It will take time to develop new technologies to help New York reach its ambitious clean energy goals, but that “is no excuse for delay in deploying solutions that are already available and ready for prime time,” Jesse Jenkins of Princeton University said last week at a state-sponsored decarbonization workshop.

More than 300 people tuned in to the workshop, held on Dec. 8 by the New York State Energy Research and Development Authority (NYSERDA) and the New York Department of Environmental Conservation (DEC).

The immediate task is to figure out what different solutions might get New York to carbon neutrality as quickly and affordably as possible, interim NYSERDA CEO Doreen Harris said.

“We cannot know what will work and so must support a diverse set of technologies that can enable multiple pathways to success,” Harris said. “The issues and the needs are just too important. … To put it simply, we are running out of time to avoid the most damaging and costly impacts of global warming.”

DEC Commissioner Basil Seggos said that such workshops will help educate the general public about what is possible and how the state can discover new ways of doing business.

“We are where we hope the federal government will be a year from now, which is in the trenches and working with stakeholders across all industries looking for the best and most effective ways to hit those all-important climate targets,” Seggos said.

Focus on Finance

The most efficient way to decarbonize the U.S. economy is through electrification, and the biggest impact comes in homes and apartment buildings, said Saul Griffith, founder and chief scientist at San Francisco-based incubator Otherlab and a co-founder of Rewiring America, an advocacy organization.

But it costs about $80,000/household to retrofit for the future, he said. It also takes about a generation for new hardware to win universal adoption, but the world doesn’t have that kind of time in the fight to reduce global warming. That’s why state action is needed to make low-cost financing available, as home electrification cannot fulfill its potential if left only to those who can afford it, he said.

Together with Rewiring America partner Sam Calisch, Griffith in October published a paper on residential electrification. He reported the “big conclusions” to the workshop audience.

If the country does a “good job,” it can decarbonize more than 40% of the economy through household energy consumption, while saving more than $1,000 per year per household. In a “great job” scenario of optimal regulatory environment, low-cost financing and steady technology improvements, the U.S. can save more than $2,500 per year per household. Applying the same technologies and approaches to the commercial sector would eliminate about 65% of its emissions.

“We don’t need any miracle technologies to completely decarbonize American households,” Griffith said.

Emerging Tech

Scott Litzelman, program director at the U.S. Department of Energy’s Advanced Research Projects Agency – Energy (ARPA-E), said that long-duration energy storage (LDES) is going to become more important as the economy decarbonizes.

“The duty cycle and markets for LDES will be different, and the cost and performance are going to have to look different from the lithium-ion batteries that dominate today,” Litzelman said. “Energy arbitrage and ancillary services can be satisfied now with current technologies, as you don’t need more than four hours of duration to do storage applications today.”

The future is about adding new renewables to the grid, he said, and ARPA-E’s interest is in how storage complements the increasing amount. LDES can help mitigate various risks, such as intermittency, demand uncertainty and price volatility.

Sunita Satyapal, director of DOE’s Hydrogen and Fuel Cell Technologies Office, said the fuel cell industry just passed 1 GW in terms of global shipments, “so it’s really starting to be commercially viable,” with a 25-fold increase in electrolysis and a doubling in sales of fuel-cell vehicles.

Julio Friedmann, senior research scholar at the Center for Global Energy Policy at Columbia University, stressed the importance of carbon capture and storage (CCS), noting the roughly 500 GT of anthropogenic carbon dioxide emissions in the environment.

“There is only one way to stabilize the environment, and that is net-zero emissions everywhere. … In order to balance the global residual emissions, we’re probably going to need an industry twice the size of the oil and gas industry working in reverse,” Friedmann said.

Anchors of a net-zero economy include hydrogen, zero-carbon electricity and CCS. “I often think of these anchors in the context of four ‘Rs’ to get to zero: reduce, reuse, recycle and remove,” Friedmann said. “These carbon-management technologies are meant to be a complement to everything else … and CCS is the Swiss Army knife of deep decarbonization.”

For example, roasting coffee produces two bags of CO₂ for every bag of beans processed, “but today you can take that CO₂, put it in a 3D printer and make it into a cup to drink your coffee,” he said.

Environmental Justice Roundtable

New York’s Climate Leadership and Community Protection Act (CLCPA) mandates that the state consume 70% renewable electricity by 2030 and 100% carbon-free electricity by 2040. It also requires that 40% of the benefits of state investments in clean energy reaches disadvantaged communities, which suffer disproportionate health risks by being located near the dirtiest of oil- and gas-fired peaker plants. (See New York Holds Final CLCPA Emissions Hearings.)

The decarbonization workshop closed with an environmental justice panel that included Annel Hernandez, associate director of the New York City Environmental Justice Alliance and a member of the state’s Climate Action Council.

“One of the specific campaigns we have going right now that is most relevant to this conversation is our fight to displace the peaker plants in New York City that are disproportionately sited in the communities that we represent,” Hernandez said.

“In Astoria, Queens, right now, NRG [Energy] is in the process of trying to repower one of their peaker plants,” Hernandez said. The company says it is “in compliance with the CLCPA because of the off chance that they can convert to green hydrogen by 2040.”

But green hydrogen technology is still rooted in fossil fuels, she said, “so we are very concerned about what the emissions profile of that is, what the energy intensity of that is and what the impact on the local community is, and what other infrastructure would have to be put in place,” Hernandez said. “There are a lot of outstanding questions that have yet to be answered, and we cannot let them to build brand new fossil fuels in New York City after we passed the most aggressive climate policy in the country.”

Gopal Dayaneni of environmental advocacy group Movement Generation said that “understanding the climate crisis and its consequences … has everything to do with how we frame the problem. If we look only at CO₂, not only do you misunderstand the problem, you don’t come up with the right solutions.”