The Climate Action Council will issue its final scoping plan to achieve the Climate Leadership and Community Protection Act’s decarbonization goals this month. Are we concerned about what that plan will say? Maybe reflecting on events in New York, the US, and globally will help us decide.
At a CAC meeting last month, the state’s Energy Research and Development Authority introduced the word or more precisely the words: NYSERDA said that advanced nuclear should be part of New York’s energy plan. Shortly afterwards, anti-nuclear members of the council asked that the plan specifically say that new nuclear won’t help New York reach its 2040 100% carbon-free electricity goal.
In its recent 20-year outlook forecast, the grid operator, NYISO, warned that plans to retire gas-fired generation and shift to solar and wind generated electricity over the next decade will jeopardize the reliability of the electric grid: EVs and building electrification are being mandated on the one hand, ultimately doubling our electricity needs. NYISO is concerned that intermittent buildout and the necessary support from batteries and transmission are happening too slowly and may, in any case, prove unreliable.
The NYISO report cautions that carbon-free backup power — greater than the state’s entire fossil-fuel capacity — will need to be deployed starting now, and over the next 20 years, but no generating source for that energy has been identified. Yet, small modular nuclear reactors, known as SMRs, can be built and deployed in five to 10 years. They can be constructed in a factory, then shipped and operated at Bill Gates’ Wyoming TerraPower facility — or even here in New York.
Fracking was banned in New York, but we now import lots of fracked gas from Pennsylvania. We played “Whack-A-Mole” with industry, FERC, and the DEC: Constitution and Northeast Energy pipelines were blocked even as other pipelines were constructed or expanded. Activists defeated the Williams Northeast Supply Line — a pipeline across Raritan Bay — meant to deliver gas to New York City. But to address the shortfall, National Grid is expanding delivery of liquified natural gas in Brooklyn.
West Virginia Sen. Joe Manchin has worked to expedite or eliminate review of the Mountain Valley Pipeline which would run through the Jefferson National Forest. MVP approval is currently part of the Energy Independence and Security Act. Environmental organizations have asked their members to call, tweet, or email their representatives to block this “dirty deal.”
Have we shot ourselves in the foot?
Anti-nuclear advocacy has been so successful that Massachusetts, Vermont, New York, California, and Germany, too, shut down carbon-free nuclear reactors. However, the rosy promise of wind and solar has not materialized even when decades and billions of dollars were devoted to the effort.
California is importing coal-generated electricity from Wyoming and building new gas plants. When energy imports — like those in the CAC’s current draft plan for New York — don’t materialize, California suffers blackouts. Germany is burning wood, crops, and coal; has just signed a 15-year gas deal with Qatar; and is constructing import terminals for LNG which the Mountain Valley Pipeline could help to deliver. California and Germany, with higher energy costs than their neighbors, have discovered that intermittent generators do not provide economical electricity. In New York, shuttering Indian Point not only spiked gas prices downstate and increased state CO2E emissions: It moved metro-region electricity to 90% fossil fuel-sourced. Iroquois’ “ExC” compression expansion project, when completed, will increase flow through that pipeline to help fuel downstate.
Unfortunately, we won’t decarbonize — that is, cut gas use — by banning LNG trucks in Brooklyn, by preventing a pipeline in the Virginias, or by plastering rural upstate New York with thousands of square miles of solar panels and wind turbines.
Two thirds of the state’s electricity demand is non-stop. Grid reliability requires baseload generation from hydro, fossil fuel or nuclear power plants. Large hydro facilities have a huge environmental impact and the developed world has already exhaustively built out of this resource. Pipelines such as Mountain Valley and fossil-fuel power plants such as New York’s own Cricket Valley and CPV — which replaced Indian Point’s carbon-free reactors — will continue to be built as long as the public accepts gas as the default mechanism to ensure economical dependable energy.
Nuclear reactors have provided safe, reliable, and affordable baseload electricity for more than half a century. While a nuclear plant on 240 acres can support 1,000 good jobs for four generations, a 2,000-acre solar farm might create a handful of permanent jobs for 20 years, until defunct panels are trucked to an out-of-state landfill. Reactors can power the grid with a fraction of the land and materials gobbled up by intermittent resources. Indeed, the first 80,000 acres of upstate bulldozed for Chinese solar panels reflects our misguided efforts to replace Indian Point. Next-gen reactors will be more efficient, passively safe, and capable of reusing spent fuel currently stored as waste.
If we want to stop fossil-fuel infrastructure, if we want to address global warming, we will need a different playbook. We will need to call, tweet and email elected officials — and NYSERDA — to maintain our current fleet of reactors and to support new nuclear power development, as well.
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