NY’s Self-Inflicted Green Energy Crunch, Temporarily Postponed

The fundamental nature of the “green energy” game is that politicians make ridiculous and impossible promises without any idea how the promises will be fulfilled.

Since the promises are ridiculous and impossible, sooner or later the crunch will hit — but how?

Maybe the promised goals will be missed by wide margins, or maybe the price of energy to the people will multiply by some huge factor, like 10 or 20, or maybe the people will be denied needed energy altogether, or it could be some combination of all three.

But sooner or later, it will happen.

Here’s what we don’t know: When will the crunch hit? And where will it hit first?

You can’t go too far wrong betting on New York as the first place for the crunch to hit. Our politicians specialize in making the most absurd pie-in-the-sky “green energy “ promises, with no concrete plans of any sort to fulfill them.

This can’t continue for very long, but “very long” is an indefinite term. Last fall, it suddenly seemed that the crunch was upon us: the natural gas utility in Long Island (National Grid) began denying new applications for hookups due to lack of supply and quickly had rejected some 3000 prospective customers.

New homes had no functioning heat. Restaurants could not open. Hundreds of affected customers cried out to their politicians to do something.

I covered that situation in a December 3, 2019 post titled “Update On New York’s Self-Inflicted Energy Crunch.”

And then, as quickly as it had come on, the crisis passed. In November, Governor Cuomo issued a really strong letter to the gas utility.

By January 2020, the new customers were rapidly getting their hookups. Problem solved! So is this whole “green energy” thing really working just fine after all?

The answer is that the utility has instituted a temporary non-solution that may work for the next two years at best. After that, nobody has any realistic plans.

Let’s review some history. After the 2018 elections, the progressive Democrats took full control of the New York State legislature for the first time in many years. At the top of their list of priorities was addressing “climate change.”

Early in the 2019 session, proposed legislation called the Climate Leadership and Community Protection Act (CLCPA) was introduced, with the usual impossible goals for reducing “greenhouse gas” emissions.

With that legislation pending, an application for a major natural gas pipeline project, called the Northeast Supply Enhancement Project, came before the Department of Environmental Conservation for approval.

The pipeline was to cross New York Harbor to bring fracked gas from Pennsylvania, via New Jersey, to communities on Long Island.

In May, under pressure from environmentalists, DEC rejected the application on the completely pretextual ground of “water quality.”

In June 2019, the CLCPA passed the legislature and was signed by the Governor. From a summary of the CLCPA on the State Assembly’s website:

The Climate Leadership and Community Protection Act would require that the Department of Environmental Conservation (DEC) establish:

• Statewide greenhouse gas emissions limits by regulation, to reduce emissions 85 percent by 2050;

• Regulations to achieve statewide greenhouse gas emissions reductions . . . .

The bill will also make investments in renewable energy sources a priority in New York State. It would require 70 percent of the electric generation secured by load-serving entities regulated by the Public Service Commission to be produced by renewable energy systems by 2030. Additionally, the bill requires that the statewide electrical demand system will be zero emissions by 2040.

By September, the Long Island natural gas utility, National Grid, was rejecting new customers; but by January, after the Governor’s strong letter, the hookups had resumed.

Looking around the websites of the local news media, I can’t find any report on how this problem was supposedly solved.

But it turns out that National Grid submitted a Report to the New York regulators in February 2020, titled “Natural Gas Long-Term Capacity Report for Brooklyn, Queens, Staten Island, and Long Island.” And here on page 6, we find our answer:

In the near term – to ensure sufficient supply for the winter of 2019/2020 and the winter of 2020/2021 – we are taking a series of measures including: [I]nstallation of additional Compressed Natural Gas (“CNG”) capacity, which allows up to 42 trucks per day in the winter of 2019/20 to bring CNG from upstream of National Grid’s system to be injected into our gas system as needed during periods of peak demand, with plans to expand to 108 trucks for the winter of 2020/21.

Congratulations! You have blocked a natural gas pipeline. But since there is no possibility for wind turbines to heat houses or run restaurant stoves, we are just going to bring in the gas by truck instead.

This year, 42 trucks per day (that’s well over 10,000 trucks if it goes on all year) of highly explosive CNG, and next year 108 CNG trucks per day (close to 40,000 for the whole year).

After that? The options really come down to allowing the utility to build “large-scale infrastructure” (essentially, pipelines or LNG terminals), or forcing the customers to switch to either oil or much-more-expensive electricity.

I keep hoping that the crunch will hit sooner rather than later. But once again, they have figured out a way to postpone the self-inflicted crisis or at least this piece of it, for a couple of years.

Meanwhile, that business about “requir[ing] 70 percent of the electric generation . . . to be produced by renewable energy systems by 2030” is complete fantasy and will never happen. But California may hit the wall well before our 2030 deadline.

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