To continue reading
Create a free account or sign in to unlock more free articles.
By continuing, you agree to the Terms of Service and acknowledge our Privacy Policy
Create a Free Account
Unlock your free articles
Welcome to Heatmap
Thank you for registering with Heatmap. Climate change is one of the greatest challenges of our lives, a force reshaping our economy, our politics, and our culture. We hope to be your trusted, friendly, and insightful guide to that transformation. Please enjoy your free articles. You can check your profile here.
Subscribe to get unlimited Access
Hey , you are out of free articles but you are only a few clicks away from full access. Subscribe below and take advantage of our introductory offer.
Login
To continue reading login to your account.
Forgot your password?
Please enter the email address you use for your account so we can send you a link to reset your password:
Electricity bills won’t be coming to the rescue.
Offshore wind developers aren’t going to get more money from New Yorkers to complete their projects.
On Thursday, New York’s Public Service Commission, which regulates utilities, rejected a request by an alliance of developers of offshore wind and other large-scale renewables projects to have their contracts adjusted for higher costs.
The difference, which the commission’s staff estimated to be $12 billion, would have translated to ratepayers paying an extra $4.67 a month on their electricity bills, according to an analysis by the New York State Energy Research and Development Authority (NYSERDA).
The projects, 91 in all, make up 13.5 gigawatts of planned capacity, almost a quarter of what the state projects it will need by 2030. They include four offshore wind farms that would make up over four gigawatts of capacity, plus a mix of onshore wind, solar, and transmission projects. In the run-up to Thursday’s meeting, an alliance of labor, business, and environmental groups pushed the commission to accept altering the contracts in order for the projects to stay on track.
The entire offshore wind industry has been dealing with rapidly rising costs and has been in a game of chicken with governments across the world over who should shoulder them.
What happens next, especially for the four offshore wind projects in New York state, is, well, up in the air. It’s possible that the developers could cancel the projects and the state could put them out for another round of bidding. There could be some kind of deus ex machina funding coming from taxpayers, a coalition of states in the region, or the federal government.
In New Jersey, the state legislature and governor agreed to send federal subsidies to offshore wind developers in order to keep costs down. But in Massachusetts, developers agreed to pay cancellation penalties instead of going through with projects that they thought were uneconomic.
On Thursday, New York’s commissioners placed blame for any cancellation or delay of the offshore wind projects on the developers for not being able to deliver profitable projects within the terms of their original contracts.
“Many are left with the impression that the fate of the clean energy transition rests entirely on this action today,” the commission’s Chairman Rory Christian said. “These projects ... collectively represent a portion of our collective effort to bring various mandates ... to bear and achieve the clean energy future demanded by the public.”
Existing New York state law mandates that 70 percent of the state’s electricity come from renewables by 2030. For downstate New York — the Hudson River Valley, New York City, and Long Island — this law means a fast energy transition, as the region is largely dependent on fossil fuels, namely natural gas, for electricity. It also makes up the bulk of the state’s population and electricity use. Since the shutdown of the Indian Point nuclear power plant in 2021, the region's energy future has long been assumed to be offshore wind.
The developers “could still re-bid and, if successful at a future solicitation,” a filing by NYSERDA said, “however, this could result in significant delays and thus impact the state’s progress towards achieving the Climate Act goal of serving 70% of the State’s electric load with renewable energy by 2030.”
“These projects are not everything,” Christian responded. “They are one part of our portfolio.”
“Some large-scale projects facing massive milestone payments need greater certainty than afforded by today’s decision, and unfortunately will likely cancel projects and withdraw from the New York market. Other projects will have the ability to re-bid, and we do expect that many will re-bid,” said Anne Reynolds, executive director of the Alliance for Clean Energy New York, an industry group that petitioned for the contract adjustments.
“We also expect that collectively, hundreds of millions of dollars that were invested as contract deposits will be lost; the bid prices will be higher based on the same inflation pressures we described in our petition; the 2024 construction season will be missed; and various grid interconnection deadlines will be missed.”
The commissioners, both Republican and Democrat, were little moved by developers’ pleas that the projects would be delayed or even canceled.
“The developers have a contract,” said Commissioner Tracey Edwards. “The audacity that you would think this commission would grant an additional $12 billion ... [it]is just not doable. Walking away is your choice and we certainly hope you do not do that.”
Matthew is a correspondent at Heatmap. Previously he was an economics reporter at Grid, where he covered macroeconomics and energy, and a business reporter at BuzzFeed News, where he covered finance. He has written for The New York Times, the Guardian, Barron's, and New York Magazine. Read More
Read MoreTo continue reading
Create a free account or sign in to unlock more free articles.
By continuing, you agree to the Terms of Service and acknowledge our Privacy Policy
Create a Free Account
Unlock your free articles
Welcome to Heatmap
Thank you for registering with Heatmap. Climate change is one of the greatest challenges of our lives, a force reshaping our economy, our politics, and our culture. We hope to be your trusted, friendly, and insightful guide to that transformation. Please enjoy your free articles. You can check your profile here.
Subscribe to get unlimited Access
Hey , you are out of free articles but you are only a few clicks away from full access. Subscribe below and take advantage of our introductory offer.
Login
To continue reading login to your account.
Forgot your password?
Please enter the email address you use for your account so we can send you a link to reset your password:
Sure, COP is a circus. But if it draws people’s attention, all the better.
If you live in the United States, work in climate, and were hoping for a sleepy post-Thanksgiving slide back into work mode, I have bad news for you.
Every Monday morning, the Heatmap team gets together to take stock of what the week ahead looks like. Some weeks are relatively slow. This week, we all agreed, is so packed that it’s tough to keep track of everything that’s happening.
There’s an obvious reason for this: The 2023 United Nations Climate Change Conference, better known as COP28, kicks off in Dubai this week. The two weeks of COP are like climate Christmas: Governments and private companies alike can make announcements anytime, but the weeks immediately preceding and succeeding COP provide a sort of aura that makes everything seem just a little bit more noteworthy. This is, without a doubt, a good thing. Unless there’s some kind of disaster looming, climate news often takes a back seat to other issues. COP, however, gives climate types an excuse to grab people by the ears and force them to pay attention.
There’s an inevitable uptick in climate news each time the conference rolls around, much of it from the conference itself. International negotiators will, yet again, meet to hash out another climate deal, and many of them have already made their agendas known. The U.S. and European Union, for example, are leading a push to triple renewable energy capacity by the end of the decade. Developing nations, meanwhile, will try to get their wealthy counterparts to finalize a loss and damage fund created at last year’s COP, but which has languished in limbo as rich governments (including the U.S. and EU) haggled over what they owe. World leaders — including the Pope — will address attendees throughout the conference, and you’ll probably read stories about the various commitments countries around the world are making in the interim. China is particularly interesting here: The last time China and the U.S. reached a climate agreement in the run-up to a major summit, we got the Paris Agreement.
Expect analyst groups to release reports en masse about the state of climate change over the next couple of weeks — like this one, released last week by the UN, taking stock of countries’ progress toward holding emissions below 1.5 degrees Celsius. Many reporters (your Heatmap writers included) have already received many more such reports under an embargo that lifts around the time COP kicks off, opening the coverage floodgates.
Then there’s the news that might not necessarily be timed for COP but conveniently (or, for those of us trying to cover all of it, inconveniently) falls within the same time frame. My colleague Emily Pontecorvo has been waiting for the Environmental Protection Agency to release new methane regulations that could significantly reduce emissions from oil and gas operations, and for the Department of the Treasury to clarify tax incentives under the Inflation Reduction Act; releasing those guidelines during COP — even if they aren’t at all related to the talks themselves — would give the Biden administration a much-needed boost to its climate credentials as the conference gets underway.
Lastly, everyone’s favorite love-to-hate-to-love-it electric car company, Tesla, will make the first deliveries of its long-awaited — and much-maligned — Cybertruck on Thursday, the first day of the conference. While this has nothing to do with COP, it is, for better or worse, arguably the most anticipated EV release since the Model 3.
There’s been a lot of back and forth lately in climate circles about the value of COP — Christiana Figueres, the architect of the Paris Agreement, called it a “circus” — and many journalists I know expect there to be few surprises from the conference this year. But the glut of news around COP makes me think the conference provides something of value beyond just the negotiations. Few if any other annual events generate quite this burst of announcements across governments, think tanks, and private industry, and for a couple of weeks each year climate change moves to the forefront of our minds.
There’s something valuable in that, if a little quaint: Sooner or later, all of this will be at the forefront of everyone’s minds at all times, whether we like it or not.
Subscribe now for a free month of full access to Heatmap News.
Cancel anytime.
