It turns out that what New York needed to harness wind power was Connecticut, as the 12-turbine South Fork Wind project off of New London inches closer to completion.
The 300-foot structures will soon stand as both monument to and practical element of our shift towards renewable energy sources, which are superior to our dirty energy past in almost every way: cleaner, less dependent on imports, un-depletable and without generating the byproducts that threaten to fully destroy our environment and our own viability with it.
Where these technologies falter a little is on cost; while the price tags have come down dramatically as the technology itself has improved, the capital needed to build something like a wind farm or a hydroelectric plant are still significant and can potentially prove prohibitive. It’s hard for it to compete head-to-head with already-operational, relatively cheap energy production from sources like natural gas.
Not a month ago, one of the companies behind the South Fork Wind development announced a surprise cancellation of two wind farms off the coast of New Jersey over escalating costs, driven in part by higher interest rates and inflation. An ambitious project to repurpose the underutilized South Brooklyn Marine Terminal to support an offshore wind farm is on life support after the state’s Public Service Commission declined to increase subsidies for it and other wind and solar projects.
The state must, of course, protect the people’s purse, and it’s not the public’s responsibility to ensure robust profits for private developers. Yet we have to be aware of the simple reality that Albany does not possess the operational and technical capacity to build out these projects itself, and if companies pull out of contracts, that’s that.
We simply don’t get the wind, solar, hydroelectric and nuclear — yes, it’s not quite as clean as the others, but it is very robust and energy-efficient and the waste can be much better managed than the greenhouse gases spewing into the atmosphere — that it needs to fulfill its longer-term energy goals.
Is New York going to solve the global climate change cataclysm? No. It requires the concerted efforts of every global leader to even have a hope of a resolution. Yet that starts with pressure and action from the local level, particularly among states with large energy consumption, like New York. It’s also just better for New Yorkers, who will be faced with fewer energy price shocks as the supply is diversified and strengthened. Plus, it’s also just embarrassing to be getting trounced on this by Texas.
That requires leadership, both by Gov. Hochul and President Biden, who is set to miss the COP28 climate summit, starting this week. He can be forgiven for that though after signing the transformative Inflation Reduction Act, which featured some $369 billion in tax breaks and subsidies for clean energy development. That’s the kind of funding and commitment necessary if we’re going to actually reach the point of having renewables as a workable replacement to our current energy production sphere.
This is a monumental achievement that Donald Trump, by the way, has already pledged to totally reverse, instead maximizing fossil fuel production. Taking that tack is the path of dirtier air, less stable energy and, eventually, total disaster.
from New York Daily News https://ift.tt/frsu5Iw