SteveLacksFocus

At 7:50 Monday evening, electricity on Long Island cost $814 a megawatt-hour. In New York City it cost under $90. The rest of the state averaged about $40 for the day. Demand on the Island was ordinary, about 2,300 megawatts and right on NYISO’s forecast. The weather was mild. No oil burned anywhere in the state. What changed at 7:45 was a cable. The Neptune line from New Jersey, which can carry 660 megawatts, dropped to 491 and then to 323. It stayed there for ten minutes, then came back. On a normal night, the Island would have covered that loss from its other connections. But the Cross Sound Cable to Connecticut has been out for maintenance since Oct. 19. One of the two 138 kV circuits between Shore Road and Lake Success in Nassau, the lines that carry power from the Westchester cable into the rest of the county, has been out since Sept. 22. Its twin was the only path left, and it hit its limit. About $760 of Long Island’s $814 price was congestion: power available, wires full. The Island has been here before, and worse. Two months ago, on Aug. 27, Neptune went to zero for two hours and the price reached $491. That afternoon the Island resorted to the worst case scenario of burning oil: all ten Holtsville turbines in Suffolk, kerosene units built in 1974 and 1975, started up and ran as high as 414 megawatts. Long Island has looked for a fix since the 1970s. LILCO proposed two reactors at Jamesport in 1973; Washington issued permits but the state siting board voted for coal instead after the Three Mile Island affair. Neither was built. Shoreham was finished and closed in 1989 before it ran commercially, about $6 billion that Island customers paid. Instead of firm, on-island capacity, cable was built: Y-50 under the Sound in 1978, Y-49 in 1991, the Cross Sound Cable in 2003, Neptune in 2007. Each one became something the Island depends on, so each outage now shows up as a price. The plants that cover for those cables are getting old, and the state has scheduled some of them to go. Two-thirds of the fuel-burning capacity in Nassau and Suffolk was built before 1980. The state’s 2019 peaker rule tightened emissions limits on the oldest turbines. A 2023 law orders the Power Authority to stop running its small gas plants, including the 47-megawatt Brentwood unit, by the end of 2030 unless they are needed for reliability. Last December the Public Service Commission found a Long Island shortfall of up to 116 megawatts starting in 2027 and up to 254 megawatts by 2030, driven by the retirement of the Pinelawn and Far Rockaway turbines. LIPA’s answer was to pay the Far Rockaway turbines to stay. The next cable is Propel NY: three new 345 kV lines under the Sound and 58 miles of underground line in Nassau, chosen in 2023 for $3.26 billion. It is still in permitting and due in May 2030. NYISO’s draft reliability study for this year says that without it, Long Island falls short in 2030. The retirements and the cable are scheduled for the same year. New York used 385 GWh of electricity. Demand peaked at 17.8 GW at 6 PM. At that hour: gas 40%, hydro 22%, nuclear 19%, all imports 16%, wind 3%, all solar (rooftop included) 0%. Over the full day: gas 36%, nuclear 21%, hydro 18%, all imports 13%, all solar (rooftop included) 7%, wind 5%. Solar’s best hour covered 26% of the state’s power; solar was done for the day by 6 PM. NYC wholesale prices topped out around $67/MWh (hourly average).