Whatever Happened to Wind?

Anyone paying attention to New York’s renewable energy sector will have noticed the emphasis placed on solar power by state government in the past few years. Gov. Andrew Cuomo’s NY-Sun program—a $1.5 billion, 10- year commitment—has provided a reassuring bedrock for the industry, luring companies to the state with incentives, and encouraging businesses and residents to get in on the action as well. The idea is to shepherd the fledgling solar market to a self-sustaining place, and advocates and entrepreneurs alike are encouraged by what they see as a solid commitment to the technology from the governor’s office.

But just as solar appears set to take off in the state, wind power seems to have faded from the discourse, at least the one driven by state press releases. New York’s Renewable Portfolio Standard (RPS)—the program that funds statewide renewable energy projects, including wind—is a decade old and set to expire at the end of 2015. As of yet, no replacement program has been announced.

“Over the course of time they’ve both gotten boosts, but in the last three years solar has seen more attention,” said Anne Reynolds, executive director of the Alliance for Clean Energy New York, a nonprofit located in Albany. “If you go back before that, the RPS has led to a good amount of wind being built. … As we get closer and closer to 2015 and people know the program is running out, they are unwilling to take the development risks.”

Unlike solar, wind is considered a large-scale renewable in New York. Wind farms can generate power on a regional level; the largest in the state, Maple Ridge Wind Farm, has a 321-megawatt capacity. (A typical coal-burning power plant is anywhere between 300 and 700 megawatts; 500 megawatts is enough to power around 175,000 homes.) By comparison, the largest photovoltaic array on the East Coast, the Long Island Solar Farm, is 32 megawatts. (In other, usually sunnier parts of the world, some solar farms reach 300 megawatt capacities, and two 500-megawatt plants are under construction in California.)

Over 1,650 megawatts of wind power have been brought online in the state during the life of the RPS. Nearly 300 megawatts of solar have been installed since the NY-Sun program began in 2012, but that number is projected to increase to around 3,500 megawatts over the next decade.

The emphasis of solar power in New York is not primarily farm-based in the way that wind is, however. Rather, the emphasis is on distributed generation—smaller-scale installations across a range of private residences, businesses and public buildings that will help decentralize the power grid—a key consideration in the governor’s Reforming the Energy Vision initiative, which is currently being handled by the state Public Service Commission. Small wind turbines, of course, can be installed on private properties as well, but just as solar is an obvious choice for distributed generation, wind is a more obvious candidate for utility-scale power plants.

“From our point of view we absolutely need both,” said Reynolds, pointing out the necessity for a diverse power supply and the greater overall resiliency in the face of natural disasters that comes from myriad decentralized power sources.

At a recent conference hosted by the Alliance for Clean Energy New York, Reynolds says that Richard Kauffman, chairman of energy and finance for New York state, assured the audience there would be a new RPS with a new target for the percentage of New York’s energy that should come from renewables, but did not elaborate on what the plan would look like. A spokesperson for the New York State Energy Research and Development Authority confirmed Kauffman’s remarks, adding, “Additional details are not available at this time.”

“It’s a fundamentally different business model between solar and wind,” said Bruce Bailey, president and CEO of AWS Truepower, a clean energy consulting firm based in Albany. “With the solar cities of the world, transactions are done on a landowner or a building owner-basis—third party financing and maintenance and installation—and they’re completed in very incremental segments. … For a wind developer, all of their development risks are long-term—they take years.”

The NY-Sun program grew out of the so-called Customer-Sited Tier of the RPS in 2012—the section devoted to distributed generation—but as of yet no comparable wind driver has materialized from the RPS’ main tier, which is devoted to large-scale renewables.

“The response from the state is that they’re working on it,” said Lisa Dix, senior New York representative for the Sierra Club. “That’s the best I’ve got.” Dix says the Sierra Club has long advocated for a wind program to parallel the NY-Sun initiative.

In September, NYSERDA released a 10-year, $5 billion proposal at the behest of the Public Service Commission for a program that will “work in coordination with other State efforts to advance cleaner, more resilient, and more affordable energy infrastructure.” Dix says this Clean Energy Fund plan will explore a new program to bridge the gap left by the soon-to-expire RPS.

Reynolds says the NYSERDA proposal does not include any funding for large-scale renewables after 2016, but notes that in August the PSC’s staff recommended that the responsibility for purchasing such renewables shift from the Authority to utilities like Con Edison and the Long Island Power Authority—a move she supports. All other states with Renewable Portfolio Standards already place this burden on the utilities, according to Reynolds.

The target of the current RPS is for New York State to receive 30 percent of its power from renewable energy sources—hydro, wind, solar, biofuel or fuel cells—by 2015. That number is currently at 24 percent, with some 17 percent provided by long-established hydropower dams. Wind provides a little over 2.5 percent of the state’s electricity. By comparison Texas receives 20 percent of its power from wind.

Transmission lines running from upstate New York—where the winds are stronger—to downstate—where the bulk of the population resides—are nearing capacity. (Running new overland transmission lines poses its own host of problems because of private land ownership conflicts.) Still, analysts say there is room to at least double the current upstate wind stock. But perhaps more important, there is deep and as yet untapped potential off the coast of Long Island.

“If we have an aggressive wind policy—and by aggressive we mean aggressive like the NY-Sun policy— and if we move now, we could get about 20 percent of our energy downstate from offshore wind by 2020,” Dix said. “We could scale up to like 4,000 megawatts. That’s huge, but that is going to require a bold commitment by Cuomo.”

Europe currently boasts 6.6 gigawatts of online offshore wind power—that’s 6,600 megawatts. The United States, by contrast, is way behind.

“We need to seize that opportunity or we’re going to get left behind for sure, because other states like Rhode Island and Massachusetts are leading the way,” said Dix, pointing out that wind also serves as a hedge against fluctuating fuel prices—a serious problem during harsh winters.

Currently, Deepwater Wind LLC, a Rhode Island-based company, is seeking a contract with the Long Island Power Authority to build a $1 billion, 210-megawatt offshore wind farm 30 miles east of Montauk. The Authority is expected to make a decision by the end of this year.