GOLDEN CRESCENT AND 1000 ISLAND NEWS

New York State has unexpectedly hit the brakes on three large offshore wind projects it awarded last year for the waters between Long Island and New Jersey, citing “technical and commercial complexities” with a turbine manufacturer.   The decision to nix the three projects comes atop months of hard knocks for the nascent U.S. offshore wind industry and poses big challenges for New York’s plans for some 9,000 megawatts of the green energy by 2035, including the state’s plan to subsidize the manufacture of turbines in New York.   The industry had already been beset by soaring costs for turbine materials and rising interest rates, leading to canceled projects in New Jersey, New England and Maryland. Overseas wind-energy developers have taken billions of dollars in impairment charges reflecting the lower value of the projects.   The three newly canceled New York projects, known as Community Offshore Wind, Excelsior Wind and Attentive Energy One, represented just over 4,000 me...

  Renewable energy projects face delays, audit says The Office of Renewable Energy Siting is meeting statutory deadlines, but total timeline longer By  Molly Burke   April 29, 2024     An audit from the office of the state Comptroller Thomas DiNapoli found that large-scale renewable energy projects are taking three years to complete applications with the Office of Renewable Energy Siting. Auditors said that tracking timelines and reducing delays could help New York reach the 2030 climate goal of sourcing 70 percent of the electrical grid from renewables. (Paul Buckowski/Times Union) Paul Buckowski/Times Union ALBANY — As New York nears climate goal deadlines, renewable energy projects are facing delays in the permitting process, according to an audit by the state comptroller’s office.   The Office of Renewable Energy Siting, which reviews major facilities proposed to generate more than 25,000 kilowatts, is statutorily obligated by the Climate...

  April 23, 2024 On rare occasions, the callous disregard for the less fortunate on the part of climate zealots within New England state governments can be frighteningly blatant. Such as in 2021, when Massachusetts undersecretary of climate change David Ismay  resigned from his post  after testifying before Vermont’s Climate Council. Ismay noted that most of Massachusetts’ (and New England) emissions come from residential heating and passenger vehicles. Which means, according to Ismay, “you, the person on the street, the senior on fixed income…. there is no bad guy left, at least in Massachusetts, to point the finger at, turn the screws on, and break their will, so they stop emitting. That's you, we have to break your will, right. I can't even say that publicly.” But climate zealots are never so honest as Ismay when the tape is rolling. How else can they keep legislators, friendly to proposals that frequently punish the poor, in power? When the costs are too obvious, Amer...

  APR 26, 2024   “ Sooner or later everyone sits down to a banquet of consequences. ”   – Robert Louis Stevenson In the final year in which both nuclear reactors were operational, the Indian Point Energy Center (IPEC) generated 16.7 terawatt hours of reliable baseload power from its 2.1GW of combined capacity—enough to meet roughly 25% of New York City’s total demand. By mid-2020, only one of those reactors was still running, but it  managed to do so for the entire calendar year without interruption, turning in a perfect capacity factor of 100%. Not bad for a facility that sits on just 240 acres of land, the equivalent of a single square kilometer.  IPEC permanently ceased operation on April 30, 2021, dealing a devasting blow to pro-nuclear activists around the country after their decade-long fight to stave off a counter-productive closure ended in bitter failure. Punching above its weight For the New York Independent System Operator (NYISO),  the loss of I...

  The terminology of the energy transition is important and “clean” is a word that can be used to obscure important differences between electricity sources. By  Dan Gearino   April 18, 2024   A worker inspects an open cast at Arcadia Lithium Mine in Goromonzi, Zimbabwe     At a conference this month, a reporter gave a compelling presentation that touched on how many “clean energy” sources depend on supply chains or processes that are far from clean. A lot of the problem is in the mining of metals used in solar panels and lithium-ion batteries, which can devastate the places where they are extracted. Even though it was first thing in the morning, and I was only a few sips into my first cup of coffee, the presenter, Jael Holzman of Axios, had my attention. After all, I write a newsletter called Inside Clean Energy. I have heard many versions of the argument that clean energy is dirty because of the need to mine lithium, cobalt and other metals. But it hit me ...

  The three offshore wind projects would have provided 6.6 percent of the electricity New York needs in 2030 . Efforts to build new wind farms in upstate New York near Albany, including at the Port of Coeymans, took a major hit when General Electric wasn't able to produce the turbines needed for three key projects . By  MARIE J. FRENCH  and  RY RIVARD   04/24/2024 In the rush to save New York’s offshore industry from collapse last fall, Gov. Kathy Hochul’s administration bet big on three new wind farms — and even bigger on General Electric, a blue chip American company founded in Schenectady in 1892. A win would be just the kind the Biden administration is looking for: Pairing clean energy with union jobs and domestic manufacturing. But the bet was a losing one. For months, it’s been clear GE Vernova, a spinoff of GE, couldn’t deliver the crucial parts all three wind farms were forced to use. And, late last week, New York officials  announced all three proj...