See comments on NY State Climate Action Council document below PDF:
The above document is 861 pages with no ideas expressed of how to pay for it, and no valid means to provide the energy that will be needed to run the system. However, the current Generating plant closures and denial of requests to retool generating plants are real.
Despite the fact that the energy output of the proposed system will be about 33% too low to support the loads in the best case scenario, an even bigger issue is the storage. At the national average $283/KWh, 100 GWh of storage will cost $28.3 billion and will run for 9 hours with their 10.9 GW storage figure. Utility engineers believe the $283 is low and it will be at least double that cost, if not triple, in NY State. So the 100 GWh of storage will likely cost upward of $ 50 billion to operate for about 9 to 10 hours. Those billions of dollars of storage amount to only 0.05% of total proposed generation and only 0.035% of the proposed load. That’s NOT 5%. It’s five one hundredths of one percent. In Engineering Modeling, a rule of thumb is that anything less than 10% is considered noise and you can throw out the effect when modeling the system. They are 20 times lower than that unless they spend $ 1 trillion dollars on battery storage. The batteries will likely only last about 10 years and there will be an additional $28 – $50 billion to replace them. A 1 GW nuclear plant costs about $ 9 billion, so you could get between three and six of them for the cost of the batteries and they don’t need an additional $9 billion of maintenance every 8 – 10 years.
If they didn’t convert the onsite gas combustion, they might get close. If they added onsite CHP, they would get there assuming they could get everything on their wish list and they kept a few gas generating plants as a backup. But assuming that they will get everything on the wish list is a huge assumption because NIMBY is real and money is finite.
Between the storage issues and the retooling of every sewage treatment plant and landfill that will be needed to fulfill the plant to recover methane and make electricity from it, it will cost well over $1 trillion to do what they are proposing and that is without upgrading the transmission system.
If you read the report, it is like looking at a Tripadvisor restaurant review. No numbers, just $, $$, $$$ to indicate the relative cost of the line item. These people must have never had a job in the real world. If a business wanted to do a project and went to the bank with a proposal that had $, $$, and $$$ as the cost projections, they would be laughed out of the building. You can be certain that they wouldn’t get funding for the project. This is after two years of work on the document.
Further, they list some of the line items as demonstration projects. How do you close generating plants that keep lights on while part of the plan is demonstration projects? Research is important and is what moves society forward, but what happens if the demonstration shows that the technology doesn’t work? The citizens of NY State should not be treated like Laboratory Rats.
A snapshot from page 433 of the document is below along with a screenshot of a TripAdvisor Restaurant page from New Rochelle. There’s a striking resemblance.
Trying new ideas is fine, but you don’t shut down critical infrastructure before the new equipment is working to a point that there is a confidence in the reliability of the system and the numbers work. These numbers aren’t even close.