On Tuesday, February 13, Citizens for Local Power hosted an excellent public educational forum “Battery Storage, Climate and the Grid: The Proposed Lincoln Park Project n Context”.
With a proposal on the table to build a power plant in the Town of Ulster that combines a 20-megawatt gas-fired plant with battery storage, the group brought together a panel of experts that included: Jen Metzger, Director, Citizens for Local Power (moderator) Energy Storage 101: What We All Need to Know with Dr. William Acker Executive Director, New York Battery and Storage Technology Consortium (NY-BEST); Karl Rabago, Executive Director, Pace Energy & Climate Center and Co-Director of the Northeast Solar Energy Market Coalition and, Emissions Impacts of the Proposed Lincoln Park Project with Evelyn Wright, Energy Economist, Sustainable Energy Economics, and member of Citizens for Local Power.
Video made by The Kingston News, brought to you by KingstonCitizens.org
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Because Evelyn Wright’s presentation spoke directly to the Lincoln Park project emissions impact, we will start here and extract some of the key points that she made that is new information to us and important for our community to have.
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Emissions Impacts of the Proposed Lincoln Park Project with Evelyn Wright, Energy Economist, Sustainable Energy Economics, and member of Citizens for Local Power
1:38 – 2:07
GLIDEPATH MISREPRESENTED ITS GAS EMISSIONS NUMBERS. GlidePath said this week that emission rate / diesel emissions was to be 800-850 lbs/MWH and not 195 which is the number they gave us at their open house meeting in the Town of Ulster on January 17th. “I told them that I thought 195 was impossible, and last week they called to confirm me that they had made a mistake in their spread sheet. Sorry.”
5:31 – 6:51
TOTAL YEARLY EMISSIONS OF LINCOLN PARK PROJECT EQUAL TO ALL HOUSEHOLDS IN THE TOWN OF ULSTER OR 1.5% OF ALL OF ULSTER COUNTY’S EMISSIONS. The total emissions for the Lincoln Park project during the course of the year is 30,272 metric tons CO2 equivalent, about equal to the annual emissions from all households in the Town of Ulster, or 1.5% of all Ulster County emissions.
7:03 – 11:04
RENEWABLES DON’T REQUIRE FOSSIL FUEL FOR BACK-UP. “GlidePath is making the argument that this project is supporting clean energy and it supports renewables….I wanted to break that down for you, because I think that’s something we’re going to hear GlidePath say over and over, ‘Well, if you’re going to have renewenables you’ve got to have fossils to back them up.’ That’s not true here.”
12:01 – 13:18
IF OUR AREA DOESN’T NEED PEAK CAPACITY, WHY DID GLIDEPATH CHOOSE ULSTER FOR IT’S PROJECT? “We know that the peak load in this region is declining. so we don’t need this peak capacity here. Our air quality has been improving to the point where in the last several years, we haven’t had any unhealthy air quality days at all. This is not true downstate where they really do need this additional peak energy. It’s much harder to get your air permits to build a facility like this in places that the EPA has designated bad air quality….we live in a remarkably clean place but that is literally why they are proposing this project here because they think they can get the permits more easily here because our air has room for pollution in it.”
13:21 – 15:58
GLIDEPATH IS A STORAGE AND RENEWABLE ENERGY COMPANY. THEY’VE NEVER BUILT A FOSSIL PROJECT BEFORE. “Glidepath has never built a project like this before. They are a storage and renewables company…I don’t know how they convinced themselves this was a great thing for them to do in order to get into the NYS market, because they have not built a fossil project before.”
VIDEO #2
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45:01 – 47:19
ENERGY STORAGE IS CHEAPER THAN A “PEAKER”. “Energy storage is already cheaper than a Peaker…ths project (Lincoln Park) is about making a Peaker cheaper with storage but head to head, storage wins standing on its own and, if we continue to develop and use storage wisely, we can get it down to the range where it starts competing with combined natural gas and we can really do something about carbon emissions.”
VIDEO #3
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45:28 – 46:01
“DOES ANYONE HAVE ANY IDEA IF THIS PLANT WILL MAKE NOISE?” “I heard Peter Rood (principal of GlidePath) say if he were a neighbor, his biggest concern would be the noise….these things are loud.”