New York state officials and appointed advisers disagreed Wednesday on the merits of a moratorium on new natural gas infrastructure, including pipelines and power plants, and on repowering of older generation units.

Lisa Dix, New York representative for the Sierra Club Beyond Coal Campaign and a member of the state Climate Action Council’s Power Generation Advisory Panel, called for the moratorium and referred to the Public Service Commission’s recently announced proceeding on gas planning (20-G-0131).

“The idea of the docket is really to come up with creative, flexible ways in which we can meet increased load, if that’s going to be an issue, or can figure out how to scale efficiency, demand response and storage to meet immediate needs,” Dix said.

The planning process will help stakeholders avoid continuing to build out gas infrastructure in the short term and also establish a comprehensive system, including a regulatory framework, for the long-term replacement of fossil fuel-fired generation, she said.

New regulations under the state’s Climate Leadership and Community Protection Act (CLCPA) require 40% decreases of methane and other greenhouse gases by 2030 and 85% cuts by midcentury.

Not so Fast

John Reese, senior vice president of Eastern Generation, said he opposed a moratorium for several reasons but not because of economic interests. The panel’s recommendations to the full council lay out a process for reducing fossil fuels as the state increases renewables in the system, and adding a moratorium before planners go through that process would essentially amount to giving up on it, he said.

“A moratorium today doesn’t consider all the factors we need to consider and basically imposes a Nancy Reagan, ‘Just Say No’; it forgets the substance and the complexity,” Reese said. “When you look at the rush to natural gas, there are two or three projects that are on the table and going through Article 10. No fossil fuel unit has ever made it through, I think, the new Article 10 legislation put in place five or six years ago.”

The Article 10 process, which governs how generating resources are sited, is incredibly complex and requires an immense amount of study on everything from economics, fuel, emissions and environmental justice, Reese said.

“It isn’t like projects that are currently being worked on are suddenly going to pop up without input and without consideration of these factors,” he said. “I think a moratorium is harmful and not necessary.”

Sarah Osgood, director of policy implementation at the state’s Department of Public Service, chaired the meeting, which was the final public comment session before the panel makes its final scoping plan recommendations to the CAC. (See Cut Peakers, Boost Storage, NY Climate Council Hears.)

“What has been communicated from the Climate Action Council is that, if we don’t have full agreement on any of the recommendations, we can put forth alternative viewpoints,” Osgood said. “Basically they indicated that not all the panel members are necessarily in alignment on an option, but we can still” recommend ideas that only a portion of the panel supports.

NYISO Executive Vice President Emilie Nelson said that building out renewable energy and storage and focusing on the transmission buildout that will be required to deliver that energy will decrease the energy produced by fossil fuel.

“This focus is the critical priority, combined with planning the phase-down of fossil fuels, and I believe why the CLCPA is structured in such a way that we first need to get to 70% renewables in 2030,” Nelson said. “The concept of a gas moratorium goes beyond the concepts they had in the CLCPA and takes solutions off the table that may become important during this broad transformation. So certainly I think focusing on the well informed planning study work in the near term makes a lot of sense.”

Public Input

Callers during the public comment session included Sam Lehr, policy manager for the RNG Coalition, who said he appreciated the panel being open to the idea that green hydrogen and renewable natural gas (RNG) can both be used alongside other resources in achieving carbon neutrality in the power generation sector.

“RNG is included as an important greenhouse gas reduction strategy in the climate plans in a number of jurisdictions, including in E3’s June 2020 analysis, which highlights the role of bioenergy-based electricity in New York,” Lehr said.

Upstate and downstate, the E3 study projects 9.5 GW of storage installed by 2050, nearly 25 GW of offshore and onshore wind, and nearly 46 GW of solar. (See NY Climate Action Council Looks at Deep Decarbonization.)

“I want to encourage the panel to take on the urgent need for New York to plan for the phaseout of the four upstate nuclear reactors,” said Timothy Judson, executive director of the national environmental organization, Nuclear Information and Resource Service and a cofounder of the Alliance for a Green Economy in New York. “These are some of the oldest and most uneconomic nuclear power plants in the world actually … and a number of those reactors would have closed by now except for the $7.6 billion nuclear subsidy that the PSC enacted with the Clean Energy Standard in 2016.”

Under current New York state policy and regulations, upstate nuclear facilities will be within the resource mix until at least 2030. The panel is recommending that the contribution of nuclear power to the 2040 resource mix and any additional policy actions needed should be evaluated prior to the cessation of the zero-emissions credit (ZEC) program in 2029. (See NY Court Rejects Challenge to ZEC Program.)

“There are enormous climate and environmental justice opportunity costs to this [ZEC] program … and the PSC never conducted analysis of alternatives to the ZEC program, although ample information was presented in the CES proceeding,” Judson said.

Taylor Scarpa, a student at Syracuse University and a legislative associate at the New York Public Interest Research Group, said that New York must have a just transition and urged the panel to put forth a 100% renewable action plan to the CAC.