Hydroelectric energy is the “backbone of clean power,” but an urgent need to improve efficiencies is driving engineers to explore a whirlwind of options Among alternative energy solutions, wind, solar, and hydrogen capture the majority of attention. Yet the combined output from these sources pales in comparison to that of hydroelectric power. Producing more than …
After the reelection of former President Donald Trump, clean energy advocates across the country are preparing for a White House that will no doubt pursue aggressive rollbacks of climate policies and further expand fossil-fuel production.
Now more than ever, states will need to step up and pursue climate efforts on their own to “ensure continued progress toward clean energy,” said Caroline Spears, executive director of the advocacy group Climate Cabinet.
Few states are as important as New York, which is large, Democrat-controlled — and already committed to ambitious clean energy goals. In 2019, the state passed the Climate Leadership and Community Protection Act (CLCPA), which pledged to reach 70 percent renewable energy by 2030 and net-zero emissions by 2050.
“New York State can continue to lead without federal support or federal oversight,” said Mandy DeRoche, deputy managing attorney at the advocacy group Earthjustice. “We’ll continue our progress regardless, and that will happen in every state no matter what.”
But so far, the Empire State is falling behind on its climate goals. Across a slew of initiatives under New York’s 2019 climate law, regulators are missing key rulemaking deadlines. According to a July report from the state, New York will likely miss its landmark clean energy target for 2030. Right now, it’s on track to get just 53 percent of its electricity from renewable sources by that date, far short of 70 percent.
The report mostly blamed external economic factors, including supply-chain disruptions and high interest rates that led to a spate of major renewable project cancellations. Another issue is skyrocketing energy demand, largely driven by new data centers for crypto mining and AI, as well as microchip manufacturing facilities and the rise in electric vehicles and appliances.
Environmental advocates argue that faltering political will contributes just as much, if not more, to the state’s lackluster progress. Governor Kathy Hochul, a Democrat, has expressed ambivalence over meeting looming clean energy targets.
“The costs have gone up so much I now have to say, ‘What is the cost on the typical New York family?’” Hochul said in a recent TV interview. “The goals are still worthy. But we have to think about the collateral damage of these decisions.”
Missing the 2030 deadline would jeopardize many of the state’s other climate goals, including achieving 100 percent zero-emissions energy by 2040 and shuttering “peaker” fossil-gas plants that disproportionately spew toxic pollutants into low-income communities and communities of color, in addition to emitting large amounts of planet-warming carbon dioxide.
But missing these goals is far from inevitable. From raising energy procurement targets to leaning on public power agencies, climate and legal experts say that there’s still plenty of ways New York can make good on its clean energy pledge.
“We’re not ready to say we can’t meet the 2030 goal,” said DeRoche. “Of course, there are obstacles, but the messaging and the approach from the state should be, ‘This is a statutory obligation, and we will do everything in our power to meet it.’”
How New York could get back on track
On some level, New York’s struggles come down to a straightforward problem: The state doesn’t have enough existing or upcoming renewable energy projects to meet its goals.
About 30 percent of the state’s electricity currently comes from renewable sources, mostly from upstate hydropower plants built many decades ago.
One bright spot is that New York has already outpaced its 6-gigawatt goal for rooftop and community solar — but its targets for utility-scale solar, wind, and battery storage projects, which make up the bulk of its clean energy plan, remain well off-track.
To help solve this, DeRoche and her team at Earthjustice argue in public comments to state energy regulators that New York should vastly increase its renewable energy procurement targets, which set guidelines for how much clean power the state should purchase from private developers. State agencies have determined that they would need to purchase about 14,000 gigawatt hours each year for the next three years to meet the 2030 deadline, yet have recommended procuring only 5,600 gigawatt hours per year.
“The Draft Review provides no basis for setting the target so low,” her team wrote, arguing that state agencies should reevaluate how feasible it would be to procure a higher volume.
New clean energy construction should be prioritized in downstate New York, DeRoche adds, a region that houses most of the state’s population yet relies heavily on fossil fuels compared with the largely hydro- and nuclear-powered upstate areas. The state will also need to address transmission and interconnection backlogs that make it harder to connect new power generation to the grid. Earlier this year, lawmakers passed the RAPID Act to expedite that process for clean energy projects and transmission lines.
Some activists argue that the state itself should take a leading role to develop more clean energy.
Last year, an amendment to the state budget granted the New York Power Authority the ability to build, own, and operate renewable energy projects for the first time. Organizers at the grassroots coalition Public Power New York say that government leaders have yet to capitalize on the change, commonly referred to as the Build Public Renewables Act. In October, NYPA released its first strategic plan for developing renewable energy projects, proposing the installation of 3.5 gigawatts of new clean energy in the next several years.
“This is only the first tranche of NYPA renewables projects,” the report said, with potentially “further projects for consideration.”
Andrea Johnson, an organizer with the New York City chapter of Democratic Socialists of America, a member group of Public Power New York, called that number “measly.” Public Power New York is rallying for the authority to commit to 15 gigawatts of new clean power by 2030, an amount based on research commissioned by the group.
Expanding clean power at a faster rate would fulfill NYPA’s responsibilities under last year’s expanded authority, which calls on it to build projects when the state falls short on its climate mandates, Johnson said. “When the private sector fails — and the private sector is failing — the state needs to step in and actually fill the gap.”
Leveraging NYPA can also allow New York to meet its climate goals at a lower cost, Johnson said. As a nonprofit, public institution, NYPA can access more favorable financing. It also owns and builds transmission lines, allowing it to plan for both energy generation and distribution at the same time, she said. NYPA is also required to provide utility bill credits to low- and moderate-income households for any clean energy produced from its projects.
Beyond building more clean energy, the state should also take steps to ease growing power demand, including strengthening building efficiency standards and accelerating the installation of heat pumps, said Michael Gerrard, faculty director of the Sabin Center for Climate Change Law at Columbia Law School.
That includes addressing the rapid growth of crypto mining and AI electricity use and its effects on residents, said DeRoche. State officials noted that those rising energy demands have made it far more difficult to reach clean energy targets. But agencies have policy tools available to understand and reduce unabated growth — and they should start with making sure that discounted electricity rates for cryptocurrency and AI companies aren’t being subsidized by residents, DeRoche said.
Offshore wind’s uncertain future
Any effort to accelerate New York’s adoption of clean energy will need to grapple with challenges in the offshore wind sector, a cornerstone of the state’s strategy that is likely to face even more setbacks under the incoming Trump administration.
New York aims to install 9 gigawatts of offshore wind power by 2035, but in the past four years, inflation, high interest rates, and supply-chain issues led developers to pull out of contracts in the state.
That challenging economic environment is now improving, however, according to Atin Jain, an offshore wind analyst at the energy consulting firm BloombergNEF. As inflation has started to ease and interest rates have begun to come down, “We have probably passed the worst of it,” Jain said. State officials have been quick to respond to the industry’s economic pressures, he added, expediting auctions to renegotiate previous agreements and adding language in contracts to allow for inflation adjustments.
Two new projects, Sunrise Wind and Empire Wind 1, with 924 and 810 megawatts of capacity, respectively, are currently moving forward in New York. The 132-megawatt South Fork Wind farm went live in March off the coast of Long Island.
But Trump’s reelection casts a new uncertainty over the industry. Trump has vowed to stop offshore wind development “on day one” and to “terminate” the Inflation Reduction Act. If those declarations end up translating to real policy, then offshore wind, which relies heavily on federal tax credits and requires federal approval and permits to build and operate, could suffer — in New York and beyond.
Still, New York has enshrined a legal mandate to decarbonize its economy — meaning no matter the headwinds, the state has an obligation to follow through, DeRoche said.
“We hear from the governor that the CLCPA is the nation’s leading climate law,” said DeRoche. “Well, it’s only the nation’s leading climate law if we’re implementing it.”
Charging stations for electric vehicles are essential for cleaning up the transportation sector. A new study by MIT researchers suggests they’re good for business, too.
The study found that, in California, opening a charging station boosted annual spending at each nearby business by an average of about $1,500 in 2019 and about $400 between January 2021 and June 2023. The spending bump amounts to thousands of extra dollars annually for nearby businesses, with the increase particularly pronounced for businesses in underresourced areas.
The study’s authors hope the research paints a more holistic picture of the benefits of EV charging stations, beyond environmental factors.
“These increases are equal to a significant chunk of the cost of installing an EV charger, and I hope this study sheds light on these economic benefits,” says lead author Yunhan Zheng MCP ’21, SM ’21, PhD ’24, a postdoc at the Singapore-MIT Alliance for Research and Technology (SMART). “The findings could also diversify the income stream for charger providers and site hosts, and lead to more informed business models for EV charging stations.”
Zheng’s co-authors on the paper, which was published today in Nature Communications, are David Keith, a senior lecturer at the MIT Sloan School of Management; Jinhua Zhao, an MIT professor of cities and transportation; and alumni Shenhao Wang MCP ’17, SM ’17, PhD ’20 and Mi Diao MCP ’06, PhD ’10.
Understanding the EV effect
Increasing the number of electric vehicle charging stations is seen as a key prerequisite for the transition to a cleaner, electrified transportation sector. As such, the 2021 U.S. Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act committed $7.5 billion to build a national network of public electric vehicle chargers across the U.S.
But a large amount of private investment will also be needed to make charging stations ubiquitous.
“The U.S. is investing a lot in EV chargers and really encouraging EV adoption, but many EV charging providers can’t make enough money at this stage, and getting to profitability is a major challenge,” Zheng says.
EV advocates have long argued that the presence of charging stations brings economic benefits to surrounding communities, but Zheng says previous studies on their impact relied on surveys or were small-scale. Her team of collaborators wanted to make advocates’ claims more empirical.
For their study, the researchers collected data from over 4,000 charging stations in California and 140,000 businesses, relying on anonymized credit and debit card transactions to measure changes in consumer spending. The researchers used data from 2019 through June of 2023, skipping the year 2020 to minimize the impact of the pandemic.
To judge whether charging stations caused customer spending increases, the researchers compared data from businesses within 500 meters of new charging stations before and after their installation. They also analyzed transactions from similar businesses in the same time frame that weren’t near charging stations.
Supercharging nearby businesses
The researchers found that installing a charging station boosted annual spending at nearby establishments by an average of 1.4 percent in 2019 and 0.8 percent from January 2021 to June 2023.
While that might sound like a small amount per business, it amounts to thousands of dollars in overall consumer spending increases. Specifically, those percentages translate to almost $23,000 in cumulative spending increases in 2019 and about $3,400 per year from 2021 through June 2023.
Zheng says the decline in spending increases over the two time periods might be due to a saturation of EV chargers, leading to lower utilization, as well as an overall decrease in spending per business after the Covid-19 pandemic and a reduced number of businesses served by each EV charging station in the second period. Despite this decline, the annual impact of a charging station on all its surrounding businesses would still cover approximately 11.2 percent of the average infrastructure and installation cost of a standard charging station.
Through both time frames, the spending increases were highest for businesses within about a football field’s distance from the new stations. They were also significant for businesses in disadvantaged and low-income areas, as designated by California and the Justice40 Initiative.
“The positive impacts of EV charging stations on businesses are not constrained solely to some high-income neighborhoods,” Wang says. “It highlights the importance for policymakers to develop EV charging stations in marginalized areas, because they not only foster a cleaner environment, but also serve as a catalyst for enhancing economic vitality.”
Zheng believes the findings hold a lesson for charging station developers seeking to improve the profitability of their projects.
“The joint gas station and convenience store business model could also be adopted to EV charging stations,” Zheng says. “Traditionally, many gas stations are affiliated with retail store chains, which enables owners to both sell fuel and attract customers to diversify their revenue stream. EV charging providers could consider a similar approach to internalize the positive impact of EV charging stations.”
Zheng also says the findings could support the creation of new funding models for charging stations, such as multiple businesses sharing the costs of construction so they can all benefit from the added spending.
Those changes could accelerate the creation of charging networks, but Zheng cautions that further research is needed to understand how much the study’s findings can be extrapolated to other areas. She encourages other researchers to study the economic effects of charging stations and hopes future research includes states beyond California and even other countries.
“A huge number of studies have focused on retail sales effects from traditional transportation infrastructure, such as rail and subway stations, bus stops, and street configurations,” Zhao says. “This research provides evidence for an important, emerging piece of transportation infrastructure and shows a consistently positive effect on local businesses, paving the way for future research in this area.”
The research was supported, in part, by the Singapore-MIT Alliance for Research and Technology (SMART) and the Singapore National Research Foundation. Diao was partially supported by the Natural Science Foundation of Shanghai and the Fundamental Research Funds for the Central Universities of China.
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