Plans to build a milk-processing facility in Monroe County were announced last year to great fanfare but with few details on how such an energy-intensive operation could fit within Albany’s strict climate rules poised to hit homes and businesses. The answer: it won’t have to.

The Coca-Cola Company announced it would build a new $650 million plant in Webster, just outside Rochester, and hire 250 people for its fairlife™ product line. Described by Governor Hochul as “the largest dairy production facility in the Northeast,” the plant expects to take in five to six million gallons of milk per day from farms across a large swath of upstate (and collect a significant amount of state and local incentives for its trouble).

Processing that much milk uses considerable energy, and the plant needs boilers powered either by electricity or a combustible fuel (such as natural gas).

Company officials found that the project couldn’t be operated using electricity alone: the local utility, Rochester Gas & Electric (RG&E), expects to serve 15 megawatts of electric load (enough to power roughly 50,000 homes) but only after $27 million in electric infrastructure upgrades (financed in part by New York state taxpayers). Yet each of the three planned boilers would need 26 megawatts of electricity, which along with other equipment would push the site’s total energy need above 90 megawatts. That’s six times the load RG&E plans to serve and would require even more upgrades to nearby grid infrastructure.

“Because these upgrades would have delayed the provision of energy needed by the facility and increased the costs of that provision,” the state Public Service Commission wrote in a September order, “they would have made it much less likely for Fairlife to locate in New York.”

Coca-Cola instead needs natural gas to run the plant, which will be supplied by an 8” pipeline running about 1.4 miles.

Plans to burn that much gas would put a less-celebrated project on a collision course with New York’s 2019 Climate Leadership and Community Protection Act (CLCPA), which requires the state to, among other things, drastically cut its greenhouse gas emissions by about one-quarter over the next six years.

State agencies must decide whether projects are “inconsistent with or will interfere with” the state’s greenhouse gas goals, and the PSC has had no qualms with invoking CLCPA as a weapon against proposals to improve gas availability or reliability.

Yet in the case of a politically favored project like fairlife, access to natural gas is being treated as a given.

RG&E used some creative language in its PSC filings, saying the fairlife project would use “100% renewable sources for the portion of their operation that is run using electric”—that is, when it isn’t using gas. It’s noteworthy that, even in a region of upstate where the overwhelming majority of electricity already comes from carbon-free sources (hydro and nuclear), and despite the state-run hydroelectric dams and Canadian imports pushing down wholesale electricity prices, a large manufacturer like fairlife is still turning to combustion over electrification.

CLCPA since the ink dried has been a sword hanging over would-be developers who face uncertainty about the cost or feasibility of projects. The state Department of Environmental Conservation blew a January 1, 2024 deadline to issue CLCPA regulations, which would include the list of things set to be banned in coming years, such as replacement gas stoves and water heaters. Significant uncertainty remains around fuel and electricity costs as the state has been slow to adopt proposed “cap and invest” rules that would significantly raise prices across the economy.

The probability of New York reaching its greenhouse gas goals is effectively zero, but rather than meaningfully re-evaluate their approach which has maximized uncertainty and chilled investment, officials keep letting the perfect be the enemy of the good: blocking new, more efficient natural gas power plants from opening and preventing natural gas pipelines that would boost reliability and allow more customers to tie into the distribution system.

They instead add continually to two equally problematic lists of projects: those scuttled because of CLCPA, and those getting the all-clear from high places to proceed despite it.