RPA President Tom Wright joined elected officials and advocates at New York City Hall on April 6 to urge the Public Service Commission to vote “yes” on Tier 4.
Tier 4 Benefits
The Tier 4 program has a range of benefits that will allow New York State to swiftly:
- Transition to Clean Energy:
To reach the CLCPA goals, New York must connect our new renewable electricity resources to downstate homes and businesses, where the majority of the state’s population lives.
Renewables are crucial not just to clean up current electricity needs, but also to replace dirty, imported gasoline and diesel engines as we transition to electric cars, buses and trucks, and to replace fracked gas and home heating oil as we transition to clean, electric heat.
- Improve Health in Overburdened Communities:
New transmission will enable renewables to displace the dirtiest plants, bringing enormous health benefits to people in surrounding communities who have suffered most from power plant pollution, especially downstate, where most of the State’s fossil-fuel power plants are located.
New York City in particular hosts many of the State’s oldest and most highly polluting fossil power plants, generating not only significant GHG emissions, but also nitrogen oxides (NOx), particulates, and sulfur dioxide (SO2), which contribute to significant public health problems, including asthma and other respiratory illnesses and heart disease.
- Stabilize Energy Prices and Lower Electricity Costs:
New transmission opens the New York market to additional resources, increasing the diversity of supply, allowing utilities to hedge against global fossil commodity prices and putting downward pressure on prices when residents need it most.
According to one analysis, if more transmission had been in place this past January it would have saved New Yorkers over $100m in energy costs in that single month.
Without new transmission, it is likely New York will experience curtailment, i.e., wind and solar facilities will generate electricity that can’t find its way to users and is wasted. This will cause more generation than needed from dirty sources and unnecessarily increase the cost of renewables for everyone.
- Attract Federal Funding:
The Department of Energy has launched the Building a Better Grid Initiative, which will deploy $20 billion in federal financing tools, including a new $2.5 billion Transmission Facilitation Program, created by the recent Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act. If New York does not have a functioning process to approve new transmission projects it will not be in position to access this funding.
The transmission grid is foundational to other clean energy investments. If New York does not have a viable plan for connecting clean sources of electricity to buildings and vehicle charging infrastructure, it will be poorly positioned to access federal funding for clean energy projects that depend on access to renewable electricity.
New Transmission Benefits All New Yorkers
Some have criticized Tier 4 as a statewide investment that primarily benefits downstate, but Tier 4 is an economic win for all of New York State. The state has long held that our climate law and clean energy standards – of which Tier 4 is a part – are statewide policies that deliver statewide benefits.
To date though, most of those benefits have accrued to upstate residents – including building the tax base, new job creation, lower electricity prices, and cleaner air. Downstate residents – representing approximately 65% of the population – have shouldered much of the investment that has primarily benefited upstate residents thus far. Transmission will begin to right that imbalance and ensure that downstate residents receive their fair share of the full suite of benefits.·
