It's been pretty interesting watching the carefully worded but dire warnings coming out about just how tenuous the future of reliable power is in the Empire State. On June 6, the folks who manage and operate the state's electrical grid, the New York Independent System Operator (NYISO), issued their 2024 Power Trends Report.

One of the first things that should have jumped out at Green Gov Kathy Hochul and the climate cultists in the state legislature should have been the #mathz. That alone would have given a rational person pause, but who are we talking about, right? 

There's only about 20M people counting on this daffy creature to keep the lights and heat on in their homes among her other gubernatorial duties, and she seems pretty overwhelmed as it is. No wonder little details like this slip through the cracks.

...New York has set a goal for 100 percent clean energy on its grid by 2040 to reduce carbon emissions and slow the progress of climate change. The effort that will require a wide roll-out of renewable energy and the axing of power plants fueled by fossil fuels like natural gas.

In the five years since New York set its clean energy targets, the state lost 5,207 megawatts of fossil-fired power supply versus gaining 2,256 megawatts of clean energy sources like wind and solar, the New York Independent System Operator said in its annual reliability report.

NY hasn't "lost" anything. In its renewable zealotry, the state has forced the shutdown of 5200+MW of reliable power generation in the past five years. That's the first point. In answer to replacing it, they have only managed to come up with less than half the "lost" capacity for generation, and what it does have consists of unreliable wind and solar.

Brilliant. This brings up the second point, which is that, in fact, even less MW is available than advertised because wind and solar are never continually online and rarely ever produce up to their rated full capacity.

NYISO points out that the mandated, ongoing switch to heat pumps from natural gas and oil furnaces in homes is driving electrical demand up at the same time that NY wants to attract large data centers and semi-conductors facilities, which each gobble up a small city's worth of wattage on their own.

...“New York’s public policies are increasingly prioritizing clean energy production and a rapid transition away from fossil fuels,” NYISO President and CEO Rich Dewey wrote in a letter featured in the report. “It is imperative that during this time of rapid change we maintain adequate supply necessary to meet growing consumer demand for electricity. Power Trends shows that achieving this balance will be the central industry challenge over the next decade.”

...NYISO is a summer-peaking system, meaning that it typically sees the highest levels of electricity demand in the summer months relative to other times of year, according to the Power Trends report.

However, NYISO projects that the grid will become a winter-peaking system sometime in the mid-2030s due primarily to demand from electrified home heating systems.

The Power Trends Report does its best to remain politically correct and climate-cult sensitive while being honest about what's going to happen and why. I've highlighted a few of the more salient portions of their bullet points. Read them and then the gentle language preceding them, and you'll see what I mean.

There is barely enough power now and there for sure won't be at the current pace.

New York’s Power Grid Faces Blackout Risks As Democrats Push Green Energy Agenda https://t.co/GcDbsnPO3Z via @Deep State Tribunal pic.twitter.com/i1OoncXdv5

— KnightNocturnal (@knightnocturna1) June 21, 2024

And on the Key Messages where I put the little purple exclamation mark? That's rather concerning, or it should be. NYISO is talking about "dispatchable-emmissions-free-resources" (DEFR) in the blandest of terms. But according to The Manhattan Contrarian, while NYISO has been consistently stating requirements for them since at least last fall, DEFRs aren't only "not yet available in commercial scale," they haven't been invented yet.

WAIT, WHUT

In this post last week, I took note that New York’s electric grid system operator, NYISO, has recently issued some clear, if muted, warnings of the impossibility of the energy transition mandated by the state’s 2019 Climate Leadership and Community Protection Act (CLCPA).  In a November 2023 Report, NYISO stated (deeply buried at page 52) that “DEFRs are needed to balance intermittent supply with demand,” and those DEFRs must be “significant in capacity.”  DEFRs are the elusive and not-yet-invented “dispatchable emissions-free resources.”  At a conference the following month, NYISO’s VP for System Integration Planning, Zachary Smith, reiterated the need for these DEFRs in large amounts.  Smith presented charts quantifying the capacity of DEFRs needed for New York to “balance” its prospective intermittent wind/solar supply as something in the range of 30+ GW.  30 GW is close to the peak electricity demand for the entire state, and is approximately equivalent to the existing capacity of New York’s fleet of natural gas plants, all of which are mandated to be closed by 2040.

NY is hurtling ahead, cutting its fossil fuel nose off to spite its Green face without having critical items in place, and such critical pieces do not even exist yet! It's a wing and a prayer situation with the power security of 20M people.

Oh, well done!

You know who else is cheering them on - no worries, do it?

Planet Earth's biggest friends appeared in the public comment section of the "proceeding" the New York Public Service Commission opened when it couldn't figure out what to do about this either.

...In just the past few days, some big comments from important players have floated in.  On Monday (June 17), a comment appeared on this DEFR docket co-signed by two environmental NGOs, Earth Justice and the Sierra Club.  These are two of the very biggest, best funded, and most vociferous advocates of the urgent necessity of an immediate energy transition away from fossil fuels.  With their hundreds of millions of dollars of annual revenue and scores of staffers, surely these guys must have found the answer to the DEFR conundrum.

In fact, incredibly, they have no clue.  The basic approach in their Comment is to pooh-pooh the entire idea that large amounts of DEFRs may be needed, on the sole ground that there may be some (unspecified) flaws in the modeling used by NYISO.  Their preferred solution is to turn off everybody’s electricity via a central switch when generation drops.  Back to the Stone Age!  

Or turn off your a/c when it gets a tad too warm.

New York Gov. Kathy Hochul Activating the National Guard to Beat the Heat.
About the only thing Not mentioned for the State of New York, NYC and other areas of the Northeast are Power Outages during the Heatwave. Sure hope there's no cascade event with the electric grid. https://t.co/drS0gqM6rQ

— ŎĿĐ ĢħŌŞŦ 👻 (@outhereinwoods) June 20, 2024

It's been almost a year since I wrote about how New York State had "no Plan B" when the 2023 NYISO Load and Capacity Report was released...

...On Friday, the New York Independent System Operator (NYISO – the non-profit that manages the state grid) – which rained on Gov Kathy Hochul’s parade as she and her group were finalizing their insane renewables package for the state – released their 2023 Load and Capacity Data Report (Gold Book). If last year’s report was a cold shower, this year’s bad news is a frog-choker for Green energy in the state and particularly New York City.

There’s a reason decarbonization advocates talk so much about power lines. Without them, the fruits of non-carbon-emitting forms of electricity generation, which are often located far away from population centers or are only available when it’s sunny and windy, can’t be fully harvested in the form of electrons flowing to customers when they need them.

The New York state electricity system operator said in a report released Friday that New York City specifically is at risk of a shortfall of 446 megawatts — about enough to power over 350,000 homes — of transmission for nine hours on an especially hot summer day in 2025 when demand for electricity is at its peak.

To those that follow New York state energy planning specifically or, like me, have the sickness that is reading reports from grid operators across the country all the time, the result was not surprising.

...and the state is still flailing away.

All I can think is maybe the authors of next year's report shouldn't worry about being so polite.

Someone might pay attention.

All they can do is try.