In June 2019, when New York passed its Climate Leadership and Community Protection Act (CLCPA), it all seemed so easy.  Back then, everyone knew that “renewables” were cheaper than fossil fuels for making electricity; it was only the nefarious machinations of evil oil and gas companies that stood in the way of an effortless energy transition.  New York would assume the mantle of climate leadership to show everyone the way.  And even as recently as December 2022, New York’s path to energy utopia still seemed clear.  That’s when the state issued what it called the Final Scoping Plan under the CLCPA, laying out the simple steps to achieve the goal.  Just keep putting one foot in front of the other, and by 2030 we would have 70% of our electricity from renewables.

In the just over two years since then, things have fallen apart with remarkable speed.  Yesterday, Interior Secretary Doug Burgum ordered a halt to all construction work on a project called Empire Wind, an offshore wind project located about 20 miles South of Long Island and just East of New York City.  This is close to a final stake through the heart of the energy transition program outlined in the Scoping Plan.  We have gone from what seemed a clear path to energy transition to being nowhere and with no plan forward.  It’s fair to say that New York’s leaders have no idea what their next move is — other than the usual “Sue Trump!”

For some perspective, I’ll summarize the history up to yesterday’s development.

The linchpin of the Scoping Plan was the planned construction of some 9000 MW of off-shore wind capacity, said to be sufficient to supplant most of the existing fossil fuel electricity generation in the state.  According to the Scoping Plan, as of 2022 some 4300 MW of that was already under “active development.”  

Of the various off-shore wind projects constituting the 4300 MW in active development in 2022, three were the farthest advanced: the 816 MW first phase of a project called Empire Wind, and a second 924 MW capacity facility called Sunrise Wind, and a third much smaller (130 MW) project off Eastern Long Island called South Fork Wind.  An agency called New York State Energy Research and Development Authority (NYSERDA) is responsible for developing all of the projects except South Fork Wind (which got off the ground under a different agency, Long Island Power Authority, before the CLCPA process got going).  According to the website of NYSERDA, in October 2019 a contract to develop Empire Wind 1 had been finalized with Norway’s Equinor, and another one for Sunrise Wind had been finalized with Denmark’s Ørsted.  The NYSERDA announcement of the contracts touted the projects’ “cost-effectiveness”:

The Empire Wind and Sunrise Wind projects have an average all-in development cost of $83.36 per megawatt hour (2018 dollars) . . . . The average bill impact for residential customers will be less than a dollar per month per customer – approximately $0.73.       

One could quibble about exactly how “cost-effective” that $83.36/MWh was — after all, it was a wholesale cost at the generation facility, and for intermittent power, when a modern natural gas plant can probably achieve a wholesale cost of around $50/MWh, and for dispatchable power.  But anyway it was all a fantasy.  As I reported in a post on October 5, 2023, in September of that year essentially all the developers of off-shore wind projects for New York had canceled their contracts and demanded huge price increases.  These cancelations included not just Empire Wind 1, but also Empire Wind 2, Sunrise Wind, and several other projects aggregating to the 4300 MW of “active development.”  For Empire Wind 1, the new demanded price was $159.64, and for the project’s second phase, Empire Wind 2, the new demanded price was $177.84.