Big Apple Blackouts: New Yorkers Can Thank Cuomo’s Wind Power Obsession

Add chaotically intermittent wind and solar to your grid and blackouts and load shedding follow, like night follows day. Wind and solar obsessed South Australians know the drill: Déjà Vu (All Over Again): Yet Another Wind Power Output Collapse Plunges 200,000 South Australian Homes into the Dark Ages

The unscheduled Earth Hour that hit the Big Apple last month has given New Yorkers a taste of things to come, with their renewables obsessed Governor, Andrew Cuomo hell-bent on wrecking New York’s, once perfectly reliable, power grid with a ‘transition’ to sunshine and breezes.

Not only is Cuomo obsessed with the unreliables, he’s denying gas supplies to New York and killing off their ever-reliable nuclear generation capacity.

As Robert Bryce details below, New Yorkers should brace themselves for more Big Apple Blackouts.

We’ll start with a particularly prescient article Robert penned back in 2017.

How Cuomo is ‘building’ blackouts for NYC
New York Post
Editorial
12 August 2017

Better stock up on candles: In just three years, New York may face a wave of blackouts following the closure of the Indian Point nuclear-power plant.

That’s the bottom line of a new report by the Manhattan Institute’s Robert Bryce: The early shutdown of the reactors in 2020 and 2021 “threatens the reliability of New York City’s electric grid.” And the risk is even greater because Team Cuomo is nixing pipelines needed to bring natural gas to plants that could replace IP’s juice.

He urges New York policymakers to “begin a serious analysis of the implications” of taking IP offline. Now.

Wise advice. Bryce’s report echoes numerous warnings — from the New York State Independent System Operator (which oversees the state’s grid), a team of General Electric experts, the New York Affordable Reliable Electricity Alliance and others — about the folly of pulling IP’s plug.

Alas, Gov. Cuomo has ignored them all and instead fed baseless fears of the plant’s “dangers.” He calls Indian Point “a ticking time bomb” that puts Gotham at risk because it’s located just 30 miles north in Westchester, even though experts have repeatedly deemed it 100 percent safe.

In a bid to close the plant, Cuomo and officials like state Attorney General Eric Schneiderman harassed its owners for years, forcing them to shell out more than $200 million in a drawn-out legal battle to re-license the plant. In January, they got their wish: The owners gave up and agreed to close IP’s two reactors by 2021.

Trouble is, Indian Point pumps out up to 30 percent of the region’s juice; without it, demand may soon outpace supply. In particular, peak demand will become increasingly hard to meet — making power fluctuations that can stress the grid to the breaking point more common.

Plus, Cuomo has blocked expansion of pipelines needed to fuel gas-fired plants that could help make up for lost IP power. In April, he nixed a permit for the Northern Access Pipeline and for more than a year refused to grant one to the Millennium Pipeline Co. A third pipeline, to fuel the planned Cricket Valley gas-fired plant, is also in limbo.

What’s the gov’s Plan B? Well, renewable energy (solar and wind) is at the heart of his fantasies. Yet unless the weather cooperates 100 percent of the time, renewables just aren’t reliable. Even Cuomo admits they won’t meet the state’s needs anytime soon.

He also calls for hydropower from Canada. But, as Bryce notes, a transmission line to carry the juice can’t be built in time to help replace what’s lost when Indian Point closes.

The clock’s ticking. Pray answers arrive — before the lights go out.
New York Post

In the ‘don’t say we didn’t warn you category’, here’s Robert Bryce again, detailing the only thing ‘inevitable’ about the so-called transition to wind and solar.

Cuomo’s war on the power grid
Crain’s New York Business
Robert Bryce
18 July 2019

Since the five-hour blackout that hit Manhattan on Saturday night, Gov. Andrew Cuomo has repeatedly attacked Con Ed, the utility that provides electricity and gas to customers in the New York area. He has threatened to strip the utility of its operating license and said the city was playing “Russian roulette” with electricity reliability.

That’s pretty rich. Over the past few years, Cuomo has repeatedly made political decisions that have reduced the reliability of New York’s energy infrastructure. Cuomo telling Con Ed that it needs to improve its reliability is like an arsonist telling the fire department to buy more pumper trucks.

The most obvious example of the reliability risks facing New York City is the looming closure of the Indian Point nuclear plant, a move that Cuomo began pushing for back in 2011.

Next April, one of the two operating reactors at the facility will be shuttered. The other reactor is slated for shutdown in 2021. While the premature closure of the 2,069-megawatt facility may please Cuomo’s friends at Riverkeeper and the Natural Resources Defense Council, the New York Independent System Operator, the agency that manages the state’s electric grid, has repeatedly warned about the threat to reliability.

Indian Point provides about a quarter of the electricity consumed in the city. Further, it helps assure the stability of the grid. The electric grid runs on narrow tolerances of voltage, which is akin to water pressure in a pipeline. The grid must be continually tuned so that electricity production and electricity usage match and voltage on the grid stays at near-constant levels. If voltage fluctuates too much, blackouts can occur.

In 2011, NYISO said that “under stress conditions, the voltage performance on the system without the Indian Point plant would be degraded.”

In 2016, the agency reiterated its concerns, saying, “Retaining all existing nuclear generators is critical to the state’s carbon emission reduction requirements as well as maintaining electric system reliability.” That same year, two analysts—one from General Electric and another from consulting firm ICF—provided a presentation to the system operator that discussed a reliability standard known as “loss of load expectation,” or LOLE, an event in which electricity demand exceeds available generation.

The reliability standard for grid operators in the U.S. allows for a LOLE of one day every 10 years, or 0.1 days per year. By 2030, the GE-ICF presentation estimated that closing Indian Point will result in the doubling of LOLE in the New York City area to 0.2 days per year.

In addition to the premature closure of Indian Point, New York has been blocking new natural-gas pipelines that would help provide cleaner and cheaper energy supplies into the state and into New England. As I show in a recent report for Manhattan Institute, the governor’s appointees at the Department of Environmental Conservation have repeatedly refused to grant permits for new pipelines at the same time the grid has become more reliant on gas-fired generators.

Since 2004 gas-fired electricity production in the state has nearly doubled and it will jump again after the closure of Indian Point. In response to Cuomo’s pipeline blockade, the region’s biggest utilities, Con Ed and National Grid, have said they will quit providing new gas connections in their service areas in and around New York City. That, in turn, forces some consumers to continue relying on heating oil, which is more expensive and more polluting.

Finally, Cuomo has agreed to implement the Climate and Community Protection Act, which mandates that 70% of electricity consumed in the state come from renewables by 2030 and 100% from carbon-free sources by 2040. Forcing the electric grid to rely more heavily on intermittent sources such as solar and wind will put yet more stress on the grid, particularly during extreme weather.

In short, Cuomo is pushing for the biggest changes in New York’s electric grid since Thomas Edison launched the Electric Age on Pearl Street in 1882, and he’s doing so without any understanding of how those changes may affect reliability.

The wonder of the modern electric grid is that it doesn’t fail more often. Blackouts like the one that hit on Saturday eventually occur on nearly every grid. Cuomo can blame Con Ed all he likes. But by rushing the overhaul of New York’s grid, he’s making the Russian roulette blackout game even more dangerous.
Crain’s New York Business