Power To The People

Gov. Andrew Cuomo has already made his mark on the state’s energy policy, from the passage of the Article X siting law to an Energy Highway initiative to improve the transmission grid to a Green Bank to spur more clean energy investment. 

Now the governor is setting in motion an effort to completely overhaul how the energy is structured and regulated—and with about a month left in the 2014 legislative session, state lawmakers are taking notice. 

The so-called “Reforming Energy Vision” initiative announced last month would increase system reliability and promote clean energy through greater investment in energy efficiency, energy storage, demand management and, perhaps most important, distributed energy generation. 

“Right now the utilities are a one-way system. Big power plants transmit electricity through transmission lines and then through distribution lines like Con Edison here in New York City,” Gil Quiniones, the head of the New York Power Authority, said at City & State’s “State of New York Infrastructure” conference earlier this month. “The future is where customers—homes, small businesses, large commercial industrial customers—are able to generate their own electricity through solar, through combined heat and power.” 

Assemblywoman Amy Paulin, who chairs the Assembly Energy Committee, said that two of her top energy policy goals this session would dovetail with the governor’s proposal. 

One would allow municipalities to band together to purchase electricity from energy service companies, or ESCOs, which could spur more local power generation, increase system reliability and pave the way for more investment in renewable energy. 

“The first [bill], which we’ve been working on since last year, is to establish a pilot community aggregation program, which actually falls exactly in line with what the governor is proposing with microgrids,” Paulin said. “It would allow communities to do inter-municipal agreements to establish essentially their own buying power to buy power from an ESCO.” 

Another measure Paulin is pushing is based on a shared renewables concept. In New York City there is little space for solar panel or wind turbines to generate much renewable energy, making it harder to realize the decentralized structure envisioned by the Cuomo administration. Another challenge is that many buildings do not have a single owner, but instead are co-ops or condos with multiple owners. To make it easier for urban residents and building owners to invest in renewable energy, Paulin would allow them to set up solar farms or other clean energy facilities and earn a credit. 

“New York City was very interested in moving this for themselves, but we thought that it should be a statewide concept, so that’s another goal,” Paulin said. 

Her goals could become part of the governor’s REV initiative, which would largely transform the state’s regulatory and market structure, she said. Quiniones noted that Con Edison and other utilities had already sold off their power plants in the last round of deregulation, and that this is a natural next step, especially in an industry already in transition. 

“I don’t know that we’ve pulled it together to say, ‘This is the plan,’ ” Paulin said. “I think when there is a plan, these will be elements in it, because the trend is to assure reliability. You want to have the power sources near those that are receiving the power so there’s less disruption to the system when there’s a severe storm or whatever.” 

State Sen. Kevin Parker, the ranking member of the Senate Energy and Telecommunications Committee, said he had some reservations about the direction the Cuomo administration is moving, however. Parker argued that a shift away from the current system of subsidies and incentives for renewable energy would pose other challenges not addressed by Paulin’s legislation. 

“I don’t have a problem with centralized utilities,” Parker said. “It is unreasonable to think that in any kind of a timely manner we’re going to get—community by community or house by house—the use of alternatives. In other words, we’re not going to get to a place in our lifetimes where we’re going to see solar panels on every house, or everybody who lives near a creek using tidal hydropower. That’s not going to happen.” 

Instead, Parker said, the state should push to expand renewable energy through the current model, but with an expansion of large solar power plants or wind energy farms, which he called “wholesale alternative energy.” He said that investing in solar panels on a home costs around $40,000, which could be reduced to as low as $10,000 with federal and state subsidies. But that would still be too costly for many New Yorkers, Parker argued. 

“Even at 10 grand, poor communities, particularly black and Latino communities, won’t be able to afford even that,” he said. “So I don’t want to be in a place where poorer communities and black and Latino communities are left out of the alternative energy mix, because of the economic barrier to entry. So if it’s a matter of now, when you get your bill, your energy just happens to be provided by wind, happens to be provided by tidal power, just happens to be provided by concentrated solar, then everybody has the same access to entry in the alternative energy market.”