New York’s energy future is a house of cards, built on a foundation of rhetorical flourishes, not meaningful results. And it’s about to collapse.
Putting forward programs with great names but not much behind them, such as “Energy Highway” or “Reforming the Energy Vision” (referred to as “REV”), the state has no viable energy policy.
While these programs have been announced by Gov. Cuomo with great fanfare, it’s clear they have been floundering in the bureaucratic maze of his state agencies.
There’s the Green Bank (established in 2013), which isn’t really a bank, but rather a division of the New York State Energy Research and Development Authority (NYSERDA) funded by a surcharge collected through customers’ utility bills. It provides financing at market rates for clean-energy projects that can’t be funded in whole by private investment.
There’s NY-Sun (created in 2012), a comprehensive program that received a $1 billion commitment by Cuomo in 2014, funded in part by charges on customers’ electric bills, to promote the development of solar power, with elements including a public-education program, a solar-jobs training program and an “affordable solar” system to facilitate solar installation in low-income areas.
Then there’s K-Solar, a joint program of the New York Power Authority and NYSERDA offering free energy-adviser services to school systems to evaluate the feasibility of solar installation throughout the state.
And then there’s NY-Prize, a $40 million competition that awards individual grants of up to $100,000 to communities to investigate the feasibility of microgrids.
“Reforming the Energy Vision” has been long on promises but short on transparency and meaningful results. If it ever gets going, it’ll take decades to implement. In fact, at a recent New York state Senate hearing, officials from Cuomo’s administration weren’t even able to definitively state whether the program would lower or raise customers’ electric bills.
Energy policy driven by short-term political convenience will result in higher taxes, job losses and a more expensive, less reliable energy future. Using the closure of the Shoreham Nuclear Power Plant, which never generated a single kilowatt hour of commercial electricity, as an example, the state of New York left Long Island with a legacy of debt that we’re still dealing with
20 years after the fact.
Today, the state plans to:
- Prop up power plants of questionable need by pushing costs onto consumers.
- Continue to increase the state’s intervention in supposedly competitive power markets, by offering tax breaks and subsidized grants to power generators that offer “green” energy options.
- Provide $750 million of state resources to one solar-panel manufacturer — Solar City in Buffalo — which is on track to lose $700 million in fiscal year 2015 alone. This, in addition to net losses of $375 million in 2014, $152 million in 2013 and $92 million in 2012.
- Close the Indian Point Energy Center, which provides a sizable supply of clean, competitively priced power to the region, employs more than 1,000 people and pays $28 million annually in local and state taxes.
Furthermore, the state forced the NYPA to enter into power-purchase agreements with the Hudson River Transmission Project Partners for power that wasn’t needed and will result in more than $1 billion of losses over the next 20 years.
What’s the Hudson River Transmission Project? An underground power cable running from New Jersey to Manhattan.
And a financial disaster. In April 2014, Albany signed a long-term deal to buy power from the line — but had no customers for the electricity. From April 2014 to April 2015, the line was completely unused nearly 75 percent of the time.
Clearly, New York lacks a realistic, robust energy plan.
New Yorkers deserve better. We must demand programs that have measurable goals and timely reporting on actual tangible results before the whole house blows down in a gust of political hot air.
Desmond Ryan is the executive director of the Association for a Better Long Island.