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November 26, 2001 



New Power Plant Planned
for New York City



By Will McNamara
Director, Electric Industry Analysis



[News item from Energy Info Source] New York state's siting board approved Astoria Energy's plans to build a 1,000-megawatt power plant in New York City, clearing the way for construction to begin as early as January. Astoria Energy hopes to have the natural-gas-fired, combined-cycle plant that will be at an existing oil terminal in the Astoria section of Queens in service by 2004. The company must do a certain amount of demolition and site preparation before it can begin construction, and still must receive some local permits from New York City. Astoria Energy is a unit of SCS Energy LLC, a privately owned energy development company based in Concord, Mass. 

Analysis: The announcement of a new power plant scheduled for the New York City area should be evaluated within the context of severe power supply problems that have been identified within this region. Like California, New York also suffers from a supply / demand imbalance. However, even if or when power supply can be increased in New York, the core load center of New York City still suffers from inherent transmission deficiencies that continue to take their own toll on the stability of the market. In other words, transmission capacity in the region has been determined to be deficient to the extent that power outside of the city cannot be reliably imported. The fact that Astoria Energy has received approval from New York state's siting board to proceed with this New York City-based plant is significant, but it should not be forgotten that the company also must receive local permits from city government. This could be easier said than done, as other planned power plants in the area have been blocked or significantly altered over the last year by community groups in New York City and surrounding boroughs who ardently voice concerns about environmental and other ramifications of new plant construction. 

The problems within the New York power market have been well documented. The state of New York reportedly has not brought a new plant online since 1996, when a 200-MW plant opened in Brooklyn. It has been almost seven years since a 1,000-MW unit in Oswego, N.Y., marked the last plant to open upstate. Further, New York expects only a 3.5-percent increase in new capacity in the next three to four years. Consequently, concerns about the state's ability to meet increasing demand for power have gained momentum. Pressure has been placed on New York regulators to expedite the approval steps for siting new plants in the state. However, at the same time, environmental and community groups closely guard the proposals for new plants and often lobby for limitations on how and where the new plant will produce power. 

While the entire state of New York is subject to shortages, the problem appears to be particularly acute in New York City. A November 2000 report issued by the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission (FERC) entitled "Investigation of Bulk Power Markets, Northeast Region," highlighted specific capacity problems in the New York City/Long Island community of 11 million people. These areas are particularly vulnerable because they are isolated from most of the state's grid, the study said. Like Northern California, which suffered rolling blackouts due to transmission constraints, New York City and Long Island can only import limited quantities of power on constrained transmission lines. Hydro and fossil resources are plentiful in upstate New York, but cannot reach the city. Being both densely populated and heavily residential, it is difficult to site new power plants in the area. Consequently, 80 percent of the power that the city consumes is generated by the city. New plants such as the one by Astoria Energy are being proposed because New York City reportedly will be short of its generating capacity needs at times during the course of 2002. The projected shortfall is expected to increase by another 200 MW by summer 2002. 

Increased demand is causing additional problems for the energy markets of New York City and New York State. Demand in the state rose by 2,700 MW from 1995 to 2000, or 2.5 times as fast as new generation capacity was added. Demand over the course of 2001 was expected to reach 31,100 MW, or about 3.7 percent above regulators' earlier forecasts. 

It is within this market context that Astoria Energy will proceed with its plans for the new power plant in New York City. Astoria Energy is a private company seeking to generate electric power with energy-efficient and environmentally sound technologies in the New York City area. The company is a subsidiary of SCS Energy, a privately owned energy development company formed in 1998 for the purpose of developing and owning new electric generating facilities. Information obtained from Astoria Energy sheds some additional light on the proposed plant. As noted, the 1,000-MW unit will be a natural gas-fired facility, which will obtain natural gas supplied from the ConEd/New York facility pipeline. The capital cost for the plant reportedly will be $600 million. Commercial operation, pending the necessary approvals on the local level, is scheduled for the fourth quarter of 2003. Astoria Energy is seemingly confident of its chances to gain approval for the new plant because it will be using a technology that is specifically geared toward the reduction of air emissions. 

However, despite this optimism, the community opposition factor should not be discounted, and there are several examples that may foreshadow the opposition that Astoria Energy could face. Take Sithe Energies, for example, which hit a roadblock with its construction plans in the New York area earlier this year. Sithe Energies originally planned a 827-MW combined-cycle facility fueled by natural gas in Ramapo, N.Y. Chief among the concerns of local residents is that the Ramapo plant was originally planned to run all the time to meet demand, and as a result would use local water resources for cooling purposes. Community resistance thus became an issue for the company, which altered its plans and began to consider a 510-MW peaking unit (also powered by natural gas) that would only be operated in times of increased demand. 

As another example, environmental and community groups won a victory in court just last week that essentially will block construction of small power plants in the South Bronx, Brooklyn, Queens, and Long Island areas. Each is a 44-MW plant, though at some sites there are twin generators operating at less than 80 MW. A coalition of the groups had opposed the construction of various plants in these areas and sued the New York Power Authority, claiming (among other things) that the state had failed to perform adequate environmental-review studies. The groups claim that the state should test the plants for their output of fine particulate matter. A lower court had ruled in favor of the state, but a judgment last week in the New York Court of Appeals was clearly a win for the environmental and community groups. The new ruling, which reportedly cannot be appealed further, says that the state must do unprecedented air tests at the 10 plants or shut them down by Jan. 31. 

In a report issued earlier this year, New York State Electric & Gas Corp. (NYSEG), one of New York's seven utilities, said the state will not have enough megawatts to support a truly competitive wholesale electric market until 2008. NYSEG, in a report issued late Wednesday, warned there are "serious problems with (New York's) generation supply and a lack of transmission and pipeline infrastructure." According to data included in a separate report by the New York ISO, which manages the state's transmission grid, between 1995 and 2000, while statewide demand in New York rose by 2,700 MW, generating capacity under contract in the state reportedly increased only by 1,060 MW. 

Consequently, given all of these factors, power supplies in New York remained strained and the area certainly could benefit from the construction of new generation capacity. However, Astoria Energy, which seeks to bring new generation online in New York that will be based on clean technologies, may still face an uphill battle from various groups that seemingly oppose the construction of any new plants in the region (with the exception of peaker units, whose output would be closely regimented). If plans for this plant are blocked or significantly altered, following the experience of Sithe Energies, the options to resolve New York City's supply / demand imbalance will once again become focused on a combination of other approaches, including conservation efforts and reliance on distributed generation alternatives. 


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