New York is apparently going to tilt full on at windmills. What else are we to think now that Governor Cuomo finally got his long hoped-for wish with last week’s announced shutdown of Indian Point? That nuke’s output equals nearly one-third of New York City’s demand. What will fill the gap so that buildings and computers stay lit in one of the world’s great cities after Indian Point goes dark in four short years?
We know what won’t happen. New York won’t build a new nuke, new coal plants, or more pipelines to carry natural gas from the verdant Pennsylvania Marcellus natural gas fields – much less from the energy-rich shale in upstate where fracking is banned. And the reality of our planet’s proximity to the sun means there aren’t enough rooftops in Manhattan to make sufficient power through photovoltaics, never mind the more than 400 percent higher costs than Indian Point’s cheap kilowatt-hours.
“Replacing Indian Point requires increasing New York’s windfarm capacity at least 400 percent.”
And no, conservation can’t fill the gap. No one serious believes NYC will use 30 percent less energy. In fact, peak demand has been soaring. Anyway, efficiency is not—despite otherwise oxymoronic labeling—an energy “source.” No matter how efficient a car or computer, it still consumes real power to operate. All the talk about “harnessing new technologies” boils down to a single option: more wind turbines.
No question: Washington-monument-sized, graceful bladed beasts are engineering marvels. But it pays to be realistic about economics and physics. Start with scale: Indian Point produces enough energy to power 3 million Teslas. (That’s 30-fold more vehicles than Tesla has produced to date.) As important as quantity is the fact that Indian Point is baseload—i.e., kilowatt-hours available 24x7 regardless of nature’s vicissitudes.
Data from the New York State grid operator shows that the “nameplate” capacity of all the state’s wind turbines combined is about the same as Indian Point. But that nuke actually produces 4-fold more electricity annually. Think of “capacity” as the horsepower rating of a car: that doesn’t tell you anything about distance traveled or energy used. So, replacing Indian Point requires increasing NY’s windfarm capacity at least 400 percent. Ignore the cost or rising local opposition to this scale of land use for both the turbines and more transmission needed to carry the power from upstate. The central challenge is obvious: On average wind blows at night and commerce peaks during the day. Converting episodic wind into baseload requires “storage” – a euphemism for lots of batteries. Engineers and businesses are capable of building lots of just about anything. It’s always just a matter of money and time.
Consider again that Indian Point’s output is equal to one-third of NYC’s use: supplying that one-third for just one day with no wind (let’s hope it’s not calm all day, or for days) means storing one-third of NYC’s daily 145 million kWh of use, or about 50 million kWh in batteries. The world, meaning, mostly Asia, today manufactures batteries (for all purposes) that can store 35 million kWh. So, purchasing about 40 percent of the planet’s entire lithium battery output for the next four years—before Indian Point is slated to be shut—would just about fill the gap.
And the cost? At least $50 billion in battery systems. Maybe NYC could get a volume discount. Add this to the $12 billion for new wind turbines. (We are counting extra turbines needed to store power while the wind blows.) Many of those could come from GE, the only American manufacturer. Some of the batteries might even be American too since Tesla made news last week with the start up of its lithium “gigafactory” in Nevada.
Instead, you could build $2 billion worth of natural gas turbines to burn fracked gas to supply the needed power. Or you could provide a few hundred million dollars of incentives to keep Indian Point on line for a couple more decades.
But Cuomo and the anti-nukes will likely get their wish: neither nukes nor fracked gas will be favored. Since the odds are against more than a tiny fraction of so many wind and battery systems being built, what will happen? Two things. New Yorkers will demand the power stays on. NYC will burn more oil.
The lower Hudson region has a surplus of under-utilized “dual-fuel” power plants designed to burn either natural gas or oil. They’re used to fill gaps caused by unexpected demand peaks (e.g., hot summers) or outages. Since gas pipeline capacity is barely adequate now, increased use of those power plants will necessarily entail burning oil. No new pipelines needed for that. Oil can come by tanker. Burning oil to replace just half the Indian Point shortfall—let’s say wind fills half that gap in the end, costs be damned—means buying 20 million more barrels of oil a year.
A final irony: Despite the abundance of American fracked oil, without new pipelines, that petroleum will come from overseas because America’s Jones Act makes shipping oil between domestic ports more expensive than buying foreign oil. New York will thus soon send $1 billion more a year to OPEC.
This piece originally appeared on Forbes
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Mark P. Mills is a senior fellow at the Manhattan Institute and author of Expanding America's Petroleum Power: Geopolitics in the Third Oil Era. Follow him on Twitter here.
This piece originally appeared in Forbes