The New York Public Service Commission on Thursday lauded Central Hudson Gas and Electric and assisting utilities for their quick response to the early February blizzard that swept through its service area and cut power to more than 65,000 customers.
The Feb. 3-5 storm dumped up to 18 inches of snow across parts of the state, while freezing rain and cold temperatures lingered mainly in Ulster Duchess and Columbia counties in the mid-Hudson region, with reports of localized icing of one-half to three-quarters of an inch.
“This was the largest workforce Central Hudson has ever assembled in the over 100-year history of their company,” said Kevin Wisely, director of the state’s Office of Resilience and Emergency Preparedness. “The large contingent of workers moving into a concentrated area such as this does pose logistical and significant coordination challenges, particularly with housing and feeding the crews.”
Central Hudson was able to house the emergency crews and has contingency plans in place, if a future need arises, to house additional workers at local universities and colleges, as well as the ability to set up large-scale tented housing units to support an incoming workforce, Wisely said.
National Grid, New York State Electric and Gas, and the Orange and Rockland utilities all provided mutual assistance to Central Hudson.
“Kudos to the utilities for working so well together, but also frankly it was really nice to see that we didn’t have the administration calling for an investigation while the storm was still happening,” Commissioner Diane X. Burman said.
The winter storm once again highlighted the need for utilities to continually reassess infrastructure vulnerabilities across their service territories to determine appropriate storm-hardening and resiliency projects to mitigate potential weather risks and adapt infrastructure to weather extremes, Wisely said.
OKs Enviro Certificate for Tx Line to NYC
The commission on its consent agenda approved a certificate of environmental compatibility and public need for the 1,250-MW Champlain Hudson Power Express (CHPE) developed by Transmission Developers Inc. and Hydro-Québec, as well as a petition for flexible financing practices (10-T-0139 and 20-E-0598).
The PSC will soon rule on a state petition to buy power from two new transmission lines being built to bring more than 2.5 GW of renewable energy into New York City, including the CHPE and the entirely in-state Clean Path NY project (15-E-0302).
Burman cast the lone “no” votes on both measures, saying that the commission should be looking at the transmission projects “more holistically” and that the requested flexibility in the financing arrangements is too lax.
“It’s requesting flexibility to modify without prior commission approval the identity of the financing entities, payment terms and the amount financed,” Burman said. “I think we should be putting in some conditions or having them come back to us if they are going to be changing some of that. I understand the need for some flexibility, [and] I think we can address that as we move forward when we get into the more thorny issues and the other items that are not before us.”
The nearly $24 billion in combined CPNY and CHPE contracts fall under the new Clean Energy Standard Tier 4 category of renewable energy credits (RECs) set up to bring renewable energy into the city by the commission, which set a Feb. 21 deadline for reply comments on the contracts.
CHPE said in its financing petition that it had withheld the expected amount of financing given certain competitive concerns, including bid preparation for the New York State Energy and Research Development Authority’s (NYSERDA) Tier 4 solicitation.
Given that the NYSERDA Tier 4 solicitation has concluded, with the project being one of two award recipients, CHPE said in a supplement to the petition that it “will seek to raise debt financing in an amount not to exceed $4.5 billion.”