Filling the Gap in New York’s Decarbonization Plan: A New View of the Electric Grid, Roger Caiazza
All credible analyses of the future New York electric system agree that new technologies are necessary to keep the lights on during periods of extended low wind and solar resource availability.
Filling the Gap in New York’s Decarbonization Plan: A New View of the Electric Grid
Nuclear New York, Inc. submitted the report “Filling the Gap in the State’s Decarbonization Plan” to the New York Department of Public Service (DPS) Proceeding 15-E-0302 related to a new category of generating resources called Dispatchable Emissions-Free Resources (DEFR). All credible analyses of the future New York electric system agree that new technologies are necessary to keep the lights on during periods of extended low wind and solar resource availability. This article documents this analysis.
I have followed the Climate Leadership & Community Protection Act (Climate Act)since it was first proposed, submitted commentson the Climate Act implementation plan, and have written over 400 articles about New York’s net-zero transition. The opinions expressed in this article do not reflect the position of any of my previous employers or any other company I have been associated with, these comments are mine alone.
Overview
The Climate Act established a New York “Net Zero” target (85% reduction in GHG emissions and 15% offset of emissions) by 2050. It includes an interim 2030 reduction target of a 40% reduction by 2030 and a requirement that all electricity generated be “zero-emissions” by 2040. The Climate Action Council (CAC) was responsible for preparing the Scoping Plan that outlined how to “achieve the State’s bold clean energy and climate agenda.” The Integration Analysis prepared by the New York State Energy Research and Development Authority (NYSERDA) and its consultants quantifies the impact of the electrification strategies. That material was used to develop the Draft Scoping Plan outline of strategies. After a year-long review, the Scoping Plan was finalized at the end of 2022.
When the Climate Action Council voted to accept the Scoping Plan draft members made statements. I have previously described the outsized influence of Dr. Robert Howarth the David R. Atkinson Professor of Ecology & Environmental Biology at Cornell University on the findings of the Council. His statement, in support of approving the Scoping Plan draft included the following:
A decade ago, Jacobson, I and others laid out a specific plan for New York (Jacobson et al. 2013). In that peer-reviewed analysis, we demonstrated that our State could rapidly move away from fossil fuels and instead be fueled completely by the power of the wind, the sun, and hydro. We further demonstrated that it could be done completely with technologies available at that time (a decade ago), that it could be cost effective, that it would be hugely beneficial for public health and energy security, and that it would stimulate a large increase in well-paying jobs. I have seen nothing in the past decade that would dissuade me from pushing for the same path forward.
The Scoping Plan directly contradicts his statement that technologies available when the paper was written and today are sufficient for the transition away from fossil fuels. The Scoping Plan itself explains why DEFR is necessary. I provide more details about DEFR at a dedicated webpage and I am compiling a list of analyses that contend that it is necessary. This post describes the Nuclear New York report “Filling the Gap in the State’s Decarbonization Plan” that also argues that New York’s plans have underestimated the need for dispatchable resources in the future.
A New View of the Electric Grid
The Filling the Gap in New York’s Decarbonization Plan: A New View of the Electric Grid report was authored by Leonard Rodberg, PhD, Research Director, Nuclear New York, Inc.; Consultant, Energy Policy; Reiner Kuhr, Founder, Center for Academic Collaborative Initiatives (CAIC); and Ahmad Nofal, Co-founder, CAIC. The rest of this section quotes the Executive Summary and includes my annotations.
The report clearly describes the issue. At the same time load is expected to increase significantly, New York is proposing to rely on wind and solar that needs a firm dispatchable resource aka DEFR:
New York State has seriously underestimated the need for a large firm dispatchable source (A firm dispatchable source is always available and able to supply whatever additional electric output is needed) in its future decarbonized grid. The growth in demand from the expected electrification of automobiles and the heating of buildings requires that such a resource operate for more than a third of the year to provide a grid that is reliable and avoids rolling blackouts.
I believe that an hourly analysis is necessary. The authors used a model that “performs an hour-by-hour analysis of the projected electricity demand in 2040 to show how the in-state sources assumed in NYSERDA’s scenario actually behave when serving this varying demand.” The Center for Academic Collaborative Initiatives model “uses spreadsheet software to calculate, for each hour throughout the year, how the available energy sources, including battery storage and the DEFR, will be used to meet projected electric load.”
We have analyzed a Renewable-Focused Plan (RFPlan) with characteristics similar to scenarios describing the state’s future electric grid prepared by the NYS Energy Research and Development Authority (NYSERDA) for the Climate Action Council. (CAC). Using a new modeling tool that allows an hour-by-hour analysis of electric system behavior, we can see details of the hourly operation of each energy source, features not disclosed by existing models, including that used by NYSERDA. We can also estimate the cost to the purchasers of electricity and taxpayers of these scenarios.
The authors used the installed capacities included in the Integration Analysis Scenario 3 but the model dictates how the units operate.
The State’s Climate Leadership and Community Protection Act (CLCPA) requires that the electric grid be free of greenhouse gas emissions by 2040. NYSERDA’s scenarios create a plan which depends almost entirely on generating electricity with renewable sources. They retain existing nuclear plants, but no new ones are added.
The Executive Summary outlines the approach used in the Scoping Plan:
The Scoping Plan adopted by the CAC declares that “wind, water, and sunlight will power most of New York’s economy.” While its focus is on renewable sources, the CAC does recognize the need for an additional clean source: “plan analysis and current studies show that the 2040 zero-emission goal requires between 15 and 45 gigawatts (GW) of electric power from dispatchable zero-emission resources”. However, NYSERDA finds that little more than 2% of the potential output of such a dispatchable emission-free resource (DEFR) will actually be used.
The authors explain that the Scoping Plan approach is based on a lot of wishful thinking:
Simple arithmetic makes this seem highly questionable. By 2040, NYSERDA and NYISO, the grid operator, estimate that building and transportation electrification will have expanded so that the grid will have a peak load in winter of 46-50 GW. Yet, even with land-based and offshore wind blowing at full capacity, no more than 35 GW will be available during winter evenings. Little or no excess capacity exists to charge the batteries, and, of course, solar won’t be available. Much more than 2% of the dispatchable source’s potential output has to be available to get through the winter without blackouts.
The CAIC model projects a dramatic difference in the use of DEFR:
Our hour-by-hour analysis shows that the firm dispatchable source has to run two-thirds of the year. The total load has increased from today. The summer peak has been replaced by a much higher winter peak. That greater demand is met by the extended operation of the DEFR which runs during most evenings in the cooler portion of the year. In fact, we find a capacity factor — the fraction of potential output actually used –of 14.4%. Our detailed results are shown below.
In my opinion, the CAIC analysis treats DEFR differently than the Integration Analysis does. I believe that when the Integration Analysis determines which resources should be applied to meet load, they use DEFR as a last resort. On the other hand, CAIC uses DEFR much more frequently. That could be due to a difference in the hourly projections of wind, solar, energy storage, and load for the two models or presumptions in the models.
The final aspect of the modeling is a proposal for an alternative approach:
In this paper we suggest alternatives to NYSERDA’s plan that use baseload nuclear power along with a nuclear-powered firm dispatchable resource (DEFR) to ensure a reliable grid. Our plan costs one-third less than the RFPlan.
DEFR Implications
The CAIC model was also used to evaluate the placeholder Integration Analysis DEFR technology:
NYSERDA suggests, in its Integration Analysis, the use of hydrogen produced with renewable generated electricity to fuel the DEFR. We have examined this case and find that supplying sufficient energy to produce the required hydrogen would necessitate a 40% increase in the number of solar and wind installations, beyond those envisioned in the RFPlan. We are unable to estimate that system’s cost, since it would require creating a new infrastructure to produce, transport, and store a large supply of hydrogen during the summer for use in the winter. Analyzing such a construction project is beyond the scope of this study.
It is not clear how the Integration Analysis deals with hydrogen. I think that they believe that they have included sufficient wind and solar resources to support hydrogen production using electrolysis. However, I also think that the Integration Analysis has arbitrarily decided that half of the needed hydrogen will come from out of state. I think that is a wildly optimistic presumption and very unlikely to occur. In any event, no one can estimate how much this will cost using the documentation provided.
Nuclear Option
Not surprisingly Nuclear New York proposes nuclear energy as a DEFR candidate. The Scoping Plan makes a token suggestion that nuclear should be considered but there is no serious attempt to compare nuclear relative to their other technology recommendations. The report describes the Nuclear New York proposal:
The following scenarios, which we term “Brighter Future,” build upon a 2022 policy proposal
prepared by Nuclear New York, Clean Energy Jobs Coalition NY, and A Campaign for a Green Nuclear Deal. Recognizing that much of New York’s electricity demand is constant throughout the year, Brighter Future utilizes nuclear power as a principal source of clean power throughout the year, not simply as a DEFR when solar and wind are incapable of meeting the load. Nuclear becomes the backbone of the system, not simply a backup to intermittent, weather-dependent renewables.
These scenarios include 7 GW of new baseload nuclear power – adding more than twice what is
already operating in upstate New York – along with 26 to 30 GW of DEFR. Far fewer solar and wind installations are needed; we assume 80% fewer installations than in RFPlan. Our grid model presently does not allow for the DEFR to charge batteries. Since adding batteries that are seldom charged adds unnecessary costs, we exclude them from the Brighter Future scenarios. We will evaluate their inclusion in future research.
The first, Brighter Future 1, has 9 GW of offshore wind, the minimum called for in the CLCPA.
Brighter Future 2 has no offshore wind and costs significantly less. Not only does offshore wind add to the system cost, but it will be shut down, and possibly seriously damaged whenever frequent and increasingly intense storms arrive from the Caribbean and South Atlantic.
The following table from the report summarizes their findings and provides total per-unit generation costs for in-state resources under two DEFR capital cost scenarios: current-cost at ~$6,000/kW and low-cost at ~$3,000/kW.
I agree that nuclear must be used if New York wants to decarbonize safely and suspect that the all-in costs of nuclear will be less than wind, solar, energy storage, and DEFR.
DEFR Options
The report also includes a section describing alternative DEFR technologies. The report evaluates a number of suggested options:
Fuel cells or gas turbines powered by “green hydrogen”: Hydrogen fuel cells or combustion power plants similar to those now burning fossil fuels could run on “green hydrogen” produced in electrolyzers powered by renewable energy, as NYSERDA has suggested. However, such a plan requires the creation of an expensive infrastructure to transport and store the hydrogen, as well as a buildout of additional costly, land-hungry solar and wind facilities to power the hydrolysis plants that produce the hydrogen. Using hydrogen for energy storage is challenged, also, by the fact that the round-trip power-to-gas-to-power (P2G2P) efficiency is just 40%.34 This means more than twice as much additional energy is needed as will be generated by the DEFR, with a commensurate drain on material resources, land, and societal wealth.
Long-duration storage: This might help, but currently no realistic scalable form of such storage exists. If it did, it, too, would require a vast expansion of generating capacity if solar and wind power charges whatever storage medium is used.
Carbon capture and storage (CCS) attached to gas-fired power plants: This only exists on an experimental basis. It would add substantial cost to the power it was attached to, and there would be upstream leakage of greenhouse gases and other pollutants to the environment. The captured CO2 would have to be disposed of, presumably underground, adding additional cost as well as potential environmental damage.
Nuclear power: This is the DEFR energy source used in each of our scenarios, as well as for additional baseload generation in the Brighter Future scenarios. Only nuclear power has been demonstrated to have the necessary capabilities, not only in the gigawatt-scale reactors now operating in New York State and elsewhere, but in the smaller reactors now under commercial development and operating on submarines and ships for over fifty years (many designed in New York State at the Knolls Atomic Power Laboratory).
Alternate nuclear options: Alternate ways of using nuclear energy will deserve consideration. Nuclear reactors, like most energy sources, are most cost-efficient when they run more of the time to meet demand. We found that the DEFR would be operating at partial capacity for most of the year. A more cost-effective plan might use a smaller number of reactors running continuously to produce hydrogen which could be used in fuel cells. Another option would be to use nuclear facilities to produce carbon-neutral synthetic fuels.35,36 Full analysis of the cost and suitability of these options is beyond the scope of this paper, but they deserve serious study.
I agree with their findings. I will only believe that the State seriously wants to reduce carbon emission if and only if they abandon the wind and solar approach and go nuclear. As this report explains it is the only viable approach.
Discussion
The report lists some limitations of the modeling and their research. Those include: a simplified view of the in-state transmission system, absence of reserves mandated by reliability requirements, fixed cost assumptions, a couple of potential refinements for the nuclear proposals, and optional DEFR designs.
I caution readers that this analysis is not as sophisticated as the work that NYISO does. Transmission constraints will definitely affect the outcome of projections. NYISO projections handle all the complications associated with those constraints. I do not think that the Integration Analysis includes sophisticated transmission constraints either.
Despite its limitations I do not believe that these limitations affect the general outcomes: DEFR is needed and nuclear is the best option available because it markedly reduces the amount needed.
Dunkelflaute
Dunkelflaute is a “German term that is used in the energy industry to describe a period of multiple consecutive days in which low or minimal energy can be generated by renewable energy sources, such as solar or wind”. Of course this describes the conditions that drive the need for DEFR.
In response to comments I submitted on this topic to the Proceeding on Motion of the Commission to Implement a Large-Scale Renewable Program and a Clean Energy Standard – Zero Emissions Target Case No. 15-E-0302author Leonard Rodberg sent me the following information:
Your analysis of the frequency of overcast and wind lull (“Dunkelflaute”) conditions is impressive and important. However, there are much larger problems with the State’s renewable-focused plan which they and everyone else seem to be ignoring.
On many winter nights in a fossil-free 2040, there will only be wind and the remaining nuclear and hydro to power the grid. No sun, of course, and batteries uncharged since there’s no excess power during the day to charge them. The result will be many nights when the grid shuts down unless a gap-filling clean firm source is available.
In fact, it’s even worse than that. Both NYSERDA and NYISO project winter peaks of 46-50 GW, but even with their projected wind power at its peak output, there’s just 35 GW available (see the graph below). No one seems to have bothered to add these up, and the model they’re using hides it .
The gap is large and is present much of the year. I’ve used an hourly dispatch model to show what’s really likely to happen in that situation. It’s shown and explained here.(This is a reference to the report described in this article.)
I included this because I think it reinforces the position I wanted to publicize. DEFR is necessary and the State’s analyses are not treating it well.
Conclusion
I concur with the report conclusion:
We have shown, with a modeling tool capable of performing an hour-by-hour analysis, that
dispatchable emission-free resources are essential to meeting the goal of a reliable, zero-emission grid. Further, this clean dispatchable source must be able to run a large portion of the year. The only such source likely to be available within the next several decades is nuclear power. The state will further benefit from the deployment of additional baseload nuclear power. This combination of nuclear resources will be more cost-efficient and environmentally-protective than an alternative focused on intermittent weather dependent sources.
Finally note that is another analysis that destroys the Climate Action Council argument that New York can rapidly move away from fossil fuels and instead be fueled completely by the power of the wind, the sun, and hydro using technologies available at this time. That is simply not true.
I am a meteorologist (BS and MS degrees), was certified as a consulting meteorologist and have worked in the air quality industry for over 40 years. I author two blogs. Environmental staff in any industry have to be pragmatic balancing risks and benefits and (https://pragmaticenvironmentalistofnewyork.blog/) reflects that outlook. The second blog addresses the New York State Reforming the Energy Vision initiative (https://reformingtheenergyvisioninconvenienttruths.wordpress.com). Any of my comments on the web or posts on my blogs are my opinion only. In no way do they reflect the position of any of my past employers or any company I was associated with.View all posts by rogercaiazza
