significant economic benefits, good jobs, and manufacturing value added. We point to direct air capture, sustainable aviation fuel, and the electric-vehicle value chain.”

Ooooh. Strategic. Sure beats the other kind of financial support where you hurl money out windows and hope it hits voters. But if “Canada” can compete globally, and we didn’t even know it was a company, then why in the name of all handouts does something that generates significant economic benefits and add value require a subsidy?

Having thus harrumphed we need to stress that Bastiat’s metaphor goes even deeper than Adam Smith’s pointed observation that those who clamour for government support in the national interest are by no means such fools as those who believe them. It actually is true that, once the window is broken, the process of making a new one in the marketplace is socially beneficial because it plugs the ugly gap in the store front, protecting the merchandise and sheltering customers and staff from inclement weather, something we already knew was worth the expense because the shop keeper previously incurred it to install the former window.

So yes, once the window has been broken, replacing it is economically rational including for the shopkeeper. But the cost incurred a second time, to replace the broken window, merely restores what was previously there, so the shopkeeper ends up poorer by the cost of replacing the window than they were before it was broken. So if something flattened all our power plants, we’d be better off after we replaced them (if we replaced them with something that worked) than if we didn’t. But we would be worse off than we were before they got flattened.

The whole Green New Deal, Just Transition, Energiewende and all its ignorant destructive cousins around the world miss this key insight. They are not proposals to make us better off, they are proposals to vandalise the economy then incur costs repairing it. They include the vandalism as a feature not a bug, and hope to get us back to where we were (though as we’ve made clear elsewhere we have grave doubts about the enormous engineering obstacles to generating enough power with wind and solar let alone distributing it) with the entire cost of the replacement a net loss.

If proponents of the “energy transition” understood this point, and insisted that it was actually beneficial to smash the old window anyway because it refracted light in such a way that it would necessarily set the shop on firea much better way we could engage them in rational discussion. But as long as they babble that it’s all gain, that “It’s a good thing to blow up power plants” it is not possible to talk sense with them, just at them.

They do babble it, in forum after forum. For instance The Economist with its headline “Saving the rainforests would be a bargain/ Far more money is needed to make conservation more profitable than slash and burn”. Um no. If it’s a “bargain”, it requires less money than other deals on the table.

The people at The Economist are not quite the economic illiterates their like-minded fellows at most other publications seem to be. They actually claim that:

“Profits from chopping down rainforests are surprisingly meagre. The land is not particularly fertile. A freshly cleared hectare of the Amazon fetches an average price of only around $1,200. By contrast, the social costs of clearing it are immense. Some 500 tonnes of carbon dioxide are pumped into the atmosphere. By a conservative estimate, that does $25,000 of harm by accelerating climate change.”

So they are making a version of the argument that the existing window, while seeming to provide shelter, entice customers and so on, actually is going to ignite the merchandise and the occupants. It’s just that their $25,000 number is highly suspicious despite bearing the PR-friendly label “conservative”. Others are not even that lucid.

In something called The Liberal Patriot, another in a long weary line of attempts to make modern progressive thought rational and palatable to normal people, Brian Katulis writes that what really concerns normal people is economic security. Thus, he notes:

“During his first two years in office, President Joe Biden introduced three pieces of legislation totaling at least $2 trillion of public investments in high-tech and clean energy aimed at re-making America’s economy…. it will require a strong focus on implementation and clear arguments for how these measures are making the lives of working-class Americans better. Advancing a clear argument on this front will be make-or-break for Biden’s re-election chances.”

He then takes a fairly level-headed look at the implementation challenges and the risks of the mercantilist “Buy American” provisions of the IRA. But when he gets off onto “a public communications strategy that convinces the American public about the value of these investments and how they are improving their lives in tangible ways” he misses the point. Scrapping America’s energy infrastructure then spending trillions to get back to the same level of production will leave the nation as a whole poorer.

Katulis says “The story is simple. No place in America will be left behind.” But the simple story is that Bastiat had it right. If you break every window in America then replace them all, the nation will be better off with fixed windows than with broken ones. But it cannot be better off than before the windows were broken because fixing them all only restores the benefits of having the original windows, but all the labour and raw material required to replace them is gone for good.

As for the guff about job creation, as Hazlitt said, if you want to make work ban trucks and require goods to be transported on people’s backs, and ban power tools and force them to dig with hand shovels. They will be poorer not despite there being more work, but because it now takes more work to get anything. It is incredible that such things must be explained again in 2023. But if we have forgotten Bastiat and Smith, there is nothing we have not forgotten.

Conclusion

I agree with everything in this article, but I do want to emphasize one point.  The Climate Act is an ignorant cousin in the Green New Deal, Just Transition, Energiewende family and they all not only want to destroy the existing energy system but they don’t have a replacement that has any chance of working.  The advocates who claim all these new jobs will occur should also, for example, include the costs to repair broken water pipes when the power goes out in the winter when there is no wind. 

Climate Act Cap and Invest Program Numbers Do Not Add Up

One of my pragmatic interests is market-based pollution control programs. As part of New York’s budget process Governor Kathy Hochul announced a plan to use a market-based program to raise funds for Climate Leadership & Community Protection Act (Climate Act) implementation.  It has been touted as a solution for funding and compliance requirements because other market-based programs have been successful.  Even though it has drawn widespread support I think the faith in the mechanism is mis-placed because the numbers do not add up.

This article was also published at Watts Up with That.  I submitted comments on the Climate Act implementation plan and have written over 290 articles about New York’s net-zero transition 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.  I also follow and write about the Regional Greenhouse Gas Initiative (RGGI) market-based CO2 pollution control program for electric generating units in the NE United States.    I have extensive experience with air pollution control theory, implementation, and evaluation having worked on every cap-and-trade program affecting electric generating facilities in New York including the Acid Rain Program, RGGI, and several Nitrogen Oxide programs. 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. 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 and power the electric gride with zero-emissions generating resources by 2040.  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 write a Draft Scoping Plan that was released for public comment at the end of 2021 and approved on   December 19, 2022. 

The Final Scoping Plan noted:

The Climate Action Council (Council) has identified the need for a comprehensive policy that supports the achievement of the requirements and goals of the Climate Act, including ensuring that the Climate Act’s emission limits are met . A well-designed policy would support clean technology market development and send a consistent market signal across all economic sectors that yields the necessary emission reductions as individuals and businesses make decisions that reduce their emissions. It would provide an additional source of funding, alongside federal programs, and other funding sources, to implement policies identified in this Scoping Plan, particularly policies that require State investment or State funding of incentive programs, including investments to benefit Disadvantaged Communities.  Equity should be integrated into the design of any economywide strategy, prioritizing air quality improvement in Disadvantaged Communities and accounting for costs realized by low- and moderate income (LMI) New Yorkers. Pursuant to the Climate Act, a policy would be designed to mitigate emissions leakage. Finally, an economywide strategy would be implemented as a complement to, not as a replacement for, other strategies in the Scoping Plan. A well-designed economywide program will bring about change in the market and promote equity in a way that does not unduly burden New Yorkers or with the global economy.

Hochul’s address stated that “New York’s Cap-and-Invest Program will draw from the experience of similar, successful programs across the country and worldwide that have yielded sizable emissions reductions while catalyzing the clean energy economy.”  Subsequently other legislators have jumped on the bandwagon and offered legislation to modify the Hochul proposal.  My problem is that the perception that these programs have yielded sizable emission reductions while providing funds needed for the transition are misplaced.

Emissions Market Program Background

The concept of emission markets is relatively simple.  EPA explains that:

Emissions trading programs have two key components: a limit (or cap) on pollution, and tradable allowances equal to the limit that authorize allowance holders to emit a specific quantity (e.g., one ton) of the pollutant. This limit ensures that the environmental goal is met and the tradable allowances provide flexibility for individual emissions sources to set their own compliance path. Because allowances can be bought and sold in an allowance market, these programs are often referred to as “market-based”.

This is a fine overview but the details are what is important for New York’s plan.  I have been following these programs since 1993 because I was responsible for submitting compliance reports from that point until my retirement in 2010.  New York State has embraced this approach and I was involved in the stakeholder process associated with multiple rule-makings.  Finally I have been tracking the performance of the Regional Greenhouse Gas Initiative (RGGI).  All of my findings are based on observations of the inner workings of these programs.

A recent book Making Climate Policy Work comes to many of the same conclusions and raises concerns similar to mine based on economic theory.   The description of the book states:

For decades, the world’s governments have struggled to move from talk to action on climate. Many now hope that growing public concern will lead to greater policy ambition, but the most widely promoted strategy to address the climate crisis – the use of market-based programs – hasn’t been working and isn’t ready to scale.

Danny Cullenward and David Victor show how the politics of creating and maintaining market-based policies render them ineffective nearly everywhere they have been applied. Reforms can help around the margins, but markets’ problems are structural and won’t disappear with increasing demand for climate solutions. Facing that reality requires relying more heavily on smart regulation and industrial policy – government-led strategies – to catalyze the transformation that markets promise, but rarely deliver.

The authors recognize the enormity of the challenge to transform industry and energy use on the scale necessary for deep decarbonization.  They write that the “requirements for profound industrial change are difficult to initiate, sustain, and run to completion.”  Because this is hard, they call for “realism about solutions.”  Cullenward and Victor recommend clear thinking and strategy as opposed to “Efforts spent tilting at ephemeral, magical policy solutions waste scarce resources that should instead be invested in things that work.”  The goal of their book is to explain how market-oriented climate policies have fallen far short and how they might be modified so that they work. If you are interested in more information about emission markets I recommend this book.

General Market-Based Program Concerns

I submitted comments on the Draft Scoping Plan chapter on a market-based approach for the transition plan based on my observations of similar programs.  The EPA Acid Rain Program was a cap-and-trade control program that enabled affected sources to meet their compliance options efficiently.  Affected sources could purchase allowances from a facility that had more cost-efficient control options to meet the overall cap.  EPA notes that the program “has helped deliver annual SO2 reductions of over 93% and annual NOX emissions reductions of over 87%” since the start of the program.  The costs have been far lower than expected in no small part because the affected sources figured out how to use fuel switching to coal with lower sulfur content.  The success of the Acid Rain program led to similar programs for NOx both nationally, regionally, and limited to just New York State.

Despite the fact that these programs provided significant emission reductions at a lower cost to the affected sources the environmental community felt it was somehow unfair that some facilities made money selling allowances that had been given to them for free.  That ignores the fact that those facilities selling the allowances made investments to get lower emissions.  The idea that the polluters had to be made to pay led to cap-and-invest programs where the allowances are mostly available through an auction.  The Regional Greenhouse Gas Initiative (RGGI) is a good example of that approach.

On the face of it, RGGI appears to provide emission reductions while also raising revenues so that model appeals to legislators.  However, my observations of RGGI indicate that the theory of this approach is not matched by reality.  Even though the CO2 emissions in the RGGI states have gone down substantially that was mostly because the effected sources switched from coal and residual oil to natural gas with lower CO2 emissions.   The investments made with the auction proceeds that were supposed to fund emission reductions were only responsible for ~15% of the observed reductions.    The accumulated total of the annual reductions from RGGI investments is 3,658,696 tons through December 31, 2020. The sum of the RGGI investments is $2,991,215,917 over that time frame.  The cost per ton reduced $818 exceeds the societal cost of carbon so they are not justified by those societal benefits.  Emission reductions in the future are going to have to rely on investments of the RGGI auction proceeds but at those high cost per ton reduced rates the costs may be too high for public acceptance.

One major difference between controlling CO2 and other pollutants is that there are no cost-effective control technologies that can be added to existing sources to reduce emissions.  Combine that with the fact that CO2 emissions are directly related to energy production, the result is that after fuel switching the primary way to reduce emissions is to reduce operations.  Consequently, CO2 emission reductions require replacement energy production that can displace existing production.  If existing generation is not displaced with zero-emissions resources then energy production must be capped.

New York Numbers

The first numbers consideration is the cap itself.  EPA explains that “The cap is intended to protect public health and the environment and to sustain that protection into the future, regardless of growth in the sector.”  For the Acid Rain Program the cap was originally intended to reduce emissions by 50% but later was tightened down.  In the NOx cap and trade programs the caps were set based on a technological evaluation of the control technology available to affected sources.  The industry – agency issues with those caps centered on whether the agency estimates for additional control levels were reasonable.  Importantly, the SO2 and NOx caps were based on the feasibility of affected source characteristics and were not binding in and of themselves.

On the other hand the CO2 cap in RGGI and the New York cap-and-invest caps are not based on feasibility.   I define a binding cap as one chosen arbitrarily without any feasibility evaluation.  In 2030 New York GHG emissions must be 40% lower than the 1990 baseline but this is an arbitrary target mandated by the Climate Act.  The state’s Scoping Plan for this transition did not include an analysis to see if this target was feasible so I think this will be risky.

The following graph lists NY GHG emissions by sector from 1990 to 2030.  The data from 1990 to 2020 is from the New York 2022 GHG emission inventory.  Electric sector emissions are available through 2022 and I used those with estimates based on recent averages to project emissions for the other sectors in 2021 and 2022.  The emissions shown for 2023-2030 simply represent the straight-line interpolation between the 2022 emissions and the 2030 emission limits consistent with the state’s Climate Act mandate that 2030 emissions must be 40% less than the 1990 baseline emissions.

I estimate that meeting the 2030 emissions limit will require a 4.5% annual decrease from each sector from 2023 to 2030.  That is an unprecedented reduction trajectory.  Those percentages translate to annual reductions of 2.73 million metric tons of CO2e (MMT) for the electricity sector, 0.97 MMT for agriculture, 5.32 MMT for buildings, 1.59 MMT for industry, 4.89 MMT for transportation, and 1.88 MMT for the waste sector. 

The Climate Act has exemptions for certain sectors.  All components in the agriculture sector are not required to meet the 40% mandate and energy-intensive and trade exposed industries also get some sort of a pass.  Even a cursory examination of the data in the graph suggests that the presumption that a binding cap will necessarily ensure compliance is magical thinking.  The historical trend in electricity sector emission reductions appear similar to the trend necessary to meet the 2030 target but the historical trend was caused by fuel switching and there are no more reductions to be had in that regard.  In order to reduce electricity sector emissions the energy output will have to be displaced with wind and solar.  Waste sector emissions have been more or less constant since 1990.  An entirely new technology has to be implemented in the next seven years to get a 4.5% per year reduction in emissions.  Transportation can only reduce emissions if the transition to zero-emissions vehicles accelerates a lot.  When I point out that there has been no feasibility analysis I am concerned because the Scoping Plan did not analyze whether the necessary technologies are likely to be available and deployed as needed and there was no consideration of what if questions.  At the top of that list is “what if the technology rollout is delayed?”

It is beyond the scope of this analysis to consider potential control strategies for every sector.  I did investigate one proposed strategy for the building sector transition that was included in Hochul’s proposal.  Part VI-B:, Decarbonize New York’s Buildings states:

Building electrification and related upgrades improve interior comfort, reduce exposure to air pollution, and support local jobs. But right now, only about 20,000 New York homes install modern heat pumps for heating and cooling each year.  While New York is making progress through programs like NYS Clean Heat, more must be done to cut emissions in our buildings.

To accelerate green buildings in New York, Governor Hochul is setting an unprecedented commitment of a minimum 1 million electrified homes and up to 1 million electrification-ready homes by 2030, and ensuring that more than 800,000 of these homes will be low- to moderate-income households. This target will be anchored by a robust legislative and policy agenda, including: raising the current rate of electrification of approximately 20,000 homes per year more than tenfold by the end of the decade.

I evaluated this component of the plan and the emissions reductions that could be expected for comparison to the annual 5.32 million metric ton of CO2e reduction required to meet the binding cap.  Instead of using the confusing and poorly documented Scoping Plan estimates of residential energy use I used the New York State Energy Research & Development Authority Patterns and Trends document.  Appendix B, Table B-1 lists the average household consumption by fuel type.  I calculated the GHG emissions (CO2, CH4, and N2O) for direct emissions and New York’s required upstream emissions for each fuel type to get an estimate of residential electrification impacts on emissions.

I assumed that the two million homes initiative would convert 250,000 homes per year (two million divided by eight years).  I apportioned the type of fuels used by the observed number of residences using each fuel type in the Scoping Plan.  In other words, for this analysis, I maximized the potential emission reductions by eliminating the average fuel use in Table B-1 to zero.  I found that these conversions would reduce GHG emissions by 1.3 million metric tons of CO2e per year.  The Building sector has to reduce emissions 5.32 million metric tons of CO2e per year so the two million home initiative will only reduce emissions 25% of the amount needed when it gets cranked up from 20,000 homes to 250,000 homes per year.

I also took a shot at the costs.  I assumed that the two million homes would be converted over to electricity for heating, cooking, hot water, and clothes dryers.  I calculated the differential cost between replacement of existing fossil-fired technology with heat pumps and included $6,500 for upgrades to the electric service.  Following the Scoping Plan recommendations, I also accounted for improved building shells.  I estimate that the average cost to electrify a single residence is $42,777 all in. Multiplying that cost by 250,000 homes per year gives $10.7 billion per year in residential electrification costs for one quarter of the reductions needed.  If the building shell is not upgraded the average price increase drops to $24,750 and the total annual cost drops to $6.2 billion per year.  Even if you assume that my cost estimate is 25% high and the building shell is not included the costs are $4.6 billion per year.

Another thing to consider is the costs per ton for emission reductions in the buildings sector.  In the best case, not including building shells and 25% below my estimates, the cost is $3,500 per ton reduced.  That is on the order of 28 times higher than the New York value of carbon which is $126 per ton in 2023.

Discussion

One of the talking points of the Scoping Plan was that emissions from the Buildings Sector was the largest source of emissions in New York.  However, the difficulty getting reductions from the sector was not discussed.  There are two ramifications of that overlooked challenge.

In the first place the cap and invest binding cap has set an ambitious emissions reduction trajectory of 4.5% reductions per year to ensure compliance with the 2030 Climate Act mandated cap equivalent to a 40% GHG emission reduction from the 1990 baseline.  That equates to 5.3 million metric tons per year.  I estimate that electrifying 250,000 homes per year that are currently burning fossil fuels will only reduce emissions 1.3 million metric tons per year or one quarter of the amount needed.

Where are the rest of the building sector emission reductions going to come from?  The lack of specificity in the Scoping Plan documentation precludes an easy response to that question.  There is another aspect of this even if there is some sort of technology available for the remaining reductions required.  The current NY rate of electrification is 20,000 homes per year and Hochul’s two million homes per year program will increase that by more than ten times someday.  The trained labor and supporting infrastructure necessary is simply not available at this time.  Providing training for staff takes time and money and companies have to invest more time and money in the infrastructure to do the work.  It is impossible to go from 20,000 to 250,000 homes per year overnight. 

The theory of a market-based carbon emissions reduction program is that the higher cost of the fossil fuels with the allowance adder will incentivize innovation to get the most cost efficient solution.  Even if someone were to develop a magical solution that dropped the costs to electrify an order of magnitude, there just are not that many emissions from an individual residence available.   As a result, the cost per ton reduced will still be well in excess of the New York Value of Carbon, $471 per ton reduced vs. $126 per ton in 2023.  If the costs to make these reductions exceed the societal benefit of the reductions then the reductions are not cost-effective.

The second ramification is equally troubling.  It is not clear at this time exactly how the program will be rolled out.  The state will put allowances up for auction annually equal to the reduction trajectory amounts needed to meet the 2030 emission limits.  I am guessing that the providers who supply fossil fuel to the building sectors will be responsible for building sector compliance.  They will purchase allowances for each quantity of fuel purchased.  If they purchase fuel and have insufficient allowances to cover that energy then they cannot sell the fuel. 

I don’t think the advocates for a binding CO2 cap really understand that limiting the number of allowances also places a limit on fuel use.  In theory scarcity will drive the prices up incentivizing innovation for lower carbon solutions but the ultimate compliance strategy is to simply not burn fossil fuels.  If the emission reduction control strategies are developed slower than the arbitrary compliance trajectory then there will be an inevitable artificial shortage of fuel.  If a power plant has insufficient allowances, it cannot run and provide energy when needed.   When the fuel providers don’t have enough allowances, then they will have to limit how much fuel aka energy they can provide to homes and other users.  Given that the trajectory is so ambitious and the options to make reductions appear to be so limited I don’t see any way this will not result in artificial fuel shortages.

Even if there are sufficient allowances the artificial scarcity will drive up prices.  One of the great unknowns of the Hochul proposal is the revenue target.  A feature of most cap and invest programs are limits to constrain the auction price.  However, the market price has no such limits.  The impacts of a binding cap on costs is another unknown with likely bad consequences.

Conclusion

New York policy makers have glommed on to Cap and Invest because they think it is a solution that will easily provide revenues  and compliance certainty.  Unfortunately, that presumption is based on poor understanding of market-based emissions programs.  The reality is that successful programs used emissions reduction strategies that are not available in the quantity or quality necessary for New York. Presuming that past performance would be indicative of future reduction success and establishing an arbitrary emissions target that is incompatible with realistic emission reduction trajectories is not going to end well because the numbers simply do not add up.

Skeptical Overview of the Climate Act Presentation 2

This is a summary of the presentation I am giving to the Mohawk Valley Environmental Information Exchange on March 8, 2023 explaining why I believe that the risks, costs, and impacts of the Climate Leadership and Community Protection Act (Climate Act) exceed the protections, savings, and benefits.  It is very similar to a presentation I made last December.

Everyone wants to do right by the environment to the extent that they can afford to and not be unduly burdened by the effects of environmental policies.  I submitted 23 comments on the Climate Act implementation plan and have published over 250 blog posts on  New York’s net-zero transition because I believe the ambitions for a zero-emissions economy embodied in the Climate Act outstrip available renewable technology such that this supposed cure will be worse than the disease.  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.

Introduction

I explained that given the time constraints it was only possible to give sound bites to describe why I am skeptical of the ultimate impacts of the Climate Act.  This blog post gives an overview of the presentation and, more importantly, a link to detailed information supporting my arguments.  Everything presented draws on my blog posts and Draft Scoping Plan comments.

I discussed three primary concerns: reliability, affordability and environmental impacts.  In every instance, my evaluation of the components of the transition plan has found that issues are more complicated, uncertain, and costly than portrayed by the State.   Moreover, they have not provided a feasibility analysis to document whether their list of control strategies could work.  In addition there is no implementation plan.  The Climate Act is simply too fast and too far.

Overview of the Climate Act

I described the transition plan for New York’s Climate Act “Net Zero” target (85% reduction and 15% offset of emissions) by 2050.  The Climate Action Council developed an outline of plans to implement the Act in 2022.  The 22 members of the Council were chosen for their ideology and not their expertise. As a result of the lack of clear direction by the Hochul Administration their plan misplaced priorities.  Instead of focusing on overarching policy issues there was  inordinate attention to personal concerns of Council members. 

Over the summer of 2021 the New York State Energy Research & Development Authority (NYSERDA) and its consultant Energy + Environmental Economics (E3) prepared an Integration Analysis to “estimate the economy-wide benefits, costs, and GHG emissions reductions associated with pathways that achieve the Climate Act GHG emission limits and carbon neutrality goal”.  Integration Analysis quantitative implementation strategies were incorporated into the Draft Scoping Plan when it was released at the end of 2021.  After an extended comment period and ostensible review of the comments the Council released the Final Scoping Plan at the end of 2022.

I expressed my disappointment with the public stakeholder process associated with the Draft Scoping Plan comments. Seven hundred people spoke at Climate Act Public Hearings and around 35,000 comments were received.  However, on the order of 25,000 comments were “potentially the same or substantially similar”, i.e., form letters.  That still left 10,000 unique comments that the Council promised would be “acknowledged”.  In my opinion, the comment process was treated as an obligation not as an opportunity to improve, correct, or clarify the scoping plan.

Of course it is unreasonable to expect that the Council members could be expected to review all the comments themselves.  Agency staff categorized the comments and then filtered them in presentations to the Climate Action Council that described themes with very little specificity.  I think there was a clear bias in the presentations.  Anything inconsistent with Administration’s narrative was disparaged, downplayed, or ignored.  I was most disappointed that no comments on the fundamental basis of the Draft Scoping Plan, that is to say, the Integration Analysis, were mentioned, much less discussed.

I also addressed the Climate Act mandates for 2023.  The expectation is that the regulations that implement policies that force the transition away from fossil fuels will be implemented by the end of 2023.  However, the Climate Act also mandates a public comment and consultation process before promulgating regulations.  It requires the Department of Environmental Conservation (DEC) to complete a public comment and consultation process before it can promulgate the 2024 Implementing Regulations.  This process includes public workshops and consultation with the Climate Action Council, the Environmental Justice Advisory Group, the Climate Justice Working Group, representatives of regulated entities, community organizations, environmental groups, health professionals, labor unions, municipal corporations, trade associations and other stakeholders. At least two public hearings and a 120-day public comment period must be provided. Only after this extensive stakeholder process concludes is DEC authorized to propose the implementing regulations.  When the regulations are formally proposed the State Administrative Procedures Act requires a 60 day public comment period, public hearings, and that the agency respond to all comments.  I think this is a very ambitious plan.

Electric Grid Risks

Many of the most vocal supporters of the Climate Act believe that existing renewable technology is sufficient to transition the New York electric grid to zero-emissions resources by 2040 and that suggestions that may not be true are misinformation.  In order to address that fallacy my presentation concentrated on my concerns about the reliability risks of an electric grid that is dependent upon intermittent and diffuse renewable resources.  The electric grid is crucial to New York’s energy future because the primary de-carbonization strategy is to electrify everything possible using those resources.  I described the existing grid, generation resource planning, the current New York State system, and the projected New York State system.  Electric grid reliability requires that generation resources match electric load at all times and the challenges associated with wind and solar in this regard are ignored by those who believe that existing technology is sufficient.

I made the point that failure to adequately plan will mean an inevitable catastrophic blackout like the

Texas February 2021 blackout.  In short, weather related issues due to freezing rain, snow and then an extended period of cold weather led to periods when the generating resources did not match the load necessary.  The storm was the worst energy infrastructure failure in Texas history.  Over 4.5 million homes and residences were without power, at least 246 people died, and total damages were at least $195 billion. 

In order to illustrate the basic electric grid I included the following diagram.  It shows that generating station provide power using turbine generators that convert mechanical energy into electric energy using water, steam, or other means to spin the turbines.  I have heard the argument that the grid is inefficient because there are power losses between the generating station and the users but the fact is that New York will always be dependent upon a transmission system because there is insufficient space in New York City for sufficient renewable resources to provide the energy needed to keep the lights on.  Power output from generating plants is stepped up at substation transformers for long distance transmission and then substation transformers step down the power for the distribution system for use by consumers.

I included the following diagram to make the point that New York is in the Eastern Interconnection which is the largest machine in the world.  Incredibly all the fossil, hydro, and nuclear generating stations in the Eastern Interconnection work together.  In order to provide 60 Hz power the generating turbines are synchronized to run at 3600 revolutions per minute.  Operators keeps the voltages as constant as possible in the entire area but have the advantage that those turbines provide inertia and they can dispatch generating resources as necessary.  Unfortunately, wind and solar resources are inverter based and cannot be dispatched as needed.

New York State has its own regional operator – the New York Independent System Operator (NYISO).  Within Power the Eastern Interconnection system operators match the load with the generation in smaller regional systems. Regional system operators manage imports and exports between neighboring systems.  New York has unique system constraints related to New York City and Long Island that warrant its own system operator.

NYISO operates the electric grid for New York State.  There are 11 control areas with specific load, interconnection, and generation characteristics that must be addressed on a six-second basis to keep the lights on.  New York State’s major challenge is that there are limits to transmission to the highly populated New York City and Long Island control areas.  The NYISO has to address different time scales for load management

  • Sub-minute fluctuations are addressed automatically
  • Hourly and daily fluctuations are handled by operators
  • Annual peaks require planning so that operators can respond

New York’s high reliability performance standards are the result of decades of experience working with dispatchable resources and implementation of specific metrics developed after blackouts in 1965 and 1977.

In order to educate those who believe that existing renewable resources are sufficient for maintaining current reliability standards I described generation resource planning.  The following load duration curve is a key concern of load management planning.  There are three general resources.  Baseline resources ideally are dispatched so they can run at a constant rate which enables the resource owners to tune the units to run as efficiently as possible.  Daily load variations require some resources to follow load during the day.   The biggest planning challenge is capacity and energy for peak loads that occur when temperatures are highest or lowest.  Before deregulation, each utility was responsible for meeting all these resource needs.  In New York City the solution for the peak load problem was a fleet of simple-cycle turbines dedicated for use to provide peaking power when and where needed.

The problem with existing renewable resource technology is matching load when the system is dependent upon renewable resources that cannot be dispatched and provide variable energy.  This is a new and difficult challenge.  It is exacerbated by intermittent renewable energy availability associated with peak loads. Load peaks with the coldest and hottest weather but those conditions typically are low wind resource periods.  Wind lulls in the winter when solar is low availability is the critical reliability issue.

The NYISO 2022 Power Trends Report  includes this description of the capacity (power available in MW) for the existing system.  It shows that 70% of installed capacity is fossil fueled and 25% is zero emissions.

Wind and other renewables (solar energy, energy storage resources, methane, refuse, or wood) account for only 6% of installed capacity.  Note that NYISO does not measure distributed solar directly.  In their accounting it reduces the load so less generation is needed.

The NYISO 2022 Power Trends Report  includes this description of Energy Production (MWh).  Note that 50% of New York’s generated electricity is zero-emissions.  There is a Climate Act target to “Increase renewable sources to 70 percent by 2030” that does not include zero-emissions nuclear. One reason that I am skeptical of the Climate Act is because 24% of renewable source energy produced is hydro and hydro pumped storage.  Wind and other renewables (solar energy, energy storage resources, methane, refuse, or wood) account for 5% of energy produced.  The 29% of the energy produced  from renewable sources is far less than the 70% by 2030 target. I don’t think that it is feasible to develop over 29GW of renewable resources between now and 2030 with supply chain issues, constraints on permitting, procurement, and construction when development of supporting infrastructure is also needed for off-shore wind development.

The capacity factor is a useful metric to understand electric generation resources.  The annual capacity factor equals the actual observed generation (MWh) divided by maximum possible generation (capacity (MW) times the 8,760 hours.  In New York nuclear is a key contributor but the Administration recently shut down 2,000 MW at Indian Point.  As a result, CO2 emissions from the electric sector increased by 23% since the phased-in shutdown of Indian Point started.  At this time the simple-cycle peaking turbines are being phased out and peaking power is produced by oil-fired units and spare capacity in the gas and dual fuel units.  Oil burning is a unique New York resource.  Imagine the difficulty replacing that capacity with a resource that would only need to run 1% of the time.  Note that in 2021 New York land-based wind only had a 22% capacity factor.

It is commonly argued that renewables are the cheapest type of new electric generating resources.  For example, that was the claim in a Dave Davies interview on National Public Radio Fresh Air: “A new climate reality is taking shape as renewables become widespread” with New York Times staff writer David Wallace-Wells.  Wallace-Wells said: “In fact, according to one study, 90% of the world now lives in places where building new renewable capacity would be cheaper than building new dirty capacity. And indeed, in a lot of places, it’s already cheaper to build new renewables than even to continue running old fossil fuel plants.” He went on to say “…we should be going all in on renewables here. We shouldn’t be building new coal or new oil or new gas capacity.”

The key to this claim is the reference to capacity.  If that were the only factor involved in getting the electricity when and where it is needed 24-7, 365 days a year without losing load due to extreme (one in ten year) conditions then his argument that we shouldn’t be building new coal, oil, or natural gas capacity” would be valid.  It is not.  Obviously electric users want power even when the wind is not blowing at night.  Electric system innumerates under-estimate the challenge of the energy storage requirements for extreme renewable resource lulls which correlate well with weather events that are safety threats because of extreme cold and heat. 

Given time restraints I could not fully describe all the NYISO’s planning responsibilities.  I did not include the following slide and made the point that their modeling analyses incorporate all of the complexities of the New York electric system.  I did not describe the three primary components of their responsibilities: comprehensive system planning which examines near-term and longer-term issues impacting reliability, economic, and public policy transmission planning; interconnection planning to evaluate the reliability implications of resources interconnecting and deactivating from the grid; and

Inter-regional planning with neighboring grid operators. One of the primary functions of the NYISO is electric system planning.  NYISO modeling incorporates all the complexities of the eleven control areas in the New York energy system.

I included the following summary of the NYISO Comprehensive System Planning Process to show all the components and to highlight the recent addition of a new component.  In order to address the Climate Act NYISO added “Develop the System & Resource Outlook” component that looks at a longer planning horizon that was included previously. 

The first report for the resource outlook component was released a couple of months ago.  The 2021-2040 System & Resource Outlook can be downloaded from NYISO and a datasheet summary of key takeaways of the Outlook report is also available.  The summary describes the four key findings: an unprecedented buildout of new generation is needed, load will increase when we electrify everything, transmission is necessary and must be expended to get diffuse renewables to New York City and a new resource has been identified: Dispatchable Emissions-Free Resource (DEFR).  That resource is essentially a fossil-fueled turbine without any emissions. 

I compared the NYISO Resource Outlook modeling analysis with the Integration Analysis modeling.  The Outlook analysis was based on three scenarios.  In order to evaluate the effects of different policy options, this kind of modeling analysis projects future conditions for a baseline or business-as-usual case.  The evaluation analysis makes projections for different policy options, and then the results are compared relative to the business-as-usual case.  NYISO ran two policy scenarios: one based on their estimates of future demand and one that tried to simulate the Integration Analysis projections.  I compared their scenario 1 to the Integration Analysis in the presentation.

I compared the NYISO Resource Outlook modeling analysis with the Integration Analysis modeling.  The Outlook analysis was based on three scenarios.  In order to evaluate the effects of different policy options, this kind of modeling analysis projects future conditions for a baseline or business-as-usual case.  The evaluation analysis makes projections for different policy options, and then the results are compared relative to the business-as-usual case.  NYISO ran two policy scenarios: one based on their estimates of future demand and one that tried to simulate the Integration Analysis projections.  I compared their scenario 1 to the Integration Analysis in the presentation.

The Integration Analysis modeling was used to develop the Draft Scoping Plan.  It is important to note that contrary to usual practice the Integration Analysis baseline was a reference case that included “already implemented” programs.  In other words there are some programs incorporated into the Reference Case that only exist to reduce GHG emissions.  This definition of the Reference Case instead of a Business-As-Usual case is different practice and motivated to get a specific answer.

The Integration Analysis considered four different policy projections.  The first considered the Advisory Panel recommendations for control measures, but the modeling showed that they did not meet the Climate Act targets.  The Integration Analysis came up with three mitigation scenarios that did meet the targets.  The model used for the analysis is not as sophisticated as the NYISO model.  Modelers plugged in a set of control measures at varying efficiencies until they met the targets.  Note, however, they have not claimed that the scenario measures as scoped out will provide electricity that meets current reliability standards.  In my opinion this approach gave the impression to the Council that meeting the targets would be relatively easy.  Council members requested scenarios that considered a faster implementation schedule and more reductions that the 85% target.   The cost/benefit results claim that those more stringent scenarios provide more benefits primarily because of reduced costs.  I think that is a counter-intuitive result so my comparison was against Scenario 2: Strategic Use of Low-Carbon Fuels.

I compared the installed capacity for the two models in the next table.  As noted by the NYISO, an extraordinary development of renewables by 2030 is required and both models agree on that.  There also are some key differences.  The NYISO modeling projects more onshore wind, less offshore wind, less solar, and more DEFR.  The NYISO model simultaneously optimizes resource capabilities and costs to come up with a least-cost solution. I think the wind differences are due to cost and availability differences.  The two modeling approaches handle distributed solar differently.  NYISO does not measure generation from distributed sources and only considers it as a way to reduce the load needed.  The Integration Analysis explicitly includes distributed solar capacity and generation as an output.  Note that existing storage is pumped hydro but any new storage will be batteries.  Finally, it is notable that both modeling analyses project that 2040 DEFR will be comparable to existing fossil capacity albeit NYISO projects significantly more and Integration Analysis a little less.

I compared the energy produced (GWh) for the two models in the next table.  The largest difference between the models is that NYISO projects that DEFR generates ten times more energy.  It turns out that NYISO has DEFR generating 14% of the total energy in 2040 but Integration Analysis projects only 1%.  NYISO projects more onshore wind than offshore wind and the Integration Analysis projects the opposite.  There is huge difference between solar but I believe that is related to the fact that NYISO does not explicitly include distributed solar.   Clearly the two models handle storage differently.

I noted earlier that I was disappointed that the Hochul Administration ignored my comments on the Integration Analysis.  The capacity factor table shows one of the points I made in my comments.  I pointed out that the Integration Analysis land-based wind capacity factors were unrealistically high.  The model projected the 2020 generation with a capacity factor of 29% but the 2021 observed capacity factor was only 22%.  The model could not even get the starting year correct.  As a result the Integration Analysis projections for the land-based wind needed to meet the load is too low.  For all renewable resources the Integration Analysis capacity factors are higher than the NYISO projections.  I prefer the projections from the organization responsible for New York reliability to those from the unelected bureaucrats who have no such responsibilities. 

There is one other point in this table.  The DEFR capacity factors are different.  To this point the extra capacity needed to keep the lights on during peaking periods was provided by relatively cheap sources of energy.  When new peaking resources were needed, cheap simple-cycle turbines were installed.  Currently peak energy resources are primarily from existing old, amortized facilities.  As we shall see, the new DEFR required to keep the system working will use much more expensive resources.  In our deregulated system the NYISO will have to develop a market payment scheme to cover those increased costs.

As noted earlier, I believe that the NYISO projections based on more sophisticated modeling has a much better chance than the Integration Analysis to describe a mix or resources that will maintain current reliability standards.  Nonetheless, I have reservations about any projections because the future electric grid will depend on unprecedented amounts of renewable energy resources.  The following slide lists six of concerns for an electric system dependent upon renewable resources.  For my presentation I only mentioned the first three.  Because wind and solar are intermittent that means you have to have storage for daily, seasonal, and peak load requirements.  The lack of an implementation plan ignores that wind and solar success is location specific.  New York needs a plan that encourages development where the resource is better during the winter lulls.  Specifically, it is not a good idea to offer the same incentives to utility-scale developments on the Tug Hill plateau where over 200” of snow are common as areas where snowfall amounts are lower.  The third concern is reliability services and they are a reason that wind and solar are far more expensive for deliverable energy than fossil.

I found a good summary of the essential reliability services in a paper by National Renewable Energy Laboratory authors entitled Getting to 100%: Six strategies for the challenging last 10%.   It describes ancillary services that must be provided to keep the transmission system going.    Wind and solar do not provide those services so someone, somewhere else has to provide them at some additional cost.

The ultimate reliability problem is illustrated in the following figure.  This graph illustrates the long-duration wind lull problem from an early presentation to the Climate Action Council.  It explicitly points out that firm capacity (DEFR) is needed to meet multi-day periods of low wind and solar resource availability.  The Council has known about the problem all along but have basically pushed it aside as inconvenient.  The thing to remember is that in order to prevent catastrophic blackouts caused because intermittent wind and solar are unavailable NYISO and the Integration Analysis are both banking on DEFR capacity.  Using wind, solar and storage exclusively makes meeting the worst-case renewable resource gap much more difficult.

There is no doubt that the fate of future reliability is inextricably tied to DEFR success.  The next slide discusses DEFR options.  The Scoping Plan acknowledges the need for DEFR and proposes seasonal hydrogen storage as a placeholder technology.  NYISO, while explaining that the resource is necessary, has offered no recommendations what technology could fill the need.  The NREL authors of Getting to 100%: Six strategies for the challenging last 10% described six DEFR strategies

  • Seasonal storage which could be hydrogen or some other kind of long term storage solution
  • Renewable energy is basically overbuilding with battery energy storage.  I believe this represents the preferred approach of those who claim existing technology is sufficient.
  • Existing technology adherents also claim that demand side resources can flatten the load peaks so much that less DEFR is needed
  • The problem with other renewables (e.g. hydro) in New York is that they cannot be scaled up enough to meet identified needs
  • Nuclear is the only proven and scalable DEFR technology currently available but it is a toxic option for NY politicians
  • Carbon capture is unacceptable to the activists and has technological challenges that make it an unlikely a DEFR option.
  • Because of the challenges of carbon sequestration to net out the 15% net-zero emissions, the Scoping plan mentions the CO2 removal strategy but in my opinion it is unlikely.

There are two approaches advocated by those who believe that existing technology is sufficient to maintain electric system reliability in a zero-emissions electric grid.  Some claim that only minimal storage is needed because renewables are available somewhere else, that is to say, the wind is always blowing somewhere.  Others claim that overbuilding renewables supplemented with battery energy storage systems is a viable solution.

While the concept that the wind is always blowing somewhere else is indisputably true, the issue is that in order to keep the lights on we need power at specific times and places from a dedicated source.  New York City’s peaking turbines were located in specific locations to maintain reliability and they were dedicated to that application.  New York’s reliability standards were developed based on decades of experience that showed that a certain installed reserve margin would guarantee that New York reliability standards could be maintained.   Against that backdrop consider the following weather map on February 17, 2021.  The Texas energy debacle was associated with this intensely cold polar vortex huge high pressure system.  Remember that winds are higher when the isobars are close together.  On this day there are light winds from New York to the southeast, west, and north including the proposed New York offshore wind development area.  There are packed isobars in northeastern New England, in the western Great Plains, and central Gulf Coast.  In order for New York to guarantee wind energy availability from those locations, wind turbines and the transmission lines between New York and those locations would have to be dedicated for our use.  Otherwise I think it is obvious that jurisdictions in between would claim those resources for their own use during these high energy demand days.  It is unreasonable to expect that this could possibly be an economic solution.

Another way of looking at this issue is to consider the NYISO fuel mix data available at the NYISO Real-Time Dashboard.  I downloaded four days of February 2021 data to generate the following table.  It shows that a high pressure system reduces wind resource availability across the state.  The data show that less than a quarter of the daily wind capacity is available for this period. Note that the worst-case hour on 2/18/21 at 7:00 AM wind production was only 138 MW out of a New York total of 1,985 MW for a capacity factor of 7%.  If we were to overbuild wind resources to replace fossil capacity 7,191 MW on that hour you would need 102,729 MW.   

Clearly, overbuilding alone is not a viable solution.  You have to have new energy storage and the currently available technology is battery energy storage systems.  Both the Integration Analysis and NYISO Resource Outlook optimized the balance between renewables and storage but still found that DEFR was needed.  Existing-technology proponents claim that over-building wind, solar, and storage is viable but have not countered the NYISO or Integration Analysis modeling results.  I am concerned about the risks associated with the current preferred technology: lithium-ion storage battery systems.  The first risk is logistical inasmuch as battery storage footprints are larger than the existing peaking turbine sites so finding space for the batteries is an issue.  Worse is the fact that lithium-ion storage batteries have the risk of thermal runaway fires and explosions that trade an acute health risk for chronic, and speculative in my opinion, risks.  Paul Christensen, Professor of Pure and Applied Electrochemistry at Newcastle University in the United Kingdom gave a presentation at PV magazine’s Insight Australia event in 2021 that describes the risks. His videos of thermal runaway tests are terrifying.  He is one of the world’s leading experts on battery fires and safety and said global uptake of lithium-ion battery technology has “outstripped” our knowledge of the risks.  He also stated that he is “astounded and appalled that if there is no appreciation of the safety issues involved” with large battery energy storage systems.  This is another feasibility issue that is unaddressed by the Scoping Plan.

Hydrogen storage is the Scoping Plan DEFR placeholder technology.  The plan is to use wind and solar electrolysis to produce “green” hydrogen from water.  The stored hydrogen would either be combusted to power turbines or used in fuel cells.  There are fundamental issues associated with the use of hydrogen that I detail on my blog.  Hydrogen generation, storage and use loses much more energy than alternatives and may not even have a net energy benefit so it is unlikely to be sustainable.  In order for it to provide the necessary peaking power in New York City a colorless, odorless, hard to store explosive gas will have to be stored and used.  I don’t think that the technology will be embraced in the City.  All the infrastructure necessary to produce, store, and use will have to be built and paid for to meet a projected capacity factor of 2%.  I doubt that makes economic sense.

I concluded my discussion of the risks to electric system reliability by summing up the NYISO Resource Outlook Key Findings Datasheet.  According to the organization that is responsible for keeping the lights on, DEFR is necessary for future reliability.  Because a politically acceptable DEFR that can be scaled up to meet the levels needed for reliability is not currently available, a new technology has to be developed, tested, and put on line well before 2040.  The NYISO makes the point that until you have the necessary DEFR technology on line shutting down existing fossil generation is inappropriate.  I am disappointed that the NYISO Resource Outlook has not mentioned any costs.  This is likely to be a particular issue relative to DEFR.  Clearly conditional implementation dependent upon the availability of DEFR would be a rational approach.

There is no documentation that lists the specific costs of control strategies, the expected benefits, or the expected emission reductions making it impossible to estimate the total costs of the Climate Act.  That information is necessary to determine whether the Integration Analysis projections are feasible. The Scoping Plan claims that the cost of inaction is more than the cost of action but a variation of this graph is the only documentation for that claim.  I directly addressed this misleading and inaccurate statement in my comments at the Syracuse public hearing but there was no response or mention of the issues I raised at any Climate Action Council meeting or in the Final Scoping Plan documentation. 

The statement is misleading because costs are given relative to the Reference Case and not a business-as-usual case as explained earlier.  In other words, the Hochul Administration is not presenting all the costs to make the transition to net-zero by 2050.   The Reference Case described as “Business as usual plus implemented policies” includes the costs of the following policies:

  • Growth in housing units, population, commercial square footage, and GDP
  • Federal appliance standards
  • Economic fuel switching
  • New York State bioheat mandate
  • Estimate of New Efficiency, New York Energy Efficiency achieved by funded programs: HCR+NYPA, DPS (IOUs), LIPA, NYSERDA CEF (assumes market transformation maintains level of efficiency and electrification post-2025)
  • Funded building electrification (4% HP stock share by 2030)
  • Corporate Average Fuel Economy (CAFE) standards
  • Zero-emission vehicle mandate (8% LDV ZEV stock share by 2030)
  • Clean Energy Standard (70×30), including technology carveouts: (6 GW of behind-the-meter solar by 2025, 3 GW of battery storage by 2030, 9 GW of offshore wind by 2035, 1.25 GW of Tier 4 renewables by 2030)

Note that the costs for electric vehicles, charging infrastructure, and distribution system upgrades necessary for electric vehicle charging are excluded from the cost of action.  Correcting that “trick” alone would undoubtedly show the costs of action are more than the costs of inaction. 

There is another egregious cheat that further undermines the claim.  It is inaccurate because the Scoping Plan counts the societal benefits of avoided greenhouse gas emissions multiple times.  My Draft Scoping Plan comments on benefits documents why I believe that their claim for $235 billion in societal benefits should only be $60 billion.  Their approach is equivalent to me saying that because I lost 10 pounds five years ago, I can say that I lost 50 pounds.  Correcting that error would also by itself invalidate their benefits claim.  Bottom line is that I estimate that the real costs are at least $760 billion more than the imaginary claimed benefits.

I wrote a post on this shell game description of costs and benefits.  I concluded that a shell game is defined as “A fraud or deception perpetrated by shifting conspicuous things to hide something else.”  In the Scoping Plan shell game, the authors argue that energy costs in New York are needed to maintain business as usual infrastructure even without decarbonization policies but then include decarbonization costs for “already implemented” programs in the Reference Case baseline contrary to standard operating procedure to use a status quo baseline for this kind of modeling.  The documentation for Reference Case assumptions was missing in the draft documents. Shifting legitimate decarbonization costs to the Reference Case because they are already implemented and hiding the documentation fits the shifting condition of the shell game deception definition perfectly. 

In my opinion one of the biggest environmental success stories in my lifetime is the reintroduction of Bald Eagles to New York State.  When I moved to Syracuse in 1981 it was inconceivable that it would be possible to see a Bald Eagle from my home but I have seen several in the last few years.  One of the missing pieces of the Climate Act implementation plan is an update of the Cumulative Environmental Impact Statement to reflect the latest estimates of the number of wind turbines and areal extent of solar panels. I worry that the combined effect of all that development will threaten Bald Eagles.

The following table was not included in the presentation but shows the capacity of the resources not considered in the cumulative impact statements. Clearly, much more renewable capacity will be required than has been evaluated.

Comparison of Integrated Analysis Projected Capacity and Cumulative Environmental Impact Statements (MW)

The following table used in the presentation shows the number of wind turbines and areal extent considered in the completed cumulative impact statements relative to the projected numbers in the Integration Analysis.  The Scoping Plan calls for at least 497 more onshore wind turbines, 493 more offshore wind turbines and 602 more square miles covered with solar equipment than has been evaluated in cumulative analysis.

I have considered the avian impact of the Bluestone Wind Project in Broome County New York to show impacts for a single facility. It will have up to 33 turbines and have a capability of up to 124 MW covering 5,652 acres. Over the 30-year expected lifetime of the facility the analysis estimates that 85 Bald Eagles and 21 federally protected Eastern Golden Eagles will be killed. A first-order approximation1 is to scale those numbers to the total capacity projected for the Scoping Plan. This back of the envelope approximation suggests that at least 216 Bald Eagles could be killed every year when there are 9,445 MW of on-shore wind. There were 426 occupied bald eagle nest sites in New York in 2017. In my comments on this topic I stated that the Final Scoping Plan must include proposed thresholds for unacceptable environmental impacts like this.  There has been no response whatsoever to my comment.

When New York’s GHG emissions are considered relative to global emissions I conclude that New York only action is pointless.  In the presentation I compared New York emissions to global emissions in two graphs.  I used CO2 and GHG emissions data for the world’s countries and consolidated the data in a spreadsheet.  I used the New York State GHG data set CO2e AR4 100 year global warming potential GHG values for consistency.   Plotted on the same graph New York GHG and CO2 emissions cannot be differentiated from zero.

When the New York emissions are plotted relative to global emission increases the futility of New York affecting global emissions is shown.  The trend results indicate that the year-to-year trend in GHG emissions was positive 21 of 26 years and for CO2 emissions was positive 24 of 30 years.  In order to show this information graphically I calculated the rolling 3-year average change in emissions by year.  New York’s emissions are only 0.45% of global emissions and the average change in three-year rolling average emissions is greater than 1%.  In other words, whatever New York does to reduce emissions will be supplanted by global emissions increases in less than a year.

Climate Act advocates frequently argue that New York needs to take action because our economy is large.  I analyzed that claim recently and summarized the data here.  The 2020 Gross State Product (GSP) ranks ninth if compared to the Gross Domestic Product (GDP) of countries in the world.  However, when New York’s GHG 2016 emissions are compared to emissions from other countries, New York ranks 35th.  More importantly, a country’s emissions divided by its GDP is a measure of GHG emission efficiency.  New York ranks third in this category trailing only Switzerland and Sweden.

Despite the fact that the ostensible rationale for GHG emission reduction policies is to reduce global warming impacts, the Scoping Plan continues an unbroken string of the Administration analyses not reporting the effects of a policy proposal on global warming.   The reason is simple.  The change to global warming from eliminating New York GHG emissions are simply too small to be measured much less have an effect on any of the purported damages of greenhouse gas emissions.  I have calculated the expected impact on global warming as only 0.01°C by the year 2100 if New York’s GHG emissions are eliminated.

Conclusion

My presentation explained why I am skeptical of the value of the Climate Act.  Attempting to get to zero emissions is an extraordinary challenge that is downplayed by the Climate Act, the Council and the Scoping Plan so most people are unaware of the likelihood of success.  The experts say we need DEFR but it has to be developed for New York in less than a decade which I believe is unlikely.  There is no reason to expect that the costs won’t be huge and the Hochul Administration has covered up of costs and benefits.  The cumulative impacts of the required renewable developments have not been evaluated and could be unacceptable. 

The fact that our emissions are less than one half of one percent of global emissions and global emissions have been increasing by more than one half of one percent per year may not mean that we should not do something but it does mean that we have time to make sure we don’t do more harm than good.  Before any implementing legislation or regulations are even considered a feasibility analysis that asks “what if” questions should be completed to prove current standards of reliability and safety can be maintained.  In the meantime the state should develop an implementation plan to make sure that renewable resource development is consistent with the Scoping Plan.

Finally, what is going to happen when we have electrified everything and there is an ice storm?  Extreme weather events can have devastating consequences on a more fragile wind and solar electricity network.  I am particularly worried about ice storms.  On a local level it is not clear how the public will be able to survive a multi-day power outage caused by an ice storm when the Climate Act mandates electric heat and electric vehicles but the bigger reliability concern is that fact that ice storms can take out transmission lines.  The January 1998 North American ice storm struck the St Lawrence valley causing massive damage and required weeks to reconstruct the electric grid.  When everything is electrified how will it be possible to rebuild?

NYS Proposed Amendments to Vehicle Emission Standards

I lost track of this proposed regulation so I did not let my New York readers know that there was the opportunity to comment on the proposed rulemaking that will incorporate the State of California’s Advanced Clean Cars into New York’s regulations.  This is the implementing regulation for the state law to switch to zero emission vehicles.  It is unlikely that it will do any good but it would be appropriate to comment and express any misgivings you have about the requirement for a battery electric vehicle.  The comment deadline is 5 pm, Monday, March 6, 2023. Written comments may be submitted by e-mail to air.regs@dec.ny.gov. Put Part 218 in subject line.

This is another article about my evaluation of the Climate Act that I have written 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. 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.

Part 218 Advanced Clean Cars

The rulemaking is described at the New York State Department of Environmental Conservation (DEC) Air Pollution Regulatory Revisions webpage.  It explains that:

Emergency Rulemaking – Parts 200, General Provisions, and 218, Emissions Standards for Motor Vehicles and Motor Vehicle Engines. The emergency/proposed rulemaking will incorporate the State of California’s Advanced Clean Cars II (ACC II) regulation. The proposed amendments establish new zero emission vehicle (ZEV) and low emission vehicle (LEV IV) standards intended to reduce GHG (greenhouse gas) and NMOG + NOx (non-methane organic gas + oxides of nitrogen) emissions from light- and medium-duty on-road vehicles.


The ZEV amendments include an annual ZEV sales requirement for original equipment manufacturers (OEMs), minimum technical requirements, ZEV assurance measures, regulatory flexibilities, and simplified credit accounting. The proposed ZEV amendments will apply to 2026 and subsequent model year light-duty passenger cars (PC), light-duty trucks (LDT), and medium-duty passenger vehicles (MDPV). Starting with model year 2026, OEMs, will be required to deliver an increasing annual percentage of their sales that are ZEVs or PHEVs. This percentage requirement will start at 35% in model year 2026 and increase to 100% of sales for 2035 and subsequent model years. The proposed LEV IV amendments will apply to 2026 and subsequent model year PC, LDT, and medium-duty vehicles (MDV).


The Notice of Emergency Rulemaking will be available in the December 28, 2022 issues of the State Register and the Environmental Notice Bulletin. A virtual hearing is scheduled for March 1, 2023 at 1 pm. The comment deadline is 5 pm, Monday, March 6, 2023. Written comments may be submitted to NYSDEC, 625 Broadway, Albany, NY 12233-3254, ATTN: James Clyne, P.E., or by e-mail to air.regs@dec.ny.gov.

My Comments

For what it is worth I had been accumulating material for comments so I manage to put together something to submit.  I include a link to my comments and describe them below.  I submitted comments to the Department of Environmental Conservation (DEC) because the proposed rulemaking ignores feasibility, affordability, and life-cycle environmental impacts.  The primary rationale for this emergency rulemaking is to implement the control strategy recommendations included in the Climate Leadership & Community Protection Act (Climate Act) Scoping Plan.  The Climate Action Council deferred a feasibility analysis of reliability, affordability, and environmental impacts to the rule-making phase.  The result of this irresponsible avoidance of responsibility is a regulation that could very well not be in the best interests of New York

New York agencies are begrudgingly following their mandates for public comments.  In the past each rulemaking had its own web page with a bit more description.  More importantly the web page would have links to each component of the regulatory package.  Admittedly they often would only be in html format so trying to develop comments required downloading and reformatting.  This proposed amendment refers to a single pdf format file Part 218 Advanced Clean Cars II (ACC II) that includes all the components in one massive file.  If they wanted to encourage public input then they would have everything on a dedicated web page and include links to the pdf format components.

It gets worse because the rationale provided in the proposed amendment documentation is insulting.  The program boils down to California did it so we can too.  There is no consideration of the potential that circumstances in New York differ from California.  The two-county Buffalo–Niagara Falls Metropolitan Statistical Area (MSA) had an estimated population of 1.1 million in 2020 and can be crippled by winter storms. Blizzard conditions with winds excess of 70 mph and heavy lake effect snow in the Buffalo area on Christmas Eve 2022  resulted in devastating impacts across the Buffalo area.   Battery electric vehicles (BEV) mandated by this proposed rule do not do well in those conditions.  Thirty-nine people died in this storm and more surely would have died if electric vehicles were the only option available.  California has no similar major metropolitan areas subject to this type of extreme weather so relying on their analysis so suggesting that it will work here too is disingenuous at best.

The Climate Act mandates a full life-cycle analysis of fossil-fuel use.  On the other hand, the life-cycle impacts of the so-called “zero -emissions” alternatives are ignored.  BEVs may not have emissions when operating but the volume of materials needed to access the rare earth elements necessary for those technologies certainly have environmental impacts when mined and processed. The vehicles mandated by proposed Part 218 require between 1,000 and 2,000 percent more minerals to deliver the same amount of power and on the order of 400% more metals to manufacture the same vehicles.  The consequence of this is that many more materials will be required.  The Part 218 Regulatory Impact Statement should address where the materials necessary for BEVs come from and whether there will be sufficient quantities available for the New York transition. 

I also addressed disposal of electric vehicles.  The modern gas automobile is one of the most highly recycled products in human existence. After initial creation, each vehicle has an average life cycle of about 20 years. At that point it is dis-assembled and its parts are sold used in a global used parts chain, which is the most profitable part of the whole life cycle.  In comparison, a Tesla has a plastic body, and a battery assembled from thousands of 18650-type cells, so it is extremely hard to recycle. The body can’t be recycled.  According to recent Tesla documents the batteries are “valorized” by grinding them up and putting their waste in construction cement. In contrast, Toyota/Honda hybrid batteries are easily re-used and recycled.

The rationale for this action is that “zero-emissions” vehicles in New York are good for the planet.  However, the proposed amendment simply exports emissions elsewhere.  I referenced a horror story of the Indonesia Morowali Industrial Park where the danger and pollution involved in mining nickel is at a rapid pace to meet the demand for EVs.  I asked how this proposed amendment comports to the environmental justice cornerstone of the Climate Act.

The regulatory documents associated with the Proposed Amendment do not address a critical feasibility problem.  DEC has to address BEV charging requirements and existing on-street parking.  Who is responsible for providing the on-street charging infrastructure for car owners that do not have a dedicated charging resource?

The proposed amendment mandates that starting with model year 2026, car makers, will be required to deliver an increasing annual percentage of their sales that are ZEVs or PHEVs. This percentage requirement will start at 35% in model year 2026 and increase to 100% of sales for 2035 and subsequent model years.  Despite tremendous publicity and extensive subsidies nothing can obscure the fact that EVs remain extremely costly for consumers and offer unproven maintenance and reliability records.  I will never buy a BEV because I cannot afford a car that does not offer the same flexibility and convenience as an ICE vehicle.  Moreover, I do not want to deal with home charging infrastructure and the safety risk of Lithium-Ion battery chargers below my bed room.  What happens when the public does not buy enough of these vehicles to meet those quotas? 

Conclusion

This is another instance of a regulation that affects most New Yorkers but only a few are aware of its existence.  I expect that the climate activists will mobilize their acolytes to submit comments supporting the rule-making.  DEC will count the pro and con comments and consider implementation as a mandate from the public because more comments in favor than against will be submitted.  If everyone was aware of this I am sure there number of people opposed would far outweigh the number in favor.

Worse is the complete disregard for rigor in the analysis.  The primary rationale is “California said they could do it and we agree”.  I did not spend sufficient time to develop comments on the California analysis but given the record of the state’s response to my comments it would only have been a waste of time. 

I encourage readers to send a comment.  I think it is sufficient to say that the state needs to prove that this is feasible, affordable, and doesn’t cause more environmental harm than good.  They have not done that work so this should be delayed until they can prove their case.

Micron Electrical Needs and the Climate Act

One of the few members of the New York State media who has been taking the time to evaluate the potential impacts of the Climate Leadership and Community Protection Act (Climate Act) is Tim Knauss writing for the Syracuse Post Standard.  He recently had another good article published that addressed the energy needs of Micron Technology’s planned semiconductor fabrication plant,  His takeaway message was that, when fully complete, would consume more energy than the State of Vermont.  Richard Ellenbogen frequently copies me on emails that address various issues associated with New York’s Climate Act.  I asked his permission to present his evaluation of this article.

I believe that Ellenbogen truly cares about the environment and the environmental performance record of his business shows that he is walking the walk.   Ellenbogen is the President of Allied Converters  that manufactures food packaging.  His facility is about 55,000 square feet and does a lot of manufacturing with heat to seal the bags, all electrically driven.  The facility has solar panels and uses co-generation.  He explains:

In 2008, the average energy cost per square foot for a commercial facility in  Westchester was $1.80.  We were at 16% of that 12 years later and even with the increases, we are at 62% of that 14 years later.  That has been done while having a carbon footprint 30% – 40% lower than the utility system.  The $1.80 per foot  also included commercial office space and our operation is far more energy intensive than an office.  We use energy extremely efficiently and as a result, our bills are much lower than everyone else. 

Micron and the Climate Act

Knauss wrote an article that asked the question: How would Micron’s electricity-hogging plant here live with NY’s war on fossil fuels?  He explained:

When fully built, the complex of four chip fabs would use 640 million kilowatt-hours a month, more than enough for 1 million average New York homes.

Micron has promised to buy all that electricity from renewable sources, a promise that reflects New York state’s commitment to have an emission-free electric grid by 2040.  But Micron could find it tough to keep that promise unless the floodgates open to new wind and solar farms.

It’s one of the least-discussed challenges of the Micron project, as New York’s signature economic development success story collides with a major environmental aspiration.

Micron announced in October that it planned to invest up to $100 billion building four giant chip fabs at a 1,400-acre site in Clay. The fabs would employ up to 9,000 people directly and could spin off 40,000 more jobs, state officials said.

The development won’t happen all at once. Micron said it plans to start producing chips in 2026 and will fully build the complex within 20 years.

Knauss explained that the construction schedule coincides with implementation of the Climate Act.  By 2040 the law mandates the elimination of fossil fuels from the electric system.  As part of the plan to eliminate fossil fuel emissions everything possible will be electrified which means that load is going to have to go up:

Even before Micron surfaced, operators of the statewide electric grid were estimating an 8.7% increase in electricity consumption by 2035, according to forecasts by the New York Independent System Operator.

Micron could add another 5%, according to estimates worked up by National Grid and Micron as part of a term sheet agreement with state officials. The documents indicate that Micron could draw an average of 928 megawatts – the output of a large nuclear plant – as soon as 2035.

I have not followed the Micron agreement very closely but it depends a lot upon Federal and State incentives.  Those incentives come with strings attached:

Micron’s promise to use all renewable power is more than goodwill. Its ability to collect up to $5.5 billion in state subsidies depends on that pledge.

According to the term sheet Micron signed with economic development officials, the company agreed to use “100% renewable energy for electricity.”

Micron must enter a state-approved sustainability plan in exchange for the billions in aid. The plan has not been finalized yet, but there will be plenty of wiggle room. State economic development officials aren’t likely to box in Micron if it prevents the company from building.

There is a relevant component to the agreement.  According to their plans Micron intends to use natural gas for heating. Knauss claims (I have not verified) that “the company also would be exempt, as a manufacturer, from proposed state legislation that would require most buildings eventually to go all-electric.”

Ellenbogen Fact Check and Alternative Approach

Ellenbogen has a number of recipients on his email chain and one of them sent him the link to the Knauss article and asked the following question:

Rich, check out the following article. Micron is making promises about 100% renewable energy that they can’t keep without cheating. Maybe they will buy credits for curtailed electricity that never gets on the grid from solar panels in California. Also note the exceptions they are getting to use gas for heating while everyone else needs to electrify.  According to this, Micron will consume more electricity than all of Vermont. If so, they ought to be building their own on-site nuclear plant. (Seriously.) That would actually give them the process heat they need, too.

Ellenbogen responded with the following analysis.

I fact checked his information and the Micron chip factory actually will use more electric energy than the state of Vermont.  The factory will use 8.12 Terawatt hours per year and Vermont’s annual electric load is only 5 Terawatt hours, with a Terawatt Hour equaling 1,000 Gigawatt Hours.  Wondering how Vermont’s electric load could be so small, I checked and their onsite heating is only 6.26% electrified with the other 93.74% coming from fossil fuels or wood.  A pie chart documenting that is below and everything that you might ever want to know about Vermont’s electric utility system is in this pdf.

Ellenbogen hits the nail on the head when he points out that fossil-fired backup is necessary:

What I find interesting is that all companies want to locate in upstate NY and then claim that they are only using “green” energy from Niagara Falls or the upstate nuclear plants, ignoring the fact that all marginal generation in NY State will be provided by fossil fuels for many decades into the future.  While the Micron facility justifies the energy expense because of the 9,000 jobs, a realistic analysis has to be done regarding the best way to provide energy for that facility.

A nuclear plant would be a great zero-emissions alternative but the politically driven energy policy of New York would have to change dramatically to address the practical issues he points out:

While the person that sent me the email is correct about the use of a nuclear plant being the most environmentally friendly way to supply this facility, the $15 billion for a one gigawatt nuclear plant would add 15% to the projected $100 billion price tag and might make it non-cost effective.  It would also take a very long time to get the approvals and build the facility.   Additionally, the words “Nuclear Energy” might be the only words uttered in NY State that are more toxic than the words “Fossil Fuels”.   Chip manufacturing facilities use ovens at about 1000 degrees-C to bake the silicon wafers accounting for their enormous energy use.  Many processes use high energy lasers and microwaves, as well.

Ellenbogen goes on to evaluate how much solar would be needed.  I have some questions about the battery storage requirements and cost numbers but my numbers come to the same conclusion:

If we look at renewable options, to supply the 8.12 Terawatt hours  with solar arrays  at this facility,  accounting for storage losses,  would require a 9.28 Gigawatt array.  At 7.5 acres per megawatt of solar array would require 69,600 acres or 110 square miles of solar arrays.  To acquire farmland upstate to support that at the going rate of $3200 per acre, the land alone would cost about $221 million.  The array, at $2/watt would cost $18.56 billion and we haven’t calculated the storage costs or the interconnection costs yet, but 1 Gigawatt of storage for 90 days, which is the minimum that would be needed, would require a 2.16 billion KWh battery.    At $500 per KWh,  less than last year’s battery cost, the battery would cost $ 1.08 trillion.  Coupled with the array cost and the land, the total cost will be $ 1.098 trillion dollars or more than ten times the cost of the fabrication facility.    A large percentage of the $1.098 trillion battery packs would have to be replaced every 10 years as the batteries decayed and became unusable.

Even without the battery storage, the 9.3 Gigawatt array would cost more than the nuclear generating plant and would be unable to support the Micron facility (without batteries). It would add almost 20% to the project cost.  Renewables are less expensive than fossil fuel generation per kilowatt-hour if the batteries are not included.  However, where a fossil fuel or nuclear powered utility system does not need batteries, an intermittent renewable system will and that is where the price comparison collapses as the battery storage makes the renewables non cost competitive.

Ellenbogen also looks at using offshore wind.  Importantly he draws on his practical experience with carbon credits to discredit this alternative:

Alternatively, instead of solar the facility would require about 3 GW of the proposed 9 GW of offshore wind but the batteries would still be needed.  Either way, the numbers for this are ludicrous and no business will locate to NY State under these conditions.  Alternatively, the state is going to require Micron to buy carbon credits which is just putting lipstick on a pig because the emissions will still be there.  They will just be gone on paper.  I am familiar with carbon credits as I have been selling the credits from my arrays to utilities in Washington DC for 12 years.  They are designed as an incentive to make utilities want to install their own renewables rather than purchase the credits.  However, if they truly worked as planned, after 12 years the utilities would have installed the renewables and there would be a glut of credits available causing the price to drop.  In 2010, I was receiving about $440 per megawatt-hour of solar energy that we generated.  Last month, I sold them for $410 per megawatt-hour so the price has only dropped by 7% in 12 years.  While renewable generation has been installed to support Washington’s utility system, the credits have not been enough to induce the utilities to invest heavily in renewable construction.   If the Washington DC Government raised the price of the credits high enough to  induce the utilities to build their own renewables,  the utility bills would increase too much and the public would scream at the policy makers. 

Recall that Ellenbogen has developed an energy-efficient solution for his manufacturing facility.  He explains how that could work for Micron:

A far better solution that would also be cost effective would be to site a 1 Gigawatt combined cycle gas generating facility next to the Micron plant to provide its energy needs without long transmission lines that will increase line losses.  By doing that, the Micron facility could also take advantage of the excess thermal energy for its heating and air conditioning needs, which will be substantial.  It would be a co-generating plant on steroids and would relieve a lot of stress on the state’s transmission system.  A generating plant the size of the recently built Cricket Valley Energy Center (1.1 Gigawatts) would suffice.  That only cost $ 1.58 billion which is a small investment of an additional 1.6% compared to the $100 billion facility cost and would save the company money on its energy bills and simultaneously make them more cost competitive.  Additionally, the Cricket Valley Energy Center sits on 193 acres, 0.002 or 0.2% of the land area of the equivalent solar array.  Micron would recoup the $1.58 billion cost from energy savings..  Rather than the state forcing Micron to pretend to be environmentally friendly, Micron would actually be environmentally friendly.  However, the gas bans will preclude using this option all over the state because it doesn’t meet the ideological purity test.

He concludes his writeup:

This is what I was saying regarding the state’s policy actually increasing carbon footprint.  NY State’s energy policy may seem environmentally friendly, but it is just the opposite and will increase carbon emissions.  The policies don’t make any sense from an economic standpoint or an environmental standpoint.

Conclusion

Tim Knauss continues to impress me. He has done another fine job evaluating a technical issue clearly and accurately devoid.

With regards to the Micron plan – reality is always going to win.  The state’s hocus pocus shell game of energy and environmental policies don’t actually decrease costs.  Ellenbogen has offered an alternative that has worked for him and will work for Micron.   Unfortunately, the ideologues in the State won’t consider his approach.  I hope that this does not scuttle the implementation of the Micron plans.

Ellenbogen’s cover email concludes: “This is a classic example of how NY State’s Climate Law is going to raise Carbon Footprint, raise energy costs,  and damage the state economy, echoing my remarks at the Capital on Monday.”

New York Assemblyman Al Stirpe Town Hall Budget Meeting

I attended a town hall meeting for the 2023 Budget sponsored my New York State Assemblyman, Al Stirpe, to explain why I am opposed to any legislation in the budget supporting implementation of any aspect of the Climate Leadership and Community Protection Act  (Climate Act).  The meeting format did not lend itself to presenting anything as detailed as the comments I wanted to make.  This post documents the Climate Act-related issues that came up at the meeting and the comments I wanted to make.

This is another article about my evaluation of the Climate Act that I have written 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.  Moreover, the costs will be enormous and hurt those least able to afford increased costs the most.  I have worked over 40 years as an air pollution meteorologist in the electrical generating sector. After retirement, I served as Director of the Environmental Energy Alliance of New York, and later started the Pragmatic Environmentalist of New York blog that debates the challenges of balancing the risks and benefits of environmental issues. 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.

Everyone wants to do right by the environment to the extent that they can afford to and not be unduly burdened by the effects of environmental policies.  New York environmental policies have lost sight of the need to balance the risks and benefits of environmental initiatives.  I submitted comments on the Climate Act Scoping Plan and have prepared a layman’s summary of issues associated with the Climate Act.  Those resources provide more backup to the references linked in the following.

Meeting Notes

Assemblyman Stirpe took an hour to go through the proposed legislative budget.  He went through quite a bit of detail of all the components.  The Climate Act component of the discussion was no more than five minutes of the presentation.   

I got to the meeting a little early and there were people talking about the effects of the Climate Act, especially the electric vehicle mandate and the gas ban.  Clearly, they were not in favor of either component.  Someone in the audience made the point that most people still aren’t aware of the ramifications of the Climate Act and suggested that more outreach would have been appropriate.  His response insinuated that people were getting wrong information from the fossil fuel interests.  Several other people made comments that were skeptical of the rationale of an existential threat from climate change and others complained about components of the Climate Act. 

Mr. Stirpe incorrectly responded to a couple of comments.  To the climate change is not that big a deal comment he said he has been shoveling less snow and insinuated that climate change was to blame.  I pointed out that he did not know the difference between weather and climate.  Near the end of the meeting he insinuated that air quality has not improved much since 1970 and the first earth day.  I was tempted to respond at the meeting but by that point everyone was tired and I thought he wouldn’t appreciate my response.  The fact is that according to the EPA Air Quality Trends website Northeast air quality improvements from 2000 to 2021 have been significant:

  • Carbon monoxide has decreased 61%;
  • Nitrogen dioxide has decreased 35%;
  • Sulfur dioxide has decreased 90%;
  • Ozone has decreased 16%;
  • Particulate matter has decreased 31%; and
  • Inhalable particulate matter has decreased 43%.

Air quality is much better than it has been in the past.  This misunderstanding is particularly problematic for a New York legislator because Environmental Justice activists have lobbied policymakers into accepting the PEAK coalition conclusion that “Fossil peaker plants in New York City are perhaps the most egregious energy-related example of what environmental injustice means today” and are putting tremendous pressure on the legislature to act.  However, the analysis that forms the basis of that conclusion is flawed.  The health impacts claimed in that analysis are for ozone and inhalable particulates that are secondary pollutants that form far downwind of the adjoining neighborhoods of peaking power plants. 

My Climate Act Comments

I gave Assemblyman Stirpe a document with the following information.

I am opposed to any legislation implementing the Climate Act because the Hochul Administration has not done a feasibility analysis that proves that the Scoping Plan list of control strategies can maintain current levels of reliability, will be affordable, and will not do more environmental harm than good.  I have written over 290 articles on my Pragmatic Environmentalist of New York blog about the Climate Act and I am convinced that the state is on a dangerous path.

New York greenhouse gas emissions are less than one half percent of global emissions per year but global greenhouse gas emissions have been increasing by more than one half percent per year on average since 1993.  Anything we do will be supplanted by emissions elsewhere in less than a year.  That does not mean we should not do something but it does mean that we can take the time to do it right.

The New York Independent System Operator recently published “Information for Policy Makers” that summarizes their activities “to design and implement the operations, planning and market enhancements necessary for the grid in transition.”  I have noted that their work describes the situation well.  New York electric gird is a complex system that has evolved over many years. It is a highly reliable system using proven hardware and procedures. Reliance on unprecedented levels of wind and solar has not been demonstrated successfully anywhere. The energy storage system technology to account for intermittent wind and solar has not been tested on the scale necessary for the proposed use. These facts make it an ill-conceived plan that will likely end in blackout.  Furthermore, the rush to electrify everything is not safe.  What will happen when everything has been converted to electricity and there is an ice storm?

The Scoping Plan does not include a detailed accounting of the costs to consumers. The administration claims that the costs of inaction are greater than the costs of action but that claim is misleading and inaccurate. It is misleading because the Scoping Plan costs of action only includes the costs of the Climate Act and do not include all the costs to meet the net-zero by 2050 target, including vehicle electrification. It is inaccurate because it double counts the societal benefits of reductions.

The Climate Act only accounts for fossil fuel life-cycle costs and environmental impacts while ignoring the lifecycle impacts of wind, solar, and energy storage technologies. Those “zero-emissions” resources may not have emissions when generating electricity but the volume of materials needed to access dilute wind and solar energy and the rare earth elements necessary for those technologies certainly have environmental impacts when mined and processed. The large number of wind turbines and solar panels will also create massive amounts of waste when they are retired. Furthermore, the cumulative environmental impacts of thousands of wind turbines and square miles of solar panels has not been evaluated for the levels proposed in the Scoping Plan.

Opposition to Following Legislation

My submittal noted that I oppose the following legislative proposals.  I oppose all components of the NY Renews Climate Jobs, and Justice package including the Climate and Community Protection Fund as well as the following specific bills:

A4592/S2016 “NY Home Energy Affordable Transition Act”;Aligns utility regulation with state climate justice and emission reduction targets; repeals provisions relating to continuation of gas service; repeals provisions relating to the sale of indigenous natural gas for generation of electricity.  

A4306/S732 DEC to establishes a carbon dioxide emissions price for electric generation from carbon-based fuel; creates a carbon dioxide emissions fund; distribute revenue to low-income individuals and communities and to support mass transit. 

A920/S562 the “all-electric building act”; provides that the state energy conservation construction code shall prohibit infrastructure, building systems, or equipment used for the combustion of fossil fuels in new construction statewide no later than December 31, 2023 if the building is less than seven stories and July 1, 2027 if the building is seven stories or more.  

A279/S4134“New York State Build Public Renewables Act”; requires the New York power authority to provide only renewable energy and power to customers; requires such authority to be the sole provider of energy to all state owned and municipal properties; requires certain New York power authority projects and programs pay a prevailing wage and utilize project labor agreements.

S4854/no same as. Requires agencies to develop recommendations regarding  the  establishment  of microgrids at critical facilities.  

A4393/S2007. Establishing a one hundred percent clean renewable energy system for electricity by two thousand thirty-four; such energy system shall include solar, wind, geothermal and tidal sources.

A4866/no same as. “fossil fuel facilities replacement and redevelopment blueprint act” requires NYSERDA, DPS and DEC to prepare a blueprint to guide the replacement and redevelopment of the oldest and most-polluting fossil fuel facilities and their sites by 2030.

A411/S3581 Declares a climate emergency and places a ban on fossil fuel infrastructure projects but shall not apply to repair or maintenance of existing infrastructure.

Support for following legislation:

I listed the following two legislative proposals as ones I think will help address my concerns.

S2030/no same as Directs the public service commission in consultation with NYSERDA to conduct a full cost benefit analysis of the technical and economic feasibility of renewable energy systems in the state of New York and to compare such directly with other methods of electricity generation within nine months after the effective date and every four years thereafter.

A4999/S2474 Directs the state energy planning board to conduct a study of the technical and economic feasibility of a one hundred percent renewable energy system and a reduction in greenhouse gas emissions.

Conclusion

I don’t think Assemblyman Stirpe understands just how poorly informed he is because of the mis-information in the Scoping Plan and the constant propaganda from the media and climate activists.  I had offered in the past to give him a briefing but he refused.  I do not expect to hear anything as a result of the comment I gave him.  If did respond I would ask him to put pressure on the Hochul Administration to give a full accounting of the costs, do a feasibility study of the effects on electric system reliability and do a cumulative environmental impact analysis of the Scoping Plan recommendations for wind and solar resources.  Until the Scoping Plan is proven to be feasible, it is inappropriate to support any implementing legislation.