New York State’s Governor Andrew Cuomo announced January 17 that his Green New Deal, an aggressive clean energy and jobs agenda designed to put New York State on a path to economy-wide carbon neutrality, is included in the State’s 2019 Executive Budget.
Governor Cuomo announcing New York State’s Green Plan
The Green New Deal will statutorily mandate New York’s power be 100 percent carbon-free by 2040, with a significant increase of New York’s successful Clean Energy Standard mandate from 50 percent to 70 percent renewable electricity by 2030. Other key commitments include:
• Doubling distributed solar deployment to 6,000 megawatts by 2025, up from 3,000 megawatts by 2023
One of Deepwater Wind’s offshore wind turbines
• Quadrupling New York’s offshore wind target to 9,000 megawatts by 2035, up from 2,400 megawatts by 2030
• More than doubling new large-scale land-based wind and solar resources through the Clean Energy Standard
• Maximizing the contributions and potential of New York’s existing renewable resources
• Deploying 3,000 megawatts of energy storage by 2030, up from 1,500 megawatts by 2025
• Developing an implementation plan to make New York carbon neutral.
The Deal will create the State’s first statutory Climate Action Council, comprising the heads of relevant State agencies and other workforce, environmental justice, and clean energy experts to develop a comprehensive plan to make New York carbon neutral by significantly and cost-effectively reducing emissions from all major sources, including electricity, transportation, buildings, industry, commercial activity, and agriculture.
Included in the plan is a strategy to move New York’s statewide building stock to carbon neutrality, including strengthening building energy codes and establishing higher appliance efficiency standards. In all, billions of dollars are anticipated to be allocated to new investments in the clean tech economy.
$1.5 billion in competitive awards will go to support 20 large-scale solar, wind and energy storage projects across upstate New York. These investments will add over 1,650 megawatts of capacity and generate over 3,800,000 megawatt-hours of renewable energy annually.
The new investments build upon a US$250 million commitment to electric vehicle infrastructure by the New York Power Authority’s EVolve program, $3.5 billion in private investment in distributed solar driven by NYSERDA’s NY-Sun program, and NY Green Bank transactions mobilizing nearly $1.75 billion in private capital for clean energy projects.
The phrase, deliberately reminiscent of Roosevelt’s New Deal response to the Great Depression, has been in contemporary circulation for around a decade this century. It’s been taken up more recently, for one, by freshman congresswoman Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez after the 2018 mid-term elections, along with a number of her fellow congresspeople. Mr. Cuomo announced a commitment to it for the State in an announcement last December.
Earlier, in mid-December, the New York Power Authority (NYPA) announced it will invest $250 million over the next five years to “accelerate the flexibility” of the electric grid to give New Yorkers greater access to renewable energy resources such as wind and solar power. The Governor’s office explains that this term refers to the integration of storage: “Storage technology compensates for the intermittent production of electricity from wind and solar power sources, making it possible for this variable energy to be captured for use during peak demand periods.” New York’s Public Service Commission also authorized a $310 million market acceleration bridge incentive to be administered by the New York State Energy Research and Development Agency (NYSERDA), in addition to $40 million announced in November for pairing storage with PV projects. The Commission also directed NYSERDA to file a market acceleration bridge incentive implementation plan and required the State’s six major electric utilities to hold competitive procurements for 350 MW of bulk-sited energy storage systems.