The New York Senate, and as of last night/early this morning, the House have voted to move the state’s electricity generation to 70% renewables by 2030 and 100% carbon free by 2040.
Now, the United States has two future renewable monsters on the coasts – California and New York – who between them have about 60 million people, almost a fifth of the population of the country. New York’s electricity demand would make it around the 25th largest nation on earth. Meaning it’s going to take a lot of work to get to 70% renewables in the next decade.
Roughly, New York’s retail electricity sales was 148 TWh in 2018, per the EIA. For the purpose of this analysis we’re going to grow that value by 1% compounding annually as we’re suggesting electric vehicles and general electrification outpace efficiency gains.
Meaning we’ll have to cover 70% of 167 TWh – about 117 TWh – with, “solar thermal, photovoltaics, on land and offshore wind, hydroelectric, geothermal electric, geothermal ground source heat, tidal energy, wave energy, ocean thermal, (or) fuel cells which do not utilize a fossil fuel resource in the process of generating electricity” (pdf of Senate legislation).
Currently, the state gets about 60% of its electricity from CO2 free sources – including about 29 TWh worth of hydroelectric, wind and solar power. As well, the state has contracted or legislated further renewable electricity generation. There is 9 GW of offshore wind, 6 GW of DG solar, and 7.1 TWh a year of already contracted large scale wind+solar in 2017 and 2018.
When summed up, these sources will generate about 84 TWh of the 117 TWh that we project will be needed in 2030. Leaving the need to build out capacity that can generate another 33 TWh of renewable electricity.
As an editorial decision, we project that of the future electricity, 80% of it will come from solar, and 20% from wind mirroring the large scale bids going on in the state currently. Meaning that the state will need 26 TWh of future solar and 7 TWh of future wind. Using capacity factors of 20% for the utility scale solar, and 26% for the onshore wind it turns out that we’ll need about 15 GW of utility scale solar and 2.6 GW of wind – in addition to what the state has already solicited through large-scale auctions, and the 6 GW of distributed solar required under the new law, which puts us over 23 GW of future solar power capacity.
There are many factors that can affect these numbers. For instance,will the state overbuild in order to limit the amount of storage and backup gas needed? Will electrification grow demand greater? Will offshore wind grow faster? Will the state ever build the powerline down from Quebec to get that sweet sweet hydroelectric power? As a smart person once said, “it’s difficult to make predictions, especially about the future” – but what we can predict is that there will be a lot of new solar power capacity built in the state of New York during the 2020s.
Edits were done to this article after 10 AM due to technical issues as we published the article. Please pardon our technical issues.
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For those of you who read the comments – https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1Pe-IbVyUS5y9POZ2-2y71I7MEEp-k5qR_-Onx06-O3A/edit?usp=sharing – that is a link to the spreadsheet where we did the work.
How is this going to be paid for? More taxes and higher prices for everything. This further encourages me to leave New York. Why is nuclear not included in the discussion? All energy sources have a carbon baseline. For example, I have 12kW of solar on my house, but getting there was not carbon-free and maintenance will not be carbon-free. I’d like to see an analysis of the carbon impact of all sources over years and develop a carbon per kilowatt measurement that shows the total cost for systems from mining the minerals through disposal of waste.
Nuclear can be deployed to meet the 100% clean energy by 2040 mandate – after the 70% renewables by 2030 are achieved. As it takes a decade to build a new nuclear power plant, there is no reason to consider them before 2030.
Additionally, your concerns about cost are utterly phony. Large-scale solar and wind are the cheapest forms of new generation, and on average cost about 1/3 of what new nuclear costs: https://www.lazard.com/media/450784/lazards-levelized-cost-of-energy-version-120-vfinal.pdf
Additionally, as solar and wind are zero marginal cost resources, they tend to bring down wholesale power prices.
It only takes a decade to deploy nuclear under the current regulatory and political environment. The new type reactors can be deployed more rapidly and are “safer”, always “on” and a little carbon footprint. Politicians, environmentalists and NIMBY are the problems for deployment. Of course, there will be some hazardous waste, but wait until we start throwing away worn out panels and storage batteries, and there will be the inevitable battery explosions, etc.
I just think that the stigma of nuclear hangs in the air and we are not taking advantage of what nuclear has to offer in the future.
https://qz.com/681753/the-united-states-newest-nuclear-power-plant-has-taken-43-years-to-build/
You did not factor in energy storage. You made a tiny reference to it in the final paragraph, but it totally blows away your plans. As everyone knows, solar and wind do not supply power at night and on calm days, respectively. You do correctly reference solar/wind’s low capacity factors. You do not factor in the implication of that low capacity factor. We will either need to keep those fossil fuel plants running in standby (of course that is not what you want), build lots of nuclear instead of solar/wind (this is what I support), or build lots of energy storage. The latter is not ready to be deployed at this scale. The only way to do this is with lots of nuclear, which is one of the prime reasons I support nuclear. NY already has large transmission lines and unpopulated areas with access to sound water supplies for cooling. Nuclear is great fit for NY especially with the low seismic and volcanism risks.
I am an electrical engineer, made solar cells as an undergrad, and am a lifelong NY resident. I am a fan of gen4, ie modern, nuclear reactor designs over the gen1 (Fukushima types). Solar uses too much land, loses 1% of efficiency a year (on average), and requires storage. I have hopes for many of the storage technologies out there, but they do not exist yet. Wind kills a lot of birds/bats and again requires storage.
You say we will need 15GW nameplate capacity. I will trust your number. Using the land use of Chinas Tennger dessert solar plant, which is in a better location for solar than NY, but they get about 1.5GW in 43km squared of land. Thus we’d need at least 10, that. That is 430km squared. That’s about 166 miles squared, or a strip of land 10 miles by 16 miles. Certainly that is a worthy sacrifice, but again, we will likely need more than that as we get less sun in NY than a desert! (I chose that plant as it’s at 37 latitude and that is fairly close to NY’s 41.5+.)
That still leaves the storage problem. We can not build that much solar or wind until we have the storage. And you are not factoring in the large GWh of energy storage we need for this. Germany could not do this with Energwide. NY will do no better. Sigh.
If we are lucky, one of the 10 to 15 serious attempts at fusion will succeed before too much money is wasted on this mistake.
Funny how storage “isn’t there yet” and is being deployed, but you support Gen IV nuclear which is still in the research phase and won’t be deployed until 2030 or so. And, nuclear takes a worldwide average of 7.5 years to deploy per plant.
Like a lot of nuclear supporters you also bring up bird deaths from wind. Things that kill more birds than wind turbines: windows, vehicles, cats, electrical lines, cell towers, oil pits (not an exhaustive list) and these all kill multiple times what wind turbines do.
It’s like y’all all get your talking points from the same bad source.
NY State land area = 54,556 square miles.
Required for solar: 166 square miles or 0.3% of NY’s landmass
From 2016:
Iceland gets 100% of its energy from renewables TODAY.
Norway: 97.2% (149,630GWh)
New Zealand 83.9%
Brazil: 80.4% (578,889GWh)
Portugal: 55% (2019)
It is not a mistake, it is the best way forward, especially as wind and solar are now cheaper than oil and gas (and getting cheaper yet). As the author points out, overbuilding is one solution to variability. A mix of wind, solar and batteries can and does work….
Also Costa Rica: 99% of electricity from renewables. Uruguay – 95% renewables.