Category: Recommended Reading

NYISO 2025 Power Trends Report

Recently the New York Independent System Operator (NYISO) released Power Trends 2025.  This is the NYISO’s annual analysis of factors influencing New York State’s power grid and wholesale electricity markets.  This post highlights some of the key points made.

I am convinced that implementation of the Climate Act net-zero mandates will do more harm than good because the energy density of wind and solar energy is too low and the resource intermittency too variable to ever support a reliable electric system relying on those resources. I have followed the Climate Act since it was first proposed, submitted comments on the Climate Act implementation plan, and have written over 500 articles about New York’s net-zero transition.  The opinions expressed in this article do not reflect the position of any of my previous employers or any other organization I have been associated with, these comments are mine alone.

Overview

The Climate Act established a New York “Net Zero” target (85% reduction in GHG emissions and 15% offset of emissions) by 2050.  The Climate Action Council (CAC) was responsible for preparing the Scoping Plan that outlined how to “achieve the State’s bold clean energy and climate agenda.”  After a year-long review, the Scoping Plan was finalized at the end of 2022.  Since then, the State has been trying to implement the Scoping Plan recommendations through regulations, proceedings, and legislation.  One law is Public Service Law Section 66-P Establishment of a renewable energy program that requires the Public Service Commission to establish a program to meet the interim targets for 70% of the energy delivered in 2030 “shall be generated by renewable energy systems” and that “by the year two thousand forty the statewide electrical demand system will be zero emissions”.

The Power Trends Resources landing page provides documentation and links to the Power Trends 2025 report itself, and a Power Trends Fact Sheet.  The Fact Sheet describes the report and summarizes the findings:

Power Trends explores the issues and challenges shaping the grid of the future based on the latest economic data, forecasts of peak demand and changing generation mix.  Our 2025 report underscores the heightened uncertainty of future system conditions and key assumptions such as population and economic growth, installation of behind-the-meter renewable resources, electric vehicle adoption and charging patterns.   Specifically, the impact on the load forecast of several energy-intensive economic development projects, such as data centers and semiconductor manufacturing, provides additional forecasting and planning challenges.

I have summarized the key points made in the Fact Sheet, the Power Trends report and the Press Release with my comments.

Reliability Margins

The Fact Sheet, Power Trends Report, and Press Release emphasize the concern about declining reliability margins.  The Press Release explains:

Generator deactivations are outpacing new supply additions. Electrification programs and new large-load customers associated with economic development initiatives are pushing projected demand higher. Together, these forces are also narrowing reliability margins across New York and increasing the risk of future reliability needs.

Recent Power Trend reports have included the declining reliability margins issue.  The following figure shows last year’s status compared to this year.  The decline in margin is mostly because fossil units are retiring faster than zero emissions replacements are coming on-line. 

Fossil Plants

All three NYISO documents note that the average age of the fossil fleet is increasing.  They also point out the advantages of modernizing old fossil facilities.  The Press Release explains:

Repowering aging power plants can lower emissions, meet rising consumer demand, and provide reliability benefits to the grid that are needed to integrate additional clean energy resources.

The declining margin and the age of the fossil plants reflects a lack of foresight by the New York Department of Environmental Conservation (DEC) who has been pressuring existing power plants to reduce emissions or shut down. 

Power Trends states that: “Repowering aging power plants can lower emissions, meet rising consumer demand, and provide reliability benefits to the grid that are needed to integrate additional clean energy resources.”  DEC has rejected several repowering applications to replace existing old generators with modern new facilities because of the Climate Act.  Unfortunately, there is no direct link between the proposed facilities and a particular reliability issue, so DEC rejected the applications.  This is an example of poor New York energy planning – the permit decisions were considered in isolation not in the context of the system.  While I applaud the fact that this is a recommendation of Power Trends, it is also fair to ask why the NYISO did not intervene in the repowering applications. 

New Load Growth

Future reliability margins will also be affected by new load growth.  The Fact Sheet and Report note that “New high-tech, AI and data center projects are having an impact on future electric demand and load growth”.  Figure 1 from the Report notes that 2,567 MW of new load capacity is needed by 2035 and the document notes that other projects could add around 1,900 MW of capacity after that.  I am disappointed that the NYISO Report did not mention that these new load centers require constant energy and clean power that is free from electrical noise, surges, voltage spikes, and drops which exacerbates the challenge of the Public Service Law Section 66-P “Establishment of a renewable energy program” requirements.

Winter Shift

The three NYISO documents all note that the peak loads are projected to shift to the winter from the summer.  The Press Release notes that:

New York is projected to become a winter-peaking electric system by the 2040s, driven primarily by electrification of space heating and transportation. On the coldest days, the availability of natural gas for power generation can be limited, and interruptions to natural gas supply will introduce further challenges for reliable electric grid operations.

There is another unmentioned issue with winter peaking.  When the Public Service Law Section 66-P “Establishment of a renewable energy program” electric system that relies on wind and solar generating resources is in place, the winter solar availability is much lower than in the summer.  This is another challenge that I think the Power Trends report should have acknowledged.

Competitive Market

The Fact Sheet, Power Trends Report, and Press Release all extoll the power of competitive markets to support the transition while maintaining reliability and minimizing consumer costs.  The NYISO is a product of the de-regulated competitive market. The report explains that: We are committed to administering and overseeing the competitive electricity markets as the most cost-effective way to attract and retain new resources to meet our reliability needs as we transition to a decarbonized grid.”  I do not share their optimistic outlook for the ability to attract and retain new resources.  At this time, it is not clear what kind of resources and how much of those resources are needed, so the presumption that they can design a market to attract those resources is questionable.

Interconnection Process

The three NYISO documents all note that there are interconnection issues.  The Press Release states:

New supply, load, and transmission projects are seeking to interconnect to the grid at record levels. NYISO’s interconnection processes continue to evolve to balance developer flexibility with the need to manage the process to more stringent timeframes.

This is an issue that is directly within the purview of NYISO, and it is a problem.  Power Trends describes proposed modifications to the process but does not acknowledge that there are fundamental issues.  Many of the new projects are inverter-based resources and integrating this new category of resources is problematic for grid stability and reliability.  Regulatory frameworks are under development to address this problem, and this has contributed to the interconnection delays.

Discussion

The Climate Act was promulgated without consideration of feasibility.  Nowhere is this more impactful than with respect to the schedule.  A rational New York energy plan would implement the zero-emission resources before retiring existing generating resources.  New York is not rational.  Despite the obvious delays in construction of new supply and transmission due to a whole host is issues the Hochul Administration has not broached the possibility of postponing any Climate Act targets.

The current Climate Act implementation plans appears to just be a matter of building as many zero-emissions resources as possible as soon as possible. These reliability planning reports indirectly affect the implementation schedule.  The process identifies specific issues which triggers a procedure to address them.  All that takes time.  Coupled with the interconnection process it is no wonder that deployments are lagging behind the Scoping Plan schedule.

In my opinion the biggest reliability challenge for the Public Service Las Section 66-P “Establishment of a renewable energy program” is the necessity of a new category of electric system support technology that can be reliably dispatched to provide both energy and capacity over long durations with no emissions.  NYISO calls this resource the Dispatchable Emissions-Free Resource (DEFR). They are “crucial for meeting energy demands when intermittent renewable sources like solar and wind are unavailable.”  The challenge is we don’t know what will work and we don’t know how much is needed because an analysis of potential renewable resource availability using the longest duration dataset available has not been completed.

I think that NYISO has become more forthcoming about the Climate Act issues in this edition of the report.  I am still disappointed with the NYISO for several reasons.  In the first place, it is still necessary to read between the lines in all their reports to understand that they know there are enormous challenges associated with the transition to a renewable energy electric system.  I think that is a disservice to the residents of New York.  A truly independent agency should explicitly describe the reliability and affordability difficulties facing the electric system without holding back. 

I am also disappointed that the Power Trends document did not describe specific issues with the key points presented.  As noted above, this edition of Power Trends does not acknowledge challenges associated with the need for clean and reliable electric energy for proposed new load centers, fossil retirements and repowering policies, weather-related complications associated with the shift to winter peaking, interconnection feasibility concerns, and DEFR

Finally, I wish that NYISO would be more assertive in New York energy policy matters.   It is understandable given the bully-tactics of the Cuomo Administration but New York State needs to hear from the experts.  Power Trends notes that we need to do repowering, but NYISO did not intercede directly to advocate for repowering applications that were rejected. 

Conclusion

The following conclusion is identical to last year’s summary here because nothing has changed.

The Power Trends 2025  report provides an excellent overview of New York State’s power grid and wholesale electricity markets.  Unfortunately, NYISO does not consolidate all the warning signs about Climate Act implementation, nor does it call out state policies that are exacerbating problems.

Ultimately the problem is that New York has no comprehensive energy plan.  The Scoping Plan is just a list of technologies that describe an electric system that is zero-emissions.  However, there is no feasibility study that shows how it will work nor has the Hochul Administration reconciled the differences between the Scoping Plan and NYISO resource outlooks.  As it stands now the Administration plan is to build as many wind and solar facilities as possible and hope someone works out how they are supposed to be integrated into the electric system.  When that does not work, I predict the NYISO will be blamed.

The only way to ensure the safety of New Yorkers is to do a demonstration project that proves that an electric system that relies on wind and solar energy will work.  A poor second choice would be a comprehensive feasibility analysis that reconciles the Integration Analysis and NYISO analyses.  Failing to do either is planning to fail.

Articles of Note December 24, 2023

Sometimes I just don’t have time to put together an article about specific posts I have read about the net-zero transition and climate change that I think are relevant.  This is a summary of posts that I think would be of interest to my readers.

I have been following the Climate Leadership & Community Protection Act (Climate Act) since it was first proposed and most of the articles described are related to it. I have devoted a lot of time to the Climate Act because I believe the ambitions for a zero-emissions economy embodied in the Climate Act outstrip available renewable technology such that the net-zero transition will do more harm than good. The opinions expressed in this article 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.

Videos

John Stossel interviews Bjorn Lomborg who points out that there are better things society should spend money on.  I particularly like this quote: “Only reporting on the minuses, and only emphasizing worst-case outcomes, is not a good way to inform people.”

Alex Epstein argues that if you believe that fossil fuels are necessary to maintain our current standard of living and improving the lives of those who don’t have adequate energy resources, then you should advocate that the zero by 2050 goal should be replaced by the goal to advance human flourishing around the world.

Michael Shellenberger: Greta Thunberg’s Climate Crusade Is Losing.  He argues that renewables are coming into crisis because of local opposition, the high costs of associated transmission and energy storage become evident and the environmental impacts of wind and solar undermine their value.

Conference of Parties 28

The COP 28 Climate Summit closing sound bite for the news cycle was that there was a deal to end fossil fuels. Earlier this “paradigm switch” was off the table but the fact that there was no debate on the final text suggests that the language was designed to be vague enough that it could be interpreted however desired..   Paul Homewood explains that when you dive into the detail of the agreement, you find that it is mostly smoke and mirrors.  Finally there are links to numerous related articles here.

Costs and Benefits

The Hochul Administration claims that the costs of inaction outweigh the costs of action of the Climate Act.  However, Kenneth Richardson notes that a new report claims the opposite: “The benefits of not meeting Paris Accord emissions-reduction targets outweigh the costs associated even with worst-case-scenario global warming throughout the 21st century.”  A new comprehensive analysis (Tol, 2023) weighs the cost-benefit of meeting Paris Accord emission policy targets to keep global warming in check, or under 2°C.  Richard Tol is an expert economist who has done a lot of research regarding the costs and benefits of greenhouse gas emission reductions.  If the Hochul Administration wants to follow the science then they should ask him about New York’s transition.

Roger Pielke, Jr, also comments on this paper in response to a question about cost-benefit ratios of climate change policies:

RP — This question reminds me of the recent discussion by Bjorn Lomborg in the WSJ of a recent paper by Richard Tol (which is part of a larger collection). Lomborg explains:

Tol finds that if the world meets its 1.5 degree promise, it would prevent a less than 0.5% loss in annual global domestic product by 2050 and a 3.1% loss by 2100. . . Based on the latest cost estimates of emission reductions from the United Nations climate panel, he finds that fully delivering on the 1.5-degree Paris promise will cost 4.5% of global GDP each year by midcentury and 5.5% by 2100. This means that likely climate policy costs will be much higher than the likely benefits for every year throughout this century and into the next. Under any realistic assumptions, the Paris agreement fails a basic cost-benefit test.

I teach cost-benefit analysis (or, I should say, I used to!) and while the idea of comparing costs to benefits makes perfect sense in the evaluation of policy alternatives, I have no expectation that we can accurately evaluate the costs and benefits of any policy over the next 75 years. The meaningfulness of long-term economic projections is one issue where I strongly disagree with Lomborg and Tol. The only way that climate policy works is by taking incremental, short-term steps that the public perceives to provide (and even better — actually has) benefits to their lives, and thus they demand more such policies. There are volumes of studies of policy implementation failures where policies did not provide benefits or made things worse, but that too gives me optimism as policy making is self-correcting. Maybe not efficiently or quickly, but look around — 2023 has more people living healthier and safer lives than at any point in human history. Yes, there are still many problems and many do not presently enjoy such health and safety. That just means we have more work to do. Long-term predictions of policy or the economy are fun exercises, but I don’t find them particularly useful for helping us to decide what to do next.

Levelized Cost of Energy

The primary reference for claims that wind and solar are cheaper than natural gas is Lazard’s levelized cost of energy (LCOE).  Andy May explains that even a quick look at their data shows that this is not true: “Even within their April 2023 report they are not consistent in their numbers. To make matters worse, they bury critical details in the fine print and do not define their terms.”  May also provides a link to more details.

The comments for this post are also interesting.  This is a good point that describes yet another hidden cost: “Renewable electric grids are longer, of higher capacity, by between three and ten times, and are underutilized, in comparison with conventional power station links”.  Another comment provides a link to an hour-long video discussion of Lazard LCOE.

Francis Menton also addresses Lazard LCOE in a follow up to his earlier post asking whether climate advocacy is incompetence or intentional fraud.  He concludes:

Could the people at Lazard who produce all these fancy and complex charts and graphs really not know that 4 hour duration batteries cycling once per day are not going to come close to solving the intermittency problems of wind and solar generation?  Or do they really know that, and they are just hoping to sell a few hundreds of billions of dollars worth of wind turbines and solar panels before the stupid politicians and investors figure out the scam?   

The 1.5oC Target

Climate Activists never tire of remining everyone that the internationally agreed upon target to “prevent worsening and potentially irreversible effects of climate change” is that the “world’s average temperature should not exceed that of preindustrial times by more than 1.5 degrees Celsius (2.7 degrees Fahrenheit)”.  An article at Climate Realism explains that this is not supportable:

Reason magazine recently posted an article on its website titled “There Is No 1.5°C Climate Cliff,” arguing that the 1.5°C threshold touted by the United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, world governments, and activists, is not based on any scientific investigation, but is rather arbitrary.

Winter Solstice and Climate Change

In my opinion, climate change is driven by the sun.  Admittedly I have not found a lot of research to support my belief so I have to rely on a couple of things.  One of the factors causing ice ages are “very minor (and regular) adjustments in the angle of the Earth relative to the sun affects the amount of solar radiation, or insolation, that reaches Earth.”  The other thing is the major differences between the seasons caused by changes in sunlight.  An article by Ron Klutz includes this nice graphic of the seasons and argues that if climate change is occurring that the highest temperatures in the summer and the lowest temperatures in the winter should both be increasing.  He does not find evidence that the summers are getting hotter but does note that the observed increase in winter low temperatures increasing is likely caused by urban heat islands affecting many land-based observing sites.

Humans and Climate Change According to a new study, humans “contribute to global warming” by exhaling greenhouse gases like methane and carbon dioxide 16 times per minute.  The study shows that humans are generating methane and CO2.  Jo Nova asks:

If belches of methane can cause a climate crisis, how, we marvel, did the planet not boil away when 30 million bison roamed the plains of North America? Why was the climate ideal  (apparently) when the vast herds of Wildebeest roamed Africa, and Aurochs stretched across Europe?

Lessons to Be Learned from Ontario

In my last edition of articles of note I included Parker Gallant’s three parts of a series of articles about the transition.  The articles describe happenings around the world where members of the Church of Climate Change Cult (CCCC) are starting to question their beliefs.  According to his contact link “Parker’s retirement allows him to spend time researching the energy sector and apply his banker’s common sense to analyzing the sector’s approach to the production, transmission and distribution of electricity to Ontario’s consumers.”

 In the latest article he pointed out that the media revels in publishing scary stories about current fossil fuel use.  However, the same outlets rarely mention issues related to the electrification alternative that is supposed to solve the problems.  He goes on to describe the electric grid costs to connect renewables and the astronomical costs.  He concludes that the CCCC have been doing their best to drive us in the developed world into poverty via their push to get us to their “net-zero” emissions target.

Weather of 2023

Roger Pielke, Jr. summarizes the weather of 2023.  He notes: “We are all well aware of the narrative that the weather is quickly getting worse. Unfortunately, data does not agree.”

I have read many stories exclaiming that this year has been the “Hottest for 125,000 years”.  Paul Homewood explains that “The claim is self-evident and baseless nonsense for a number of good reasons:

  • There is no such thing as “a global average temperature”
  • Even now we have very sparse coverage of temperature measurements. Prior to satellites, we had virtually no data  outside of the US, Europe and a few other built up areas
  • The temperature record we do have is thoroughly corrupted by UHI, and only dates back to the late 19thC
  • Natural variations, including ENSO, volcanic activity etc, can easily cause temperature swings of a degree Celsius from year to year, and decade to decade. But historical proxies don’t have the fine resolution to pick these up, they merely give an idea of average temperatures over decades and even centuries. Consequently you cannot compare one year now with the general climate of, say, 2000 years ago.

But forget about all of these theoretical objections, because the climatic evidence we do have is overwhelming, and it tells us that the climate has been much warmer than now for most of the last 10,000 years, since the end of the ice age.