Today is a big day on the road to New York’s energy future: Our “Climate Action Council” voted to approve the final “Scenario Plan,” giving us I know all about how we will achieve, among other goals, 70% of statewide electricity from renewables by 2030 and zero emissions by 2040. Press release titled “New York State Climate Action Council finalizes scope plan to advance the nation’s leading climate legislation.” Here is also a link to scope plan it’s him.
In looking at the Scoping Plan and its Executive Summary, I found that the two biggest factors in achieving this zero-emissions power system are expected to be offshore wind turbines and storage. energy storage. I have covered energy storage issues extensively in other articles. But what about this offshore wind? Certainly, to commit New York to switching to offshore wind as its primary source of electricity just seven years from now, they must have a very solid game plan for how that will happen.
In fact, like everything else here, they don’t know. As of today, there is not a single offshore wind turbine in operation in New York State, nor is there a single offshore wind turbine under construction. Climate advocates on the Climate Action Council think they can order this to happen, and then it will.
Are from Executive SummaryHere’s what the CAC thinks will be needed to meet its emissions targets:
[The Scoping Plan] State installation requirements:
6,000 megawatts (MW) of distributed solar by 2025
3,000 MW of energy storage by 2030
9,000 MW of offshore wind by 2035.
9,000 MW of offshore wind sounds like a lot at first. At 10 MW per turbine (which is huge), that would be 900 of these giants.
EIA reports total annual electricity consumption in New York State for 2021 is 141,423,778 MWh. Divide by 8760 (hours of the year) and you get an average demand of 16,144 MW. 9,000 MW starts to sound like more than half of that. Not bad!
But of course wind turbines only generate about 35% of the average capacity of the year. So this 9,000 MW of offshore wind turbines will at most provide us with about 3,000 MW on average, which is less than 20% of our electricity needs for the year. Oh, and they’re planning to double their electricity needs by electrifying cars and heating homes, so do that 10%. And the highest demand is about 25,000 MW, 50,000 MW after doubling. When it peaks, you can’t rely on 9,000 MW of offshore wind to do anything. So why are we doing this again?
Without a doubt, if this is done expertly, there must be a working demonstration project to show how to build offshore wind and then integrate into the existing system? Wrong. Instead, the plan seems to be to sign some huge subsidized contracts and then hope that one day something will be built.
Here is a link to New York Energy Research and Development Authority (NYSERDA) website. They claim there are 4,300 MW of offshore wind projects “in active development” in the state, which is less than half of the 9,000 MW that are supposed to be forthcoming. Of the 4,300 MW, almost all are in the Atlantic Ocean off New York City and Long Island. Here is the key part of their map:
But go to Empire Wind Website, for example, and you find a timeline indicating that they are about to apply for a license to federal and state agencies. Construction – if it really happens – is many years in the future. There is no difference in Beacon Wind website.
And what if well-funded environmental opposition arose against these projects? It is almost inevitable. For example, there have been lawsuits by wealthy homeowners seeking to prevent cables from these wind farms from landing in their area. Here is an example of one of which is put in 2021 in East Hampton Town.
Are there any offshore wind projects beyond these from which we can see how things could develop? Well, there’s the Commonwealth Wind project in Massachusetts, off the coast of Martha’s Vineyard. That was about to begin construction when in September the contractor told the state they would need to “rewrite the contract” because of the steep increase in costs. On Friday (December 16), the contractor abandoned efforts to renegotiate and said it wanted to withdraw from the contract altogether. Wall Street Journal’s James Freeman has a story in His Best of the Web column todaybased on a report from Jon Chest of the Boston Globe:
The state’s nascent offshore wind industry suffered a major setback on Friday when Avangrid told state regulators it wanted to terminate contracts with three major utility companies to build a site. Large wind farm south of Martha’s Vineyard… In September, chief executive Pedro Azagra said Avangrid would postpone construction of Commonwealth Wind, which could eventually power up to 750,000 homes, by pushing the completion date into 2028 and will need to rewrite contracts due to the sharp increase in the cost of goods. With Friday’s move, Avangrid abandoned those renegotiation efforts.
Meanwhile, again from Freeman, in Rhode Island, regulators are considering suspending a permit that had been issued for a cable to bring electricity ashore from another project called Mayflower Wind. The issue is not the environmental impact of the cable, but the financial viability of the entire project:
Rhode Island utility regulators are considering suspending Mayflower Wind’s application for transmission cables running along the Sakonnet River to the former site of Brayton Point Power Station in Somerset after the developer raised questions on the financial viability of the first phase of the $5 billion offshore wind project investment it has proposed off the coast of Massachusetts.
Is there any chance that New York will have better fares? Not sure. Expect lengthy delays and require more money before anything is built.
Meanwhile, what is the total number of offshore wind turbines currently operating in the US? Based on Wikipedia is here, the numbers are 7–5 for Block Island (part of Rhode Island) and 2 off Virginia. The same article said the Biden Administration plans to increase offshore wind capacity by more than 1,000 times by 2030. Sure.
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