New York City's Power Struggles

Date: Tue, 04 Jul 2006 18:21:59 -0400
To:
From: "Kitchen"
Subject: No power needed until after 2012 (yes, but)

NB - Maybe they figure all those new commercial and residential towers won't need power. And when the crunch hits, how many new power stations will be needed, where will they go and who will pay for them?

Every new power plant will come with community benefits agreements full of fake affordable dog runs, courtesy of your local council member and community board.

The West Side could be 28-45 million SF of office space plus 12 MSF of residential space. Brooklyn faces 5+ MSF of space including office, residential and the Nets Arena. And just forget about all the new development in Queens and the Bronx.

All this requires power. Power costs. Increasing capacity means either increasing transmission lines or building more plants. Someone must pay for that. Plants require land -- which must be found, approved and obtained Construction requires financing. Plants require substations for voltage transformation ... more land.

Will the power plants end up in the poorer communities? After all, the better-off areas wouldn't hear of it. I'm not sure if that's an issue as Amanda Burden and Danny Doctoroff have used up pretty much any industrial land that's left in the city. Maybe underneath Central Park. Don't laugh ... a water filtration plant is going underneath a park in the Bronx.

Where would the plants be?
Who would operates them?
Who pays for them to get online?

Without getting too detailed, there are rules of thumb requiring so much power for each typical residential unit and so much for each SF of office space. A round figure can be calculated. We figured the West Side would require at least, a minimum, of 250 MW of newly found power.

At 6 watts per SF, the West Side office towers would require 168 MW of power

For residential construction, slated to be about 14 MSF, at 3 watts per SF, that would require 42 MW of power.

Combined, that would be a need for an additional 210 megawatts of power. And that just handles the are in the Hudson Yards. That doesn't count the new towers on 8th Avenue or other areas experiencing rapid development.

How much power is this:

Over two million 100 watt light bulbs.

Or about 350,000 room-sized air conditioners (600 watts each).

A recent Mayoral report stated that an additional 2600 megawatts are required citywide by 2008 -- and that's without the projected development. Just keeping the status quo, all your AC, computers, etc., will require 2600 MW in two years according to the report.

Food for thought. Chew on the two articles below. - Kitchen

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Inside Politics

City's energy task force has lost steam
Crains
By Anne Michaud
Published on June 26, 2006

More than two years after the formation of the mayor's Energy Policy Task Force, the city has made little progress toward goals that the task force has established.

In January 2004, the panel said that New York would need 25% more electricity by 2008. It proposed building new power plants, retrofitting old plants and simplifying the site-selection process. None of those things has happened, though much of the foot-dragging is out of the city's hands.

The New York Power Authority, for example, has failed to choose among bidders for 500 extra megawatts of generating capacity, though as many as 10 companies submitted proposals last July. NYPA was supposed to have announced a decision by the end of last year. Additionally, the Legislature put off renewing a site-selection law, Article X, for the fourth year in a row this session.

One responsibility that is within the city's control is having the task force report twice-yearly on its progress. However, the group has issued just one report since its launch. An update that was due May 24 was delayed. The task force is a project of the city's Economic Development Corp., and EDC has refused to respond to repeated requests for comment.

Update: Shortly after this account was first published on June 22, the mayor's task force released a report saying that conservation efforts had proven so successful that the need for new electricity sources has been pushed back to at least 2012.


UPSTATERS IN 'POWER' STRUGGLE WITH CITY
NY Post
By MAGGIE HABERMAN

July 3, 2006 -- Upstate residents want to pull the plug on a planned megapower line that would snake across 200 miles and feed electricity to the energy-hungry Big Apple.

The private project, New York Regional Interconnection, has sparked a wave of protests in counties that would be affected by the above-ground, $1.6 billion transmission line - whose 10-story towers have residents up in arms over potential health hazards, reduced property values and hampered tourism.

"I think there are plenty of other alternatives to providing power to the downstate region," said state Sen. James Seward (R-Otsego County). "I know of no one who favors this proposed line . . . in the affected area."

A spokeswoman for the city's Economic Development Corp. said, "We'd need more information on this particular proposal, but we generally support the concept of transmission lines from upstate or New Jersey into the city."

NYRI officials have started seeking approval from the state Public Service Commission for the 1,200-mega-watt transmitter, which would let the company use eminent domain to scoop up private land and have the line operational in five years.

But upstate lawmakers managed to push through in the final days of the state legislative session a bill to prevent the NYRI from using eminent domain - a huge blow to the project if Gov. Pataki signs it, forcing the company to work out individual deals with land owners.

Aides to Mayor Bloomberg said he opposes the bill and will write to Pataki this week asking him to veto it.


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