Illustrating The Absurdity Of New York's Energy Transition

April 12, 2024 Francis Menton @ Manhattan Contrarian 

By its 2019 Climate Act, New York has officially embarked on a great energy transition to Net Zero by 2050, with statutorily-dictated interim mandates along the way. The first of those mandates is 70% “emissions-free” electricity by 2030, only 6 years from now. This is far and away the biggest government-directed project that the State of New York has ever undertaken. However, to date, relative to this project there exists no environmental impact statement, no feasibility study, no prototype, and no demonstration project to show how this can be done, let alone any detailed cost analysis to show how much it will cost.

Implementing the enforced energy transition is the responsibility of an alphabet soup of state agencies that makes the federal labyrinth of bureaucracies look simple and rational by comparison. Multiple overlapping departments, councils and authorities that have staffed themselves up with climate zealots take charge of pushing the transition forward — things like the Climate Action Council, the Department of Environmental Conservation, and the NY State Energy Research & Development Authority.

But meanwhile, there remain a couple of vestigial agencies tasked with keeping the lights on, notably the Department of Public Service and the NY Independent System Operator. Those two held something called the Zero Emissions by 2040 Technical Conference back on December 11-12, 2023. After all, somebody has to look over the minor “technical” issues along the way to our lofty climate goals for 2030 and 2040. Look as I might, I can’t find any reporting on, or reference to, this conference in any of the local press at the time or in the months since. However, my friend and partner in crime Roger Caiazza (the Pragmatic Environmentalist of New York), has tracked down information on the conference on various agency websites and on YouTube. On April 7, Roger posted a lengthy blog reporting on the first panel at the Conference; a somewhat different version of that post also appeared on Watts Up With That at about the same time. The slides for all the presentations at the Conference can be found as Item 72 on the public docket at this link.

I’ll just elaborate here on a few of the absurdities that Roger has uncovered.

The first panel at the Conference got the title “Gap Characterization.” The “gap” in question is the potential difference between electricity demanded by consumers and the ability of the system to produce electricity at any given moment. Such “gap” is predicted to arise during the course of the energy transition because of the simultaneous shuttering of the natural gas power plants that currently form the backbone of our grid and the increased demand for electricity from the forced electrification of things like building heating and automobiles. And where will the electricity come from to fill this gap? From the magical “DEFR,” of course. The “DEFR” is the Dispatchable Emissions-Free Resource — the “resource” with all the good characteristics of fossil fuels but without any of the carbon emissions. The current amount of DEFRs in existence and actual use to generate utility-scale electricity in the world is zero.

A guy named Zach Smith gave the first presentation on the “gap” panel. Smith is the VP of System Resource Development at NYISO. Here is his first slide: 

Then we have the sources of the juice, shown in the bars. Natural gas is the big orange part in the middle. Currently, about 2/3 of the power comes from natural gas, most of the rest from hydro and nuclear, and some little slivers from things like wind and solar. Then we see the projected changes. Supposedly, large amounts of wind and solar emerge by 2035, and natural gas goes down a little. Then in 2035, the DEFR (lavender) emerges, and by 2040 becomes dominant. In the left-hand scenario, the DEFR — something that currently doesn’t exist at scale anywhere in the world — has supposedly been built to a capacity of about 50 GW, far more (indeed close to double) our entire current natural gas fleet, and far more than current peak demand. In the lower-demand scenario in the right-hand graph, the 2040 DEFR capacity is approximately equal to current natural gas capacity.

And get this: In the ISO guy’s view of resource adequacy, the sum of capacity from hydro, nuclear and the DEFR are almost equal to peak demand in both scenarios. Vast amounts of wind and solar capacity are built out, to more than 100% of peak demand in one scenario and closer to 200% of peak demand in the other scenario — but ISO doesn’t count on any of that to be available when actually needed. The DEFR needs to be able to back up the intermittent renewables to the extent of the entirety of peak demand. So why again are the renewables going to be built at all?

So what exactly is this DEFR that doesn’t even yet exist? Smith provides the following chart of the various possibilities that have been suggested:

Each column represents a criterion that the DEFR must meet to fulfill the role of replacing the natural gas. If you get a red mark, you are not up to the job. Well, hydro doesn’t get any red marks — but we have already used up all of our hydro capacity, and we don’t have another Niagara Falls. Wind and solar have obviously only been put on the list in order to reject them for multiple reasons. Really, there is only one possibility that is green all the way across: hydrogen combustion.

So that’s it. Are we supposedly going to go from zero to 50 GW of capacity of hydrogen combustion power plants by 2040? Currently, no such power plants exist in New York (or anywhere else in the world), nor are any under construction, or in the planning process (unless you consider this slide of Smith to be “planning”). Oh, and how about the capacity to produce the hydrogen? That doesn’t exist either. Is the plan to make it from electrolysis from sea water, using electricity generated by wind and sun? Then you are going to need about four to five times the capacity of wind and solar generators than Mr. Smith has in his scenarios. He seems to have forgotten about that. (Or maybe the assumption is that we will buy the hydrogen from China, although they currently don’t produce any either.). And how about the new network of pipelines to transport the hydrogen from the production sites to the power plants? None of that exists or has been planned for yet.

Not a word about costs in Mr. Smith’s presentation. You wouldn’t want to concern the plebes with that kind of thing.

It is impossible to believe that any of this is real. I’ll bet you don’t remember President George W. Bush’s State of the Union address from 2003. Here is a White House press release about it from the time. A few excerpts:

Hydrogen is the key to a cleaner energy future:

• It has the highest energy content per unit of weight of any known fuel.
• When burned in an engine, hydrogen can produce effectively zero emissions; when powering a fuel cell, its only waste is water.
• Hydrogen can be produced from abundant domestic resources including natural gas, coal, biomass, and even water.

The President’s FY 2005 budget proposes $228 million for the Hydrogen Fuel Initiative, a $69 million increase (43%) over the FY 2004 budget.

At least it was $228 million, rather than $228 billion as Biden would have proposed. But here we are, twenty years later, and hydrogen is still nowhere. It will still be nowhere 20 years in the future. If produced in the “green” form from water, it will be easily 5 times as expensive as natural gas, and inferior to natural gas as a fuel in every respect.