The Fossil Fuel End Game: A Frontline Vision to Retire NYC's Peaker Plants by 2030
The new report, The Fossil Fuel End Game: A Frontline Vision to Retire New York City's Peaker Plants by 2030, prepared by Strategen on behalf of the PEAK Coalition, is the first detailed strategic and policy road map to retire and replace an entire city’s fossil-fuel peaker plants.
The PEAK Coalition includes New York City Environmental Justice Alliance (NYC-EJA), UPROSE, THE POINT CDC, New York Lawyers for the Public Interest (NYLPI), and Clean Energy Group (CEG).
The report lays out a technically feasible strategy to replace about half of the existing fleet of polluting peaker plants in New York City with a combination of offshore wind, distributed solar, energy efficiency, and battery storage by 2025. The remaining peaker plants could be reliably and cost-effectively replaced with the same mix of resources by 2030. While the plan calls for major investments in new resources, most of these new resources are already required by the state’s law to address the climate crisis, the Climate Leadership and Community Protection Act (CLCPA).
The report lays out a plan for New York City focused on local, distributed solutions. This decentralized approach creates a more resilient power system than the current grid, which depends on centralized fossil-fuel power plants. Centralized grids have failed time and time again when stressed by extreme events, as seen most recently in the collapse of the Texas power system when gas peaker plants failed. The New York City roadmap presents an equitable and reliable replacement strategy — using a combination of distributed and community resources that do not depend solely on a centralized system of fossil-fuel power plants with single points of predictable failure and collapse.
The report also highlights the alarming economic, environmental, and social costs of New York City’s existing peaker plants, finding:
Environmental justice communities in New York City bear an inequitable burden of pollution and negative health impacts from fossil fuel power plants; 750,000 people in New York City live within one mile of a peaker plant; 78% of these people are either low-income or people of color.
The city’s aging and inefficient peakers plants are major contributors to air pollution, accounting for as much as 94% percent of the state’s nitrogen oxide (NOx) emissions on high-ozone days. Retirement of the city’s peakers would result in annual emissions reductions of 2.66 million tons of carbon dioxide (CO2), 1,655 tons of NOx, and 171 tons of sulfur dioxide (SO2).
Electricity from peaker plants in New York City is up to 1,300% more expensive than the average cost of electricity in the rest of the state. Public and private owners of these seldom-used power plants received more than $4.5 billion in revenue to operate over a ten-year period. The proposed retirement and replacement plan could save ratepayers $1 billion in energy costs by 2035. Reduced environmental and health impacts from avoided emissions could create additional savings of more than $1 billion by 2035.