There’s a mind-boggling gap in NY’s plan for a clean electric grid. ‘We are so far behind’

Ithaca, N.Y. – New York has a mandate to stop burning fossil fuels for electricity by 2040. But there is a big problem to solve first.

It’s not just that acres and acres of solar and wind farms have yet to be developed. That’s a tough slog, but we know how to build solar and wind farms.

The greater uncertainty is this: What technology will grid operators turn to when solar and wind fall short?

Maybe it will be advanced nuclear reactors. Or hydrogen-burning power plants. Nobody knows for sure. Operators will need some emission-free power source they can turn on and off at will.

At Cornell University, Professor Lindsay Anderson and fellow researchers have been studying this problem. Given the specific layout of New York’s electric grid, they asked, how much of this new power source would be needed in addition to all the solar and wind?

A staggering amount, it turns out.

Just 15 years from now, the electric grid will need about 40 gigawatts of new generating capacity that can be activated regardless of wind speeds, cloud cover or other weather conditions, according to Anderson’s research.

How much is that? It’s roughly equal to the total capacity of all of New York’s current power plants – nuclear, natural gas, hydro, wind, all of it.

You read that right. To back up the massive quantities of solar and wind power that will provide most of our future electricity, the state power grid will need some new, mystery resource equal in size to the entire generating fleet of today.

Anderson knows that’s not easy to hear.

“That’s the thing, right?’’ she said. “Where people are going to start to worry is (to) say, ‘Okay, wait, so you’re telling us that we’re going to spend all this money building out all this wind and solar and batteries -- AND we have to put in 40 gigawatts of this?”

But there will have to be a backup.

To estimate the need, Anderson’s team simulated operation of a zero-emission power system without a dispatchable source of backup power. During the coldest and hottest months of the year, the results were scary blackouts.

Blackouts big enough to put half of New York City in the dark, for example. Blackouts that could last a month in some parts of the state.

Those nightmares won’t happen, Anderson is quick to point out. But they show the extent of the resources required to prevent them, resources that do not currently exist.

“I am 100% behind decarbonizing,’’ she said. “I just want to make sure that we understand what we actually need to make it work.’’

One obvious solution is to slow down the retirement of natural gas power plants that currently switch on whenever the grid lacks sufficient power. Anderson’s next study is looking at whether New York could meet most of its carbon reduction goals while hanging on to some fossil fuel generators.

Testing a ‘digital twin’

Anderson chairs Cornell’s department of biological and environmental engineering. She has a PhD in applied math and a master’s degree in engineering.

For the past decade, she has worked with a shifting assortment of doctoral candidates and other graduate students in her eponymous Anderson Lab, housed in a large room full of cubicles and computers. They examine issues related to the growing importance of renewable energy.

Following the publication of research estimating the need for new dispatchable power sources, Anderson has been flooded with speaking requests in the past year, from industry groups, conference organizers and the state Public Service Commission, among others.

“I feel like people are seeing me sort of as an objective third party,’’ she said.

Thanks to the Anderson Lab, we can look 15 years into the future and test out the zero-emission electric grid that New York state has committed to build.

Impelled by a 2019 law, state officials have set ambitious mandates to reduce carbon emissions to fight climate change: The electric system must be carbon-free by 2040; new cars must be electric beginning in 2035; new homes must be heated by electricity beginning in 2026; all new buildings will be electric as of 2029.

Taking carbon out of the electric system is the key, because that paves the way for lowered emissions from transportation and buildings too. But sweeping electrification, in turn, puts added pressure on the electric system.

The Anderson Lab is looking at the physics of how all that will work. To do so, they built an elaborately detailed computer model – a “digital twin’' -- of New York’s electric grid.

That level of detail sets their work apart. Many of the studies that look at phasing in renewable energy pretend that the electric grid is a single pool of electrons that flow from point to point without constraint. It‘s known as the “copper plate’’ assumption.

In reality, the New York electric grid is a complex, lopsided network that has been stitched together piece by piece over a century. There are limits on how much electric current can move from one area to another.

The “digital twin” put together by Anderson’s team mimics how power flows amid changing conditions across all 94 major transmission lines. They used a year’s worth of real operating data from the New York Independent System Operator, which runs the grid, to validate the model’s accuracy.

The lead researcher who put the digital twin together, Cornell PhD Vivienne Liu, now works at the Grid Planning and Analysis Center of the federal government’s National Renewable Energy Lab.

To test a zero-emission grid, the Anderson Lab researchers removed all the fossil fuel generators from their “digital twin’' and replaced them with wind, solar and battery power. The renewable energy plants were integrated into the grid at locations identified in government studies of wind and solar resources.

Then they put the electric grid through 22 years of real weather. Hour by hour, they simulated grid operations using weather data from 120 locations around the state.

Real weather data is critical, Anderson said.

In an energy system dominated by renewables, the weather creates a double whammy. Not only does temperature determine how much electricity people use, but weather will be the key factor in how much renewable power is available. Rain and snow affect hydro output. Cloud cover affects solar. And so on.

The unique value of their recent research is its realistic detail, said Kevin Lanahan, a spokesman for NYISO, the grid operator.

“The incorporation of the weather data and the extreme weather events -- that data she’s using in the modeling is especially helpful,’’ Lanahan said.

NYISO officials consult Anderson’s research when developing some of their long-range planning documents, in addition to doing their own studies. Anderson also serves on the NYISO’s environmental advisory council.

Measuring ‘dark matter’

Here’s a nasty acronym that you might as well get familiar with: DEFR.

It stands for “dispatchable emission-free resource.” It’s a place-holder phrase referring to a carbon-free generating plant that can be turned on and off as needed. It’s pronounced DEE-fur.

Today, dispatchable power is provided mostly by natural gas power plants. Energy planners hope to replace them with something that does not produce greenhouse gases. Nobody knows what that will be.

“They’ve come up with a name for something that they don’t know what it is, but their modeling shows that they need something. It kind of seems like dark matter in the universe,’’ said environmentalist Tim Judson, executive director of the Nuclear Information and Referral Service.

When the state’s Climate Action Council issued their December 2022 report on how the state will eliminate greenhouse gases from the grid by 2040, they estimated a need for 18 to 23 gigawatts of DEFRs. Anderson’s study concluded that the estimate should be roughly doubled, to 37 to 40 GW.

In its most recent forecast, the NYSIO estimated a need for at least 20 GW of DEFRs, and as much as 40 GW, by the year 2040.

Anderson Lab researchers estimated the need for DEFRs by operating the grid without them and measuring the blackouts that resulted. There were doozies, especially during winter when the grid is expected to face the highest demand.

The biggest winter blackouts in Long Island, for example, shut off the lights on nearly 90% of customers. Some of the predicted blackouts in the lower Hudson Valley lasted as long as a month.

None of that is likely to happen in real life, Anderson said. But the simulation shows the enormous gap to fill.

“Sometimes you get the initial reaction that it’s really scary,’’ Anderson said. “Because it looks like … we’re going to have sweeping blackouts, right? For long times. Big blackouts. Like, Downstate’s in trouble. And then I always try to remind people that that is what would happen if we actually didn’t bother with the DEFRs.”

The need stems from two main vulnerabilities, Anderson said.

First, there will be lulls when the wind dies down for days on end and the skies cloud over, resulting in power shortages that exceed the current ability of batteries to compensate. Second, there will be periods when the state has plenty of renewable energy but not enough transmission capacity to get it where it’s needed.

There would even be times when Upstate produced too much renewable energy, which must be disconnected to keep from overloading the grid, even as blackouts rolled across Downstate due to bottled up transmission lines.

Most of those problems are likely to occur in the coldest part of winter and the hottest part of summer, when demand for electricity will surge to peak levels. And the region most vulnerable to blackouts would be Downstate, where communities with massive electricity needs sit at the end of transmission lines from Upstate that are often overloaded.

So what might a DEFR be?

Some experts propose converting power plants to burn hydrogen rather than natural gas. Or hydrogen could be used in fuel cells, which rely on chemical reactions rather than combustion to make electricity.

Others promote the idea of sequestering the carbon emissions from gas plants underground. Or burning “renewable” methane recovered from landfills and other sources.

Recently, New York officials have expressed interest in small advanced nuclear plants, which are under development by various companies. State energy planners are developing a “roadmap’' that should be released early next year detailing how new nuclear technology might be encouraged.

None of the possible technologies is available yet at a commercial scale. Which will emerge?

“That’s the million-dollar question,’’ Lanahan said.

‘Expensive and untested’

New York is long overdue to identify DEFR technologies and to support their development, said Gavin Donohue, executive director of the Independent Power Producers of New York, a trade group representing power plant owners.

IPPNY formally asked the Public Service Commission three years ago to decide what it will accept as “zero-emission’' generating plants. The PSC is still mulling that over in a regulatory proceeding.

“The timely development of fully dispatchable zero emitting resources is crucial to maintain reliability as the economy electrifies and reliance on intermittent renewable and duration limited resources increases,’’ the group wrote.

But some environmentalists argue against a rush to develop DEFRs, saying it could distract from building wind and solar resources and could lead state officials to hastily subsidize unproven technology such as hydrogen combustion.

Following a technical presentation to the state Public Service Commission last year by Anderson and a NYISO planning director, representatives from Sierra Club and Earthjustice submitted rebuttal comments claiming that NYISO’s forecast of the need for DEFRs was “alarmist.” (The forecast presented by NYISO that day was about 25% lower than the Anderson Lab’s estimate.)

The critics said the state should focus on proven techniques such as importing power from out of state, improving transmission, and encouraging demand response programs under which customers cut their power consumption during peak periods.

“Rushing to deploy expensive and untested DEFRs risks committing New York to flawed technologies, as it is unclear at the present time which technologies will emerge as commercially scalable and cost effective,’’ they wrote.

It’s a complicated issue, in part because there are strategies other than adding power plants to help reduce demand for electricity during peak periods.

Improvements in meter technology, for example, will enable residential customers to respond during power shortages by reducing their demand, as some commercial and industrial customers do already. Likewise, grid operators could one day draw power from electric vehicle batteries during peak periods.

Those sorts of customer-based responses could yield significant results, Anderson said. They are difficult to model, but she said her lab may be able to study their potential impact at some point.

‘What we’re going to have to do’

For now, the Anderson Lab is looking at what it would mean to back off of New York’s zero emissions-by-2040 goal just a smidge. What if the state delayed shutting down a few of the natural gas plants as officials figure out the DEFR problem?

Would keeping a few targeted gas plants online still enable the state to hit 80% or 90% of the planned reductions in air emissions?

“I think that’s what we’re going to have to do, because we don’t know what the DEFRs are yet, right?” Anderson said. “I know people are super-excited about nuclear power, but that takes a long time to build.’’

DEFRs aside, the path to a zero-emission grid is almost certainly more difficult than even Anderson’s research would indicate. Although her study describes the steep challenge of maintaining reliability on a zero-emission grid, in other respects her report is based on extremely optimistic assumptions.

The study assumes, for example, that all the wind and solar power anticipated by the Climate Action Council actually gets built. Cost is not considered. Land scarcity is not a factor. Local siting issues are no object.

In reality, siting battles and other issues have stalled many large wind and solar projects for years. And as inflation drives up the capital costs of renewable energy, Gov. Kathy Hochul is under mounting pressure from business and consumer groups to keep the cost of the energy transition under control.

Because of those barriers, there is a vast gap between New York’s renewable energy capacity today and what would be needed to retire all the fossil fuel plants. Developers would have to build about 10 times the wind and solar power that exists now.

“It’s a huge problem, and we are so far behind,’’ Anderson said.

For the DEFR study, Anderson’s team assumed that roughly 77 gigawatts of utility-scale wind and solar would be available. At the beginning of this year, the state had 2.7 GW operating, according to the NYISO. Anderson also assumed 13.6 GW of rooftop solar, plus roughly 20 GW of 8-hour battery storage. The study anticipated that existing hydro and nuclear plants would continue to operate at current capacity.

Building enough renewable energy to make the electric system zero-emission will be a daunting task, Anderson said, but a necessary one.

Because of the urgent need to limit climate change, state officials are right to press for a transformation of the energy system, she said.

“It’s a really hard problem,’’ she said. “We have to be pushing on all fronts all the time, because we need to solve it, too. It’s a legitimate, important ambition.”

Staff writer Tim Knauss can be reached at: email | Twitter | 315-470-3023.