Climate Etc by Roger Caiazza 4/2/2021
Environmental justice organizations are currently a major driver of environmental regulation in New York. A new report “The Fossil Fuel End Game, A frontline vision to retire New York City’s peaker plants by 2030†illustrates the campaign strategy they are using to shut down peaking power plants in New York City. Unfortunately their claims are based more on emotion than fact.
Background
In the spring of 2020 Physicians, Scientists, and Engineers (PSE) for Healthy Energy released a report Opportunities for Replacing Peaker Plants with Energy Storage in New York State. The text for the New York specific report describes the alleged problem:
Across New York, 49 oil- and gas-fired peaker power plants and peaking units at larger plants help meet statewide peak electric demand. These include both combustion turbines designed to ramp quickly to meet peak demand, and aging steam turbines now used infrequently to meet peak needs. More than a third of New York’s peaker plants burn primarily oil, and three-quarters are over 30 years old resulting in numerous inefficient plants with high rates of greenhouse gas and criteria pollutant emissions for every unit of electricity generated. Some of these plants are in very urban areas: ten plants have more than a million people living within three miles. One-third of the plants are located in areas the state considers to be environmental justice communities, where vulnerable populations typically already experience high levels of health and environmental burdens. New York has set energy storage targets and recently designed peaker plant emission reduction targets, providing an opportunity to replace inefficient, high-emitting peaker plants in vulnerable communities throughout the state with energy storage and solar.
These findings were picked up on by the New York City PEAK Coalition. They released a report in June 2020 entitled: “Dirty Energy, Big Moneyâ€. Most recently they followed up with The Fossil Fuel End Game, a frontline vision to retire New York City’s peaking power plants by 2030. The campaign is succeeding because the New York Senate passed the Pollution Justice Act of 2021 on March 3, 2021 that mandates that the peaking power plants have to be retired consistent with these reports.
This campaign is deeply flawed from the get go. The premise is wrong because peaking power plants are not inherently bad because they provide critical support to the electric system when needed most and that will be the focus of this post. The rationale is incorrect that these peaking power plants are directly affecting air quality in adjacent environmental justice neighborhoods because the health impacts are claimed from secondary pollutants that do not form before they are transported away from the neighborhood. Replacing all the peaking plants in the time frame as suggested is extremely risky because the technology available today is not up to the task.
In this post I am going to concentrate on the reason for peaking power plants rather than the holes in the environmental arguments against them. For more information on those aspects, I refer readers to posts on my blog. The first post on the Peak Coalition report provided information on the primary air quality problem associated with these facilities, the organizations behind the report, the State’s response to date, the underlying issue of environmental justice and addressed the motivation for the analysis. The second post addressed the rationale and feasibility of the proposed plan relative to environmental effects, affordability, and reliability. I also discussed the original report Opportunities for Replacing Peaker Plants with Energy Storage in New York State document that provided technical information used by the PEAK Coalition. I summarized all three of these technical posts in simpler fashion. I looked at the trends of inhalable particulates in New York City relative to the claims of a dire health threat. Finally, I recently wrote a post on the Pollution Justice Act.
More:
https://judithcurry.com/2021/04/02/environmental-justice-campaign-to-replace-new-york-city-peaking-power-plants/#more-27375
