The New York State Climate Action Council (CAC) met Tuesday to discuss bioenergy, methane emissions and the formation of a utility consultation group while also receiving updates from its seven advisory groups.
The 22-member CAC is working toward a fall 2021 target for completing a scoping plan for achieving the state’s goals under the Climate Leadership and Community Protection Act (CLCPA).
Bioenergy
New York State Energy Research and Development Authority (NYSERDA) Interim CEO Doreen Harris, serving as CAC co-chair, said the council recommended the advisory panels conduct a study on the role bioenergy can play in meeting the state’s goals — switching to 100% zero-emission electricity by 2040 and reducing greenhouse gas emissions to 85% below 1990 levels by 2050.
The initial intent was to see where the CLCPA explicitly addresses bioenergy. Now it is up to the advisory panels to identify opportunities in the various bioenergy sectors, Harris said.
Harris highlighted that NYSERDA earlier this month issued a request for proposals seeking contractors to conduct site reuse planning studies for retired power plants, and that the state’s $226 billion pension plan announced it will divest from fossil fuels. (See NY Seeks ‘Just Transition’ in Decarbonization Plans.)
Utility Consultation Group
Harris invited the CEOs of the New York Power Authority (NYPA) and the Long Island Power Authority (LIPA) to participate in the utility consultation group along with representatives from each of the investor-owned utilities — National Grid, the Avangrid utilities, Central Hudson and Consolidated Edison.
“We see this group serving as a resource to the panels at large to help inform them of system considerations to account for in their strategy and recommendation development,” Harris said. “So, we see this group also becoming very helpful with cross-panel issues such as buildings and transportation electrification strategies … and through the scoping panel process, I welcome thoughts on where this utility information would help to promote our state investments and objectives.”
Gavin Donohue, CEO of the Independent Power Producers of New York (IPPNY), thanked the co-chairs for recognizing his efforts to get more utility involvement in the council’s proceedings at the working group level.
NYPA CEO Gil Quiniones said the authority’s strategic plan first focuses on “preserving and enhancing the value of our hydropower assets to serve as the base of our state’s renewable energy” as the country’s largest state-owned utility.
“We will also look to build priority transmission projects to integrate land-based and offshore wind renewables into our system,” Quiniones said.
LIPA CEO Thomas Falcone said the transmission cable permitting process for New York’s first OSW project, South Fork, is moving forward with the Public Service Commission and the federal Bureau of Ocean Energy Management. LIPA and Con Edison recently submitted to the PSC and NYSERDA a study of the transmission reinforcements necessary to deliver 9,000 MW of OSW.
Waste Not, Want Not
CAC Co-Chair and Department of Environmental Conservation (DEC) Commissioner Basil Seggos said that the DEC that day had finalized the regulations to reduce GHG emissions, the first regulatory requirement of the CLCPA.
The state in October completed its public hearing process on the proposed (Part 496) emissions limits. (See New York Holds Final CLCPA Emissions Hearings.)
The CLCPA directs the DEC to measure GHG emissions on a common scale using the carbon dioxide equivalence metric (CO2e) and the 20-year global warming potential of each gas, as derived from the U.N.’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change.
DEC Deputy Commissioner Martin Brand said the waste emissions advisory panel has met twice since its founding in November and is focusing on methane emissions as well as collaborating with other panels on “a number of cross-cutting issues that we have to discuss.”
“All the goals are based on the goal of reducing methane emissions, primarily, and certainly there are a number of ancillary benefits for some of these programs,” Brand said. “A general theme is waste avoidance: Don’t create the waste in the first place. … Certainly, we’re going to focus on disposal avoidance, landfill avoidance, capture of resources and emissions from facilities for other use, and to reduce the impact of waste activities on host communities around the state.”
A recent study by Cornell University Professor Robert Howarth found that methane emissions have grown as CO2 emissions have declined, leaving New York’s total emissions virtually unchanged from 1990. (See NY Study Highlights Rising Methane Emissions.)
Panel Updates
Transportation Commissioner Marie Therese Dominguez said the Transmission Advisory Panel held public meetings this fall, including two roundtables in December that discussed electrification and green hydrogen, among other topics. (See NY Panel Examines Vehicle Electrification, Cleaner Fuels.)
Howarth, a professor of ecology and environmental biology, said he lived in a rural area and would like to see more electric buses in upstate New York, but was skeptical that significant amounts of green hydrogen could be generated through clean energy, and was concerned about generating hydrogen from natural gas.
“To the extent that we have surplus renewable electricity, there are far more efficient ways to store and use it than to generate hydrogen,” Howarth said.
Raya Salter, lead policy organizer for environmental advocacy group NY Renews, said that she would like to see the state “get it right” in analyzing the lifecycle of co-pollutants so that there is strong guidance on these issues.
PSC Chair John Rhodes said that the Power Generation Advisory Panel he leads had organized itself into sub-groups:
- The Equity Subgroup is developing recommendations to address community impacts relating to siting, health concerns and access to renewables and energy efficiency.
- The Barriers Subgroup is focused on clean energy siting and energy delivery and hosting capacity.
- The Solutions for the Future Subgroup is addressing technology and research needs and identifying market solutions to ensure system efficiency and send correct price signals to resources.
- The Resource Mix Subgroup is focused on the growth of renewables and EE, transitioning away from fossil fuel generation and the deployment of energy storage and distributed energy resources.
The resource mix is “where a lot of the technical complexity really shows up,” Rhodes said.
Paul Shepson, dean of the College of Marine and Atmospheric Sciences at Stony Brook University, said he is “really fascinated by the distributed energy opportunity” and wanted to hear a comment on the analysis the power generation panel had done on small-scale, community-based power generation.
Rhodes said that while a 5-MW solar plant may be less efficient than a 100-MW solar plant, the former can still be valuable if it is close to load.
IPPNY’s Donohue said that while the generation working group is prioritizing a market solution, he didn’t hear any mention of carbon pricing, which his organization believes “could be the next iteration of a market outcome.”
Rhodes said the panel discussed it, and that it’s also a CAC agenda topic. “It’s hard to imagine us getting through this process without figuring out a position to recommend on carbon pricing,” he agreed.
Anne Reynolds, executive director of the Alliance for Clean Energy (ACE NY), said that the barriers to getting renewable energy built include establishing uniform property tax rates statewide instead of developers negotiating agreements with every local government. While some people “believe that the main problems are behind us, from developers’ view that is not necessarily true,” Reynolds said. “We’re not all the way through fixing permitting.”
Labor Commissioner Roberta Reardon, co-chair of the Just Transition Working Group, which addresses environmental justice and social equity issues, said that the jobs being created in the clean energy transition “are not simply in the construction trades and in the flow of energy, but in all the support industries that go into it. There’s really a much larger area for workforce development than people tend to think.”
DEC Deputy Commissioner Jared Snyder said the next step in the scoping process would be for consultants Energy and Environmental Economics (E3) to complete technical analyses of the new state targets and standards and for the council to deliberate over recommendations from the advisory panels.
Peter Iwanowicz, executive director of Environmental Advocates NY asked if NYSERDA and DEC were still looking for someone to help run the CAC. Harris replied yes, saying the agencies “hope to have an announcement sooner than later.”