32 minute read
FIRST READ
Gov. Kathy Hochul signed an extention to the eviction moratorium in September, but it expired on Jan. 15. Now some tenants are left to wonder, what will happen next?
EVICTIONS ARE BACK ON THE MENU
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On Jan. 15, the statewide eviction moratorium enacted in response to the COVID-19 pandemic officially came to an end after Gov. Kathy Hochul declined to extend it, and lawmakers did not take action themselves. That means that a long backlog of eviction cases around the state can begin to proceed, and tenants who were facing imminent eviction prior to the pandemic may find themselves without a home since landlords can now enforce vacate notices. Tenant advocates had hoped the state Legislature would have passed the good cause eviction bill before the moratorium ended, which would restrict the reasons that landlords could kick people out, in hopes that it would help people remain in their homes. But despite
SCHOOL’S OUT
After weeks – even months, years – of parents, lawmakers, educators and unions fighting over the best way to conduct school in the middle of a pandemic, the kids are seizing the mic. Students at Brooklyn Technical High School staged a walkout last week to call for a remote learning option as the omicron variant of COVID-19 continued to overwhelm the city.
– New York City Mayor Eric Adams, talking about his management style, which included a recent Zoom meeting where he made everyone do breathing exercises at the beginning, via Gothamist
– Andrew Cuomo’s attorney, Rita Glavin, on the former governor’s perceived unfair treatment following numerous allegations of sexual harrassment, via The New York Times protests and rallies from activists, lawmakers did not approve the legislation.
BACK TO THE DRAWING BOARD
In one of their first acts of the new year, state lawmakers from both parties resoundingly rejected both sets of partisan redistricting maps, sending them back to the Independent Redistricting Commission to make changes. The commission has about two weeks to revise the maps, and hopefully come to a bipartisan agreement on a single set, which they were originally tasked with doing. Realistically, the prospect seems unlikely given the professional animosity between the Democratic and Republican commissioners that characterized the end of their work and was apparent during their final public meeting, with both sides blaming the other for perceived intransigence. If the Legislature rejects the maps the commission sends them a second time, then the task falls to the Democratic lawmakers to draw new district lines themselves, allowing them to engage in gerrymandering the commission was designed to avoid if they so choose. Although the state Senate did approve some things in their first full days of the session, including confirming new Court of Appeals Justice Shirley Troutman and passing a package of voting reform bills.
DISCORD AT RIKERS
Issues at the violenceplagued Rikers Island jail complex in New York City are hardly new, but they recently have featured prominently in news coverage. Hundreds of people at the jail have engaged in a hunger strike to protest poor conditions as COVID-19 rapidly spreads among the detained, many of whom remain unvaccinated. Protesters said corrections officers haven’t let them outside in weeks and that temperatures in the jail have been dangerously cold since the start of winter. They also sought to draw attention to violence at the complex, new details of which have come to light thanks to reporting from The New York Times. The paper obtained surveillance videos from the jail that laid bare the extent of the problems as guards simply looked on at a regular “fight night” organized by gang leaders who would force other detainees to participate.
A DEADLY BRONX BLAZE
An apartment fire caused by a faulty space heater in the Bronx resulted in 17 deaths, including eight children, making it the deadliest fire New York City has had in decades. Although the space heater caused the initial spark, a door that had not closed properly allowed the fire to spread through the building. The fire resulted in immediate backlash for the building’s owner after city data showed that he had been cited for several recent heat complaints as well as for his position on Mayor Eric Adams’ transition team. The ajar door also drew scrutiny since, by law, all doors in apartment buildings must close automatically to prevent precisely a situation like the one that occurred. At least one tenant in the building had also recently complained about a self-closing door that was not working properly prior to the fire, in addition to a lack of heat.
Gov. Kathy Hochul, New York City Mayor Eric Adams and FDNY Commissioner Daniel Nigro brief the press after a Bronx fire killed 17 people in an apartment building.
Schumer’s labor union support
U.S. Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer just announced endorsements from nearly every major labor union in New York. And the missive from Schumer’s campaign was a good reminder that Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez will almost certainly not challenge him for reelection this year – no matter how many Republicans openly daydream about the scenario. Twenty-nine unions and labor groups backed Schumer, the campaign announced, including 1199SEIU, District Council 37, Teamsters Joint Council 16 and the city and state building trades. By the campaign’s count, they represent more than 1.9 million workers in New York. The endorsements aren’t a surprise. Schumer is among the most powerful Democratic politicians in the country, and he carries major influence at the state level. He can take credit for huge influxes of federal funding to the state – most recently a $6.2 billion grant to the Metropolitan Transportation Authority. That money greatly pleased the Transport Workers Union, one of the unions that backed Schumer, and there are countless other examples. “New York is a union town, and I am proud and humbled to receive these major endorsements and the support of so many unions and their members,“ Schumer said in a press release, shared in advance with City & State. “From walking picket lines to passing legislation that kept millions of unions workers on-the-job during the whole pandemic to securing a rescue package for at-risk worker pension funds to passing a bipartisan infrastructure law to invest billions to create American jobs, I will never stop fighting for New York’s working people and the unions that represent them.” Schumer also has a lot of money flowing in. He reported having $32 million in his campaign account as of Sept. 30, and a campaign source said the next filing due on Jan. 31 will show over $35 million. With that kind of money and labor support, it isn’t hard to see why there has been little to no serious talk in New York’s left-leaning political circles in recent months about Ocasio-Cortez primarying Schumer. Some eyes have already turned to U.S. Sen. Kirsten Gillibrand, who is up for reelection in 2024, instead. Ocasio-Cortez’s campaign didn’t immediately respond to a request for comment, but the always-unlikely primary is looking less likely than ever. – Jeff Coltin
THE WEEK AHEAD
TUESDAY 1/18
Gov. Kathy Hochul is expected to release her proposed budget for the fiscal year beginning April 1. INSIDE DOPE
Cold hard numbers mean Hochul has to show us the money to make good on her various promises to remake New York. TUESDAY 1/18
Campaign finance filings are due for all candidates in the state and New York City. THURSDAY 1/20
The New York City Council officially announces who is chairing and sitting on each committee at its second meeting of the new session at 1:30 p.m. at City Hall.
NEW YORK'S NEPOTISM HALL OF FAME
GIVING FAMILY MEMBERS JOBS IS A TIME-HONORED NEW YORK TRADITION.
By Caitlin Dorman and Jeff Coltin
New York City law is clear on conflicts of interest when it comes to nepotism: It’s a big no-no. A City Council member isn’t even allowed to nominate a family member to the unpaid, thankless position of community board member. But that didn’t stop Mayor Eric Adams from giving his brother Bernard a high-level post at the NYPD, and when you look at the precedent set by previous mayors … he might have a point! Exceptions have been granted in the past – mostly for unpaid positions – but an exception could be granted for this $210,000-ayear job. With that in mind, we took a look back at some recent examples of nepotism by city and state executives. Bernard Adams, left, was named by his brother, NYC Mayor Eric Adams, as head of mayoral security.
CHIRLANE MCCRAY
Chair of the Mayor's Fund to Advance New York City; ThriveNYC founder Bill de Blasio gave her so much to oversee, but he couldn’t give her the world, aka the Brooklyn borough presidency.
CHIARA AND DANTE DE BLASIO
Summer 2014 interns You kind of have to admire Chiara de Blasio for embarking on the road of nepotism that first summer and then deciding it wasn’t worth the negative clout of being attached to her dad’s administration. The same can’t be said for her brother …
DANTE DE BLASIO
Contracted filmmaker After initially rising to fame in front of the camera during his dad’s mayoral campaign, Dante de Blasio bid adieu to his time in Gracie Mansion by working on a series of short films highlighting the de Blasio administration’s accomplishments. Get this guy an Emmy.
EMMA BLOOMBERG
Mayoral program coordinator Bloomberg also raised eyebrows when he hired his 22-year-old daughter to work on his staff, but really he was doing the city a favor – an unpaid relative is one less employee to lay off when you’re looking to save the city some money.
MARIAH KENNEDY CUOMO
Informal adviser to the state Department of Health To think, if it weren’t for her father Andrew Cuomo’s fall from grace, Mariah would probably be state health commissioner by now.
MARJORIE TIVEN
Commissioner for the United Nations, Consular Corps and Protocol Michael Bloomberg’s younger sister didn’t receive a salary for the important but littleknown job as New York City’s liaison to the United Nations (overseeing a staff of a dozen), but that’s the beauty of being a Bloomberg isn’t it? You don’t really need a salary.
JAMES COPELAND
George Pataki relation, hired as an architect for SUNY Hiring your wife’s sister’s husband who is also your next-door neighbor might look like a minor nepotism offense, but while almost everyone else worked for free, this guy got paid hundreds of thousands of dollars in state university contracts.
ANDREW CUOMO
$1 a year special adviser to Gov. Mario Cuomo Don’t be deceived, despite a gig in his 20s as an adviser to the governor, Andrew Cuomo is not a politician. He might want to watch out given the way things are going with JCOPE. They might ask him to return his tiny salary.
THE GIULIANIS
Four relatives in various positions When reporters pressed Rudy Giuliani on why so many of his relatives were hired in his administration, he pleaded that he had too many cousins to keep track of. “At what degree of relationship should I know about. What about a second or third cousin?” he asked. With a memory like that, it’s no wonder he forgot the basic rule of law later in life.
A Q&A with acting state Health Department Commissioner
DR. MARY BASSETT
What has your first month been like? Well, obviously, the omicron variant thread has really dominated my time in the first month. There was a time when we were reporting each person who was identified within the omicron variant, now we’re just reporting the proportion of COVID and the state attributable to omicron. And it’s 95% or so. So that’s been the dominant part of my work. And obviously, not all I hope to do here. But it has given me a chance to get to know many people in the Health Department.
What led you to accept Gov. Kathy Hochul’s offer to take the position at such a trying time? I think there’s two parts to it. First, I’ve worked in public health for many years now, over 35 years, and the COVID pandemic is a once-in-a-century event. You can imagine that it’s been hard to be on the sidelines when public health was in such demand. So part of it was just wanting to contribute. Part of it was that this Health Department has unique features. The state Health Department oversees hospitals and health facilities from a regulatory standpoint. And it also has oversight over Medicaid, which is a payer that insures about a third of New Yorkers. Those are important levers that public health doesn’t always have authority in. That was what I was interested in, long-standing challenges: how to cover health care for the undocumented, for example, how to address what appears to be just baked-in instability of the safety net hospitals. Those are the things I’m looking forward to turning my attention to. And of course running through all of this is the issue of racial equity.
wear their masks.
In your first appearance alongside Hochul, you promised greater transparency. Do you feel you have had an impact in this regard? Since I became commissioner, we’ve implemented what (we call) in shorthand the mask or vax mandate. That was something that I recommended to her – and that of course other people in the administration also supported – and she implemented that. Another example of transparency with the data was on Dec. 24, the day before Christmas, when everybody’s thinking about children and family. We put out information that we had observed a troubling increase in pediatric hospitalizations due to COVID. Somebody might have said, “Let’s wait a few days, not do it on Christmas Eve.” But we put it out. And that is what this governor expects of us, and that’s what we’re going to keep delivering.
What might be the next steps for tackling rising COVID-19 cases? Every morning, a group of us meet and go over the numbers. And we’re tracking very carefully the number of hospital beds there are. New York City does not yet have a capacity problem, and that’s the heart of the omicron surge still. Hospitalizations are still a lagging indicator, but I expect it to continue to rise. The only saving grace with this variant is it’s clear now – although you’ll hear people say “it seems,” but I say it’s clear – that it causes more mild disease. The problem is how contagious it is. The problem is the number of people, even if we have a relatively low proportion, who get sick and hospitalized. I’m still really – I’m watching it carefully. We need people to take (the) recommendations to get their kids vaccinated and wear their masks. Those are our principal tools right now. – Rebecca C. Lewis
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New York’s cloudy dream of a clean energyfuture
THIS STORY IS PUBLISHED IN PARTNERSHIP WITH NEW YORK FOCUS.
Does the state have a workable plan to shut down old fossil fuel plants?
By Colin Kinniburgh
The Ravenswood Generating Station looms over neighboring fields. L OOK ACROSS THE East River from midtown Manhattan, and you can’t miss them: the four towering, candy cane smokestacks of the Ravenswood Generating Station, New York City’s largest power plant. For more than 50 years, the plant has been a cornerstone of the city’s electrical grid and a landmark of the Queens waterfront. Its southern end also sits just opposite the largest public housing development in the country: Queensbridge Houses, home to more than 6,000 people, the majority of them Black and Latino.
“I knew I was home when I would see those,” longtime resident Kaseem Cushnie, 44, said of the smokestacks. Cushnie grew up in the shadow of the power plant, and he expects its smokestacks will be around at least as long as he is.
But a coalition of local public housing residents, environmental justice groups and elected officials hope Ravenswood’s fossil fuel-burning days will soon be over. The plant, powered mostly by natural gas, is one of the biggest polluters in the state. In 2019, according to Environmental Protection Agency data, it pumped out more than 1.2 million tons of carbon dioxide, roughly 5% of all emissions from the electricity sector in the state. It also released some 360 tons of nitrogen oxides, a major contributor to unhealthy air.
Ravenswood is only one of several power plants concentrated along the Queens waterfront – one factor driving air pollution levels in Long Island City and Astoria above the city average, according to a survey by the city Department of Health. Organizers see the cluster of fossil fuel plants as a textbook case of environmental injustice.
“It’s been an (environmental justice) dream for Ravenswood to shut down because of how big it is and how much it pollutes,” said Eddie Bautista, executive director of the New York City Environmental Justice Alliance. The cause has drawn the attention of Rep. Carolyn Maloney, who told New York Focus and City & State it is one of her “goals in life to close this thing down.”
“It is unconscionable that so many polluting power plants are allowed to emerge in one area,” Maloney said. In September, she rallied with New York City Housing Authority tenant leaders, calling on state lawmakers to shut down “Big Allis,” the plant’s largest smokestack.
In an unusual twist, it’s not the power company they’re fighting. Rise Light & Power, which has owned the plant since 2017, has its own ambitions of transforming Ravenswood into a renewable energy hub. “Our plan has always been for a longterm redevelopment of this site to support the energy transition,” said Clint Plummer, CEO of Rise Light & Power.
Plummer said the company has already shut down most of the plant’s dirtiest peaker units, and it has plans to install 300 megawatts of battery storage – about 5% of the state’s recently expanded 6 gigawatt goal. Last year, the company submitted a major proposal to build new transmission lines that would bring upstate solar and wind power to New York City through the Ravenswood plant.
But the project, one of seven reviewed by the state energy agency NYSERDA, lost to two other contenders: the Champlain Hudson Power Express and Clean Path New York, which Gov. Kathy Hochul has promoted as a flagship of New York’s transition to renewable energy. That left Rise Light & Power’s project in limbo, and Ravenswood as dependent as ever on fossil fuels. The company’s plans to install battery storage were also stalled, Plummer said, because of a lack of a long-term contract, which also depends on state regulators.
The drawn-out fight over Ravenswood illustrates the thorny path to achieving one of the key targets of New York’s landmark climate law. The Climate Leadership and Community Protection Act, passed in 2019, requires the state to supply 70% of its electricity from renewables by 2030 and 100% by 2040. That will mean retiring and replacing most of the state’s generating capacity – more than two-thirds of which relies on gas and oil – in less than 20 years, even as overall electricity demand is projected to increase due to electrification of home heating, transportation and other sectors.
Some of those facilities will simply age out: More than a third of the state’s current fossil fuel capacity is on track to be retired by 2030 because it can no longer be operated reliably or profitably, according to an analysis by New York Focus and City & State of data published by the New York Independent System Operator, which manages the electrical grid.
The state has recently signaled that it does not want these plants to be replaced with new polluters. In October, the state Department of Environmental Conservation denied permits to two new gas plants that would have replaced outdated peakers: one proposed by NRG Energy in Astoria and the other by Danskammer in Newburgh. Six weeks later, the company behind a similar project in Gowanus pulled its application and said it would instead pursue plans to replace its peaker facility with battery storage.
Shifting the entire grid away from fossil fuels will require not only adding vast
Left, Gov. Kathy Hochul visits a hydroelectric power plant. Right, the Ravenswood Generating Station.
– Rep. Carolyn Maloney
amounts of wind and solar power, and expanding and upgrading transmission lines, but also closing dozens of existing plants. As of now, climate organizers and some industry experts said the state lacks a plan to match the scale of the task at hand.
In one sense, New York has a head start on the energy transition: more than half of the electricity the state produced in 2020 was carbon-free, thanks overwhelmingly to upstate nuclear plants and hydroelectric dams (wind, solar, and other renewables made up only about 5%). But gas and oil plants account for the remaining 43% statewide and a whopping 77% in New York City and Long Island.
Statewide, there are about 80 active fossil fuel plants, the bulk of which burn fracked gas from Pennsylvania as their primary fuel. Many have some oil-burning units as well, but very few rely on oil alone and, since 2020, none burn coal. Phasing out the dirtiest fuels has reduced the power sector’s emissions sharply over the past 30 years, and the industry now accounts for only 13% of New York’s greenhouse gas emissions – third after buildings and transportation, which are responsible for roughly 30% each.
As those two heavily polluting sectors go electric, though, the question of where the electricity comes from becomes increasingly key. And so far, the state has said much more about the renewables and transmission lines it plans to add than about what will happen to the plants they’re expected to replace. “Elite-level Democrats … are totally cool with incentivizing more clean energy development,” said Pete Sikora, climate and inequality campaigns director at New York Communities for Change. “What they generally are unwilling to do is actually cut fossil fuel use directly.”
The governor’s office said the Champlain Hudson and Clean Path transmission projects, combined with new offshore wind and other renewables, will be enough to cut New York City’s use of fossil fuels for electricity by more than 80% in 2030. If all of the projects receive final approval and are built on schedule, they would put a major dent in the state’s overall emissions and bring the CLCPA’s 2030 targets within reach.
The future of the plants they intend to replace is far less clear. The state has moved against one subset of fossil fuel plants so far: the so-called peaker plants that fire up when electricity demand spikes, which are among the dirtiest and most expensive plants to run.
In late 2020, the state adopted rules capping the emissions of nitrogen oxides from such plants, effectively requiring about a dozen plants to retire their dirtiest units by 2025. Independent System Operator estimates this will take about 6% of the state’s fossil fuel power supply off the grid. In her State of the State policy book published this month, Hochul broadened the regulatory push against peakers, saying her administration would establish a blueprint for shutting down “New York’s oldest and most-polluting fossil fuel facilities” by 2030. She did not say how those criteria would be defined, or how many plants might be covered, and her office did not respond to a request for more details.
Peakers account for less than 10% of the sector’s emissions. The next big step, climate organizers said, will be to take on the “baseload” facilities that supply the bulk of the state’s power. To do that, climate organizers want to see the state adopt a more stringent version of the “Peaker Rule,” which would apply to a much broader swath of plants across the state and would be tightened every two years.
They also want the state to establish a comprehensive planning process so that the retirement of fossil fuel plants is carefully managed alongside deployment of renewables and transmission upgrades, maintaining the reliability of the grid while protecting workers from layoffs and consumers from rate hikes during the transition.
The state’s Climate Action Council – the body tasked with writing a roadmap to meet the CLCPA targets – has endorsed both prongs of this approach in its Draft Scoping Plan, released in late December. But the council’s recommendations won’t be finalized until the end of the year, and it could take another year or more for new rules to be written and adopted.
Allison Considine, senior New York campaign representative at the Sierra Club, said the state can’t wait that long. “The governor and the Climate Action Council have a public mandate to move really quickly, and to meet or hopefully even exceed (the CLCPA targets),” she said. “Seventy percent by 2030 is not a ceiling.”
Climate organizers also warn that, as of now, the state has not provided funding to match its legally binding climate targets. NYSERDA analysts working with the Climate Action Council estimated that decarbonizing New York’s economy will cost some $15 billion per year. New York Renews, the coalition behind the CLCPA, is pressing the governor and Legislature to include that full amount in this year’s budget.
When it comes to the power sector, the state can count on at least one new source of funding: A portion of the $65 billion for grid upgrades that was included in the federal bipartisan infrastructure bill passed in November. A state environmental department spokesperson said that historically New York has received about 7% of federal formula funding, which would translate to $4.5 billion for the grid over the next five years, but the state is still waiting for details.
More than 50 state Democratic lawmakers want the governor to include the Build Public Renewables Act in her budget. The bill would enable the New York Power Authority to build new large-scale wind and solar facilities, and require it to phase out its fossil fuel facilities by 2025. Proponents said the effort would pay for itself, relying on the authority’s well-established bond program.
So far, Hochul has shown no sign of backing either approach. In her State of the State speech, she announced $500 million to develop offshore wind and proposed a $1 billion increase to the $3 billion Environmental Bond Act that was passed in the budget last year. But only about a third of the funds in the bond act are slated directly for climate mitigation – the mandate of the CLCPA. And none of it would go toward greening the grid. The bond act also still needs to be approved by voters through a ballot initiative in November.
Without a major infusion of new climate funding in the budget, Hochul’s promises in the State of the State would amount to “just more unfunded goals, which has been NY’s M.O. for a long long long time,” Sikora said by text message.
Climate organizers aren’t the only ones voicing these concerns. Gavin Donohue, president and CEO of the Independent Power Producers of New York, a statewide trade association representing both fossil
fuel and renewable electric companies, said the state has “a long way to go” in planning and above all paying for the transition to a clean grid.
Donohue, a member of the Climate Action Council, is especially worried about the costs that could be passed on to ratepayers if the state doesn’t implement carbon pricing or another mechanism to fund the transition. He’s also concerned about reliability, an area that he doesn’t think climate advocates take seriously enough.
“All the activists can claim all they want about the value of this stuff, but if it doesn’t help keep the lights on, it’s really not accomplishing what we set out to do here,” said Donohue, whose group has lobbied against proposals to block new fossil fuel plants statewide. Independent System Operator’s latest reliability plan warned that if renewable energy deployment and grid upgrades don’t stay on schedule, the combination of climate impacts and regulations like the Peaker Rule could leave New York City with relatively little backup in an emergency.
Donohue also said that closing plants too quickly could take a toll on jobs, and organized labor wasn’t given enough of a role on the Climate Action Council.
Experts on the council stressed that decarbonization is projected to create far more jobs than it will cost. The council’s Just Transition Working Group projects that the rapidly growing energy sector could add upward of 38,000 jobs by 2030 compared to 2,000 jobs lost. (Estimates of total New York fossil fuel plant employment today range from 4,000 to 10,000 workers – 0.1% or less of the state’s total workforce.) But those costs and benefits aren’t always distributed evenly, and organizers insisted that a portion of any funding for the energy transition go toward the workers and communities long dependent on fossil fuel plants to ensure they don’t get left behind.
As for Ravenswood, Rise Light & Power hopes Hochul’s recent promises to promote battery storage could finally allow the company to make good on its promises of a green transition. (Her State of the State included a directive to prioritize storage projects that will help eliminate the dirtiest plants, as well as doubling the CLCPA’s target of 3 gigawatts of energy storage by 2030.)
Some local residents, though, said phasing out fossil fuels would be just the beginning of what the company owes the community.
“I think there has to be some restitution paid,” said Lashawn “Suga Ray” Marston, a filmmaker and community health advocate. His mother, who has lived in Queensbridge for 35 years, is one of many in the area who suffer from asthma, and he said nearby power plants are at least partly to blame.
Anthony Rogers-Wright, director of environmental justice at New York Lawyers for the Public Interest and steering committee member of New York Renews, shares the sentiment. The energy transition’s projected $15 billion cost, he said, is “a pretty good deal” for big polluters.
“If we were to externalize the price that they’ve caused, specifically to indigenous, Black, brown and poor white communities in lost lives and ailing health, the fee would be even higher, and they would basically just have to go out of business,” he said. “We are letting them off easy.” ■
– Gavin Donohue, Independent Power Producers of New York president and CEO
HYDROGEN: CLIMATE CHANGE FRIEND OR FOE?
NEW YORK NEEDS all sorts of renewable energy projects to meet its goal of reducing greenhouse gas emissions by 85% (compared to 1990 levels) before 2050. Offshore wind, solar and hydroelectric power will be important to replacing fossil fuels, but they each have their own limits. Wind patterns do not always line up with consumer demand. Clouds sometimes block the sun. Many rivers have already been dammed. Some engines just need more oomph than electricity can provide.
Hydrogen is getting more attention from policymakers at all levels of government as a future fuel source. It is much lighter than gasoline and has the torque to keep long-haul trucking and commercial flights going in a carbon-free future. Heavy industry could use it to smelt steel and produce cement, and hydrogen can be stored without needing batteries. Such advantages help explain why the federal government is now offering billions of dollars in funding for states with ideas for harnessing the most plentiful element in the universe as a reliable source of energy. Gov. Kathy Hochul announced steps in her State of the State to transform the Empire State into a “green hydrogen hub” over the next few years.
New York is increasingly leaning on hydrogen power as an option to help the state meet the environmental goals established in the 2019 Climate Leadership and Community Protection Act. Hydrogen has advantages over other renewable energy sources, but it also has its drawbacks. New funding aims to encourage the technological advances necessary to overcome many of the negatives while making hydrogen power economically viable, but its production could lead to increased greenhouse gas emissions in some situations. That is why environmentalists warned that fossil fuel companies were promoting it to help their own bottom line more than efforts to confront climate change.
Nomenclature and a little science are important to understanding hydrogen as a fuel. So-called blue hydrogen is made from natural gas in a process that research shows can pollute as much as coal. Green hydrogen is made from water through an energy intensive process called electrolysis, which can be carbon neutral if renewable sources were used to create the electricity needed to split water molecules into hydrogen and oxygen. Once hydrogen gas gets made through either method, it can be burned to power an engine. Or, it can go into a device called a fuel cell to generate electricity without making any greenhouse gases. The bottom line is there are two important types of hydrogen – and two ways to use them.
Hochul appears to be keeping an open mind when it comes to new fuel sources, though she emphasized green hydrogen in her State of the State policy book. “Green hydrogen is a cutting-edge climate technology with the potential to accelerate New York’s transition into a net-zero economy and create good-paying jobs across the state,” reads the book outlining her 2022 agenda. “Made from renewable energy right here in New York, green hydrogen releases zero greenhouse gas emissions when used in a fuel cell, yet it is strong enough to power a forklift, long-distance semi-truck, or even entire neighborhoods via a microgrid.” To do this, she proposed competing for billions in funding for hydrogen development included in a recent federal infrastructure bill, catalyzing new state-funded research and continuing work New York has already done in recent years.
The New York State Energy Research and Development Authority, which leads many of New York’s climate initiatives, has spent millions of dollars on research into hydrogen as well as internal combustion engines that could be fueled by any of the color-coded types of hydrogen. Then-Gov. Andrew Cuomo in his final weeks in office promoted hydrogen as a potential fuel for power plants, which would require additional advances in carbon capture technology to stop greenhouse gases from entering the air. But draft plans recently released by the state Climate Action Council – tasked by law with developing plans for the state to reach its climate goals – recommended limiting “the use of hydrogen, nuclear, and biofuels” because of their potential ill effects on the environment. Making hydrogen from natural gas can result in leaking methane, which is a much more harmful greenhouse gas than carbon dioxide, which is also created in the process.
Energy companies like National Grid have nonetheless promoted hydrogen as a way to continue using current infrastructure like pipelines even though that could mean creating more greenhouse gases through combustion that could not necessarily be captured and stored. “The Trojan horse argument is real,” Alex Beauchamp, Northeast region director of Food & Water Watch said in an interview. “There’s a reason that (fossil fuel companies) are hyping up hydrogen that just magically can exist in the exact same infrastructure that the gas they currently burn is in.” Environmentalists succeeded in getting the City Council to include a ban on hydrogen gas (fuel cells are permitted) in a landmark law requiring all new buildings to be fully electric after 2027. They are hoping that the state will adopt a similar approach to reducing pollution from commercial and residential buildings, which accounted for 32% of greenhouse gas emissions in New York in 2019.
A lot about the state’s climate strategy will be determined soon. The state budget is due April 1. A final plan for state climate efforts is scheduled to be released by the Climate Action Council at the end of the year. Federal applications for hydrogen funding are expected to open up sometime around the latter half of 2022, according to NYSERDA. If all goes well, Hochul might be able to make good on creating a national hydrogen hub. Such efforts will not come to fruition in time for the June Democratic gubernatorial primary or even the general election, but the governor is making a lot of political hay about how she is confronting climate change here at home. Environmentalists are hoping she prioritizes forms of green hydrogen that will reduce New York’s carbon footprint. “There’s going to be a role for green hydrogen; we’re going to need to look into this,” said Liz Moran, New York policy advocate at Earthjustice. “But it needs to be done very carefully.” – Zach Williams
