20^th century business executives wanted the lowest energy costs when siting new, large energy intensive operations to maximize their profits.  21^st century leaders are equally interested in how their companies are marketed, and nothing sells better than “being green,” as seen by the pledges by every major corporation to maximize their use of renewable energy.  Power generated at Niagara Falls meets both of these criteria.

The New York Power Authority (NYPA) controls the distribution of the 2.6 million kilowatts of clean energy produced annually at the Niagara Power Project.  As a public entity, it is involved in economic development within the state, using a dedicated hydropower for economic development allotment for the regions closest to its two major hydropower projects to attract private investment and jobs.  The allotment from the Niagara Power Project is for eligible customers within a 30-mile radius of the facility, which includes Niagara County and part of Erie County including the City of Buffalo.  

Despite the massive production of energy from the Niagara River (as well as from the St. Lawrence River at NYPA’s St. Lawrence-Franklin D. Roosevelt Power Project), it is a small percentage of the state’s energy usage.  Both add to the renewable energy totals included in the tallies by agencies like the Environmental Protection Agency.  It places New York State well above the national average in the percentage of in-state electricity produced that comes from carbon-free sources like wind, solar, geothermal, and hydropower, and our state’s energy mix (and lower average usage) saves New York residents about 11% in electric costs compared to the national average.

New York passed the landmark Climate Leadership and Community Protection Act (CLCPA) in 2019. It requires the state to reduce economy-wide greenhouse gas emissions 40 percent by 2030 and no less than 85 percent by 2050 from 1990 levels.  These reductions depend on a transition of the building and transportation sectors away from fossil fuel energy sources.  As we move to “electrify everything” and move to more efficient heat pumps and electric vehicles, the electric supply needs to follow along and decarbonize.  The CLCPA mandates that 70% of the State’s electricity will be generated by renewable energy by 2030.

Reports indicate that the state will fail to meet the 70% renewable energy threshold due to a combination of factors such as the higher investment costs and supply chain issues started by the Covid pandemic as well as unanticipated increases in energy usage from new sources like data centers and cryptocurrency mining.  Even though State officials like to classify the delay as missing a milestone versus missing the final target, making it sound like just another goal gives decision makers the wiggle room they need to kick the can further down the road whenever convenient.

NYPA will soon be kicking off a series of public hearings across the state on their plans to build renewable energy projects.  The first, to be held at the Niagara Power Vista in Lewiston on November 7^th at a location that likely attracts more large businesses to the Buffalo Niagara region than all of the scattered Industrial Development Agencies combined.   There’s a competitive advantage for the state to be ahead of the rest of the country in the transition to cleaner energy, so it is important that this multi-year strategic plan includes as quick a transition as possible including meeting the 2030 mandated 70% renewables target.  Here are two possibilities to consider.

• The New York State Energy Research and Development Agency (NYSERDA) was tasked to do a Great Lakes Wind Energy Feasibility Study in 2020.  The results of the study were released in December 2022 and showed that “average annual wind speeds in the Great Lakes are on par with the mid-Atlantic regions where offshore wind is proliferating “and that “Great Lakes Wind is technically feasible and is potentially economically feasible in some locations of the Great Lakes.” The report did not make any recommendation to proceed with either a proposal for a pilot project or to bid out for selected areas for wind development as is done offshore in the Atlantic Ocean.  Without a signal from the state, Erie County lawmakers recently re-floated a proposal that was tabled in 2019 to ban offshore wind in Lake Erie.  NYSERDA needs to allow the market to determine the feasibility of such projects in the Great Lakes, subject to the same environmental safeguards the new habitat building South Fork turbine project off the coast of Long Island comply with. 
• NYSERDA already has in place an under-promoted Build-Ready Program that provides financing and other incentives for projects on underutilized lands including landfills, brownfields, parking lots, abandoned or former commercial/industrial sites, and dormant electric generating sites.  Their 2023 annual progress report noted “two promising sites in Niagara County” (which appears to be related to a recent rezoning proposal for the Love Canal site).  Even without these incentives, other smaller renewable projects on underutilized sites continue to come on line, like the Broadway Solar Farm that was built on the site of the old Depew landfill.

This Build-Ready program would also be ideal on the region’s largest brownfield, the former Huntley Generating Station (lead image).  Local advocates, including the Clean Air Coalition of WNY, are pushing to have the State change their preferred development plans for the site from a data center hub to site a large-scale solar farm.  Previously engaged in the efforts protect the nearby residents from the soot and chemical pollution coming from the site, the Clean Air advocates are working hard to protect the community from the noise pollution that plagues communities near data centers.  As noted earlier, one of the factors in likely missing the CLPCPA’s 70% renewable energy mandate by 2030 is the data center and turning this former large-scale energy producing location into an intensive energy use hub by state planners is short-sighted.

For the naysayers who say that this can only be done in the dreamworld of the environmental community, there is an example of another closed coal power plant is close to Buffalo converted to renewable electric generation.  The retired Nanticoke Generating Station in Ontario (only 90 minutes away from the Peace Bridge) was revitalized in 2016 by construction of a solar park on a majority of the property.  Using the site for a solar park made sense as, like at the Huntley site, use of the existing interconnection to the electric grid from the closed plant saved both time and money for the project.   

It’s time for the State to step up their game on marketing brownfields and other unusable sites while there’s still time to meet both the 2030 70% renewable electricity mandate as well as the final target of decarbonizing the electric grid by 2050.  Governor Hochul likes to say that New York leads the nation in the transition to cleaner forms of energy.  Now is the time for her to lead the State through this transition. That begins with directing the plans by her administrators at NYPA and NYSERDA.   As a former Hamburg resident and representative, she would be very familiar with our most visible brownfield renewable energy project, the Steel Winds and Steel Sun project built on the old Bethlehem Steel site in Lackawanna, making it easy to sell the benefits and the compatibility of projects like this to communities throughout the State.