From MANHATTAN CONTRARIAN
Francis Menton
In this post last week, I noted that New York’s electric grid system operator, NYISO, recently issued some clear, if silent, warnings about the impossibility of the energy transition mandated by the state’s 2019 Climate Leadership and Community Protection Act (CLCPA). . In its November 2023 Report, NYISO stated (deeply buried on page 52) that “DEFRs are needed to balance intermittent supply with demand,” and that DEFR must be “significant capacity.” DEFR is the elusive and yet to be invented “deliverable emission free resource”. At a conference the following month, NYISO’s VP for Systems Integration Planning, Zachary Smith, reiterated the need for such large amounts of DEFR. Smith presents a chart that calculates the DEFR capacity needed for New York to “balance” the incoming wind/solar supply in the 30+ GW range. 30 GW is close to peak electricity demand for the entire state, and roughly equal to the capacity of New York’s fleet of natural gas plants, all of which are required to close by 2040.
So what is the answer to the big DEFR puzzle? The New York Public Service Commission, operating from its usual playbook, has begun proceeding, under the name of Proceeding 15-E-0302, to uncover the answer. My New York co-blogger Roger Caiazza calls these “DEFR Proceedings,” although I haven’t found the PSC using that name. Everyone should post good thoughts and ideas. To date, more than 22,000 items have entered the docket — more than can be read by humans.
In the past few days, some big comments from important players have come in. On Monday (June 17), there was a comment on this DEFR docket that was jointly signed by two environmental NGOs, Earth Justice and the Sierra Club. These are the two biggest, best funded, and loudest advocates of the urgent need for a direct energy transition away from fossil fuels. With hundreds of millions of dollars in annual revenue and the number of employees, this guy must have found the answer to the DEFR puzzle.
In fact, incredibly, he didn’t know. The basic approach in the Comment is to pooh-pooh the whole idea that a large number of DEFRs can be needed, on the ground that there may be some (unspecified) flaws in the modeling used by NYISO. The preferred solution is to turn off everyone’s electricity via a central switch when generation drops. Back to the Stone Age!
Here is the topic sentence:
Commenters were concerned that NYISO’s presentation at the December technical conference overstated the need for deliverable and emission-free resources (“DEFR”) and downplayed the value of taking near-term steps to close this gap.
OK then, if perhaps NYISO has “overstated” the need for these DEFRs, then what is the alternative calculation of the amount of resources that will be needed, and what is the concept that goes into the calculation? They don’t give anything away, they don’t even think or guess anything. However, they seek to reduce and stop any development of the DEFR:
Rushing to deploy expensive and untested DEFRs risks making New York vulnerable to flawed technologies, as it is currently unclear what technologies will be commercially scalable and cost-effective, much less what is often said about DEFRs that are truly emission-free.
So, if there is no development or deployment of DEFR in the next few years – when New York is slated to close natural gas plants and make electricity hot and many cars – then what do you propose as a way to provide electricity? Basically, all they allow is “storage, wind and solar.”:
Instead of selecting DEFR technologies to subsidize that may not be optimal, DPS should focus on accelerating the construction of storage, solar, and wind, along with other existing methods to reduce the DEFR gap.
If “storage” is going to be intermittent wind and solar backup, how much will you need, and how much will it cost, and will the storage technology be able to sustain the cost for as long as it is needed? The only answer given to that question is a happy hope for some magical results from a small and barely started federal program:
The deployment of new long-term storage to fill any gaps may be the ideal way to fill remaining gaps. In fact, just this April the US Department of Energy released $15 million to develop a project that wants to “enable energy storage technologies that can last for long periods of time (10+ hours). . . .
As you read here, 10 hours of storage is not enough to get through a quiet winter night. Actual storage should back up wind and solar for a year more like 1000 hours.
So it looks like we will use “other existing methods” to balance supply and demand in order to fill the DEFR “gap”. What is it? It turns out that the word refers to some combination of expecting imports from neighboring countries (don’t they use coal?)
Some existing methods include but are not limited to improving inter-regional coordination, developing import capabilities with inter-regional transmission, developing intra-regional transmission, improving energy efficiency and demand response is mandatory, and incorporating large load flexibility where possible.
“Mandatory demand response” is Maoist-speak for turning off power from central headquarters when the wind isn’t blowing.
Interestingly, about half of this Comment is then devoted to the issue of hydrogen infrastructure as a potential means of backing up wind/solar systems. Given that these guys are against investigating DEFR more, you might think they’d be hydrogen fans. But you would be wrong. In fact, from this Commentary you will know that he echoes the Manhattan Contrarian on many of the hydrogen issues:
(P)ipelines built specifically for hydrogen transportation do not exist in New York. (E) New York’s existing gas pipelines cannot safely transport more than de minimis hydrogen concentrations, and building a new pipeline distribution system for hydrogen would be prohibitively expensive. Hydrogen leakage is a serious problem. Due to its small molecular size, hydrogen is susceptible to leakage rates on the order of 1.3-2.8 times greater than methane. . . . Increasing the pipeline mileage in New York that can transport hydrogen also presents significant cost challenges. . . . (H) hydrogen embrittles steel and cast iron pipes, requiring expensive replacement of existing pipe infrastructure to accommodate hydrogen. . . . (E) even if existing natural gas pipelines could easily be repurposed to transport a higher percentage of hydrogen, the amount of energy flowing through the pipeline would be drastically reduced. . . . (S)toring hydrogen presents cost and feasibility hurdles.
And it goes on from there. There is no reliable way of generating electricity that meets environmental purity standards. Although they will only speak in the Orwellian terminology of “demand response,” these people clearly support the idea of ​​electricity whenever you want it.
Mr. Caiazza has more detailed thoughts on this Comment on his website here.
Bottom line: no one has an answer for how to keep the lights on after the natural gas plant shuts down. Today, we continue to care about disasters.
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