Richard Ellenbogen was an early adopter of renewable and lower-emission combustion technology, deploying them at both his home and his business in Westchester County. Ellenbogen, a Cornell-trained electrical engineer, explains below how his personal experience led him to become one of the leading critics of the cost and feasibility of New York’s ambitious energy policy. 

I have been analyzing the numbers coming out of Albany regarding the Climate Leadership and Community Protection Act (CLCPA), New York’s plan to drastically reduce the use of fossil fuels, for over five years now.  

I am not anti-renewable and I am not a climate denier. What I am is an engineer that lives by numbers. The numbers underpinning the CLCPA—namely the belief that New York can replace most of its natural gas-fired electricity generation with renewables in the next six or even nine years—are a fantasy.

• New York is letting the perfect be the enemy of the good, prohibiting or frustrating viable solutions that could reduce emissions. 

• Instead, New York is relying on older, less efficient power plants, in hopes that wind and solar—built in more rural areas or offshore—can someday replace them. 

• Even if New York were to build the wind, solar and battery backup necessary to keep the lights on without fossil fuels, the storage requirements, either onsite or grid-based, would be cost-prohibitive. 

State Comptroller Tom DiNapoli in July described “inadequate planning, monitoring and assessment of risks and challenges” by state energy officials. That’s just the tip of the iceberg. 

Greener Than The Grid 

I was an early adopter of emerging energy technologies. My home, planned in 1999 and constructed from 2002 to 2004, has heat pumps, radiant heat and solar. I purchased a Tesla in 2017. When the car is charging and the heat pumps are operating, the load can approach 40 kilowatts. Right now, that’s the exception for typical homes, but state officials expect to make this the norm.

Building electrification combined with widespread use of electric vehicles presents major challenges at multiple levels: the state, as a whole, will need much more electricity; utilities will need to deliver more electricity within their service area; and the increased customer demand must be served at the neighborhood level. 

My factory is 16 miles from Times Square, in New Rochelle, a city of 80,000. My company, Allied Converters, manufactures food packaging for large bakeries and supermarket chains. The machinery is thermally intensive and uses large amounts of electricity.  

In 2002, I installed the first microturbine-based Combined Heat and Power (CHP) system in the Con Ed service area. The technology was so new that it took Con Ed more than two years to approve it. The CHP system generates electricity by burning natural gas to turn a turbine. Waste heat is recovered either to heat the building in the winter, or to be sent to absorption chillers to cool the building in the summer. The chillers use a lithium bromide solution plus the heat from the generator to make chilled water. It allows us to recover 70 to 75 percent of the energy content of the fuel. 

No refrigerants and no electricity are used for cooling aside from the water pumps. I note this because refrigerants have a greenhouse gas (GHG) footprint significantly larger than natural gas and hundreds if not thousands of times larger than carbon dioxide.  

Most of downstate’s electricity comes from burning natural gas. New York’s single-cycle gas generating plants are in the neighborhood of 30 to 35 percent efficient. Newer combined-cycle plants are in the range of 55 to 60 percent efficient. For both, about 7 percent of energy produced is lost as heat in the transmission lines, a loss we avoid by generating electricity onsite. 

Contrast that with New York’s plan to replace gas and oil furnaces at homes and businesses with electric heat pumps, which will—at least for the foreseeable future—require more electricity generation from fossil fuels, farther away from where the electricity is needed (and therefore more line losses). 

In 2007, I installed the first commercial-scale solar array in New Rochelle. We were given a building permit and then it was rescinded after the panels were on the roof because the building department didn’t understand their own regulations for solar arrays and it had to be approved by the planning board first. A year later, I had to battle Con Ed to operate the technologies together without paying export fees at the same rate required of Indian Point, the 2-gigawatt nuclear plant that used the entire transmission and distribution system whereas any energy exported by our solar array got used on our block. We were successful and became the first facility in New York with multiple sources of grid-connected high efficiency generation, but the previously mentioned issues are the pitfalls of being an early adopter. 

More information about my company’s focus on sustainability is available here in this 2015 presentation.

We added a Reactive Power Mitigation System in November 2007 and in conjunction with the onsite generation, reduced our load on the utility by 80 percent. The building operates with an average power factor of 0.999 while the building demand is above 15 KW, meaning that no excess work must be done by the utility to deliver energy to the factory, and from the grid’s perspective, that makes the factory an ideal load. Along with the reactive power system, we collect data on all electric parameters in the building. It has now been collecting data four times per minute for 17 years, almost 1.9 million data points every year, 31 million data points in total.

This massive amount of data, along with my training as an electrical engineer, has formed my frame of reference regarding the CLCPA. Renewable generation has a place in the energy mix but it cannot be used as the backbone of the utility system. Renewables are a tool and when you misuse a tool, bad things will happen. When you need a hammer, you don’t use a screwdriver, but that is essentially what the state is trying to do with renewables.

The factory is a microcosm of NY’s energy system. It has a fossil fuel-based high efficiency generator to provide baseline load which it supplements with a solar array. The balance of the energy is dispatched by the utility when we need more.

The factory, with its 50 KW rooftop solar array, in New Rochelle

Last year, we would have used 236 megawatt-hours of Con Ed’s electricity, but instead used only 66 megawatt-hours, thanks to the CHP’s electricity, heating and cooling and the solar array. Of the 236 MWh, 46 MWh were generated by the solar array and 124 MWh were generated or offset by the CHP system. A total of 72 percent of the electric energy was generated or offset on-site.

Daily total output from the factory’s solar array. Note the seasonal variability and the number of days with near-zero output.

All told, the factory’s carbon footprint is 30 to 40 percent smaller than it would be otherwise.  

Additionally, our utility bill, including the cost of natural gas, is less than half of what it would have been if we hadn’t added the energy systems. We have not only reduced our carbon emissions but we have also saved money through reduced energy usage and the associated expenses, about $1 million over the past 17 years. Our savings have been relatively higher during recent years as the business has grown and we have used more energy. Contrast that with current bills for other utility customers that are rising at an increasing rate. 

Note that all of the preceding numbers were obtained from actual measurements. They are not based upon desire, speculation, or theory. 

The CLCPA calls for New York to get 70 percent of its electricity from renewable energy sources by 2030, and 100 percent of its electricity from “zero-emission” sources by 2040. 

The New York Independent System Operator (NYISO), the independent nonprofit organization that operates the electric grid and oversees the state’s wholesale electricity market, has been warning about potential blackouts due to closing existing fossil-fuel generators before new generators come online. 

A 2019 plan by the state Department of Environmental Conservation to close smaller “peaker” power plants risked causing rolling blackouts on hot days as soon as 2025, before NYISO officials pushed back and kept some of the plants open. 

As NYISO officials warned earlier this summer, reliability margins—the cushions in each region that ensure there’s enough electricity to meet demand at all times—“are also observed to be narrowing across the grid in New York, which poses significant challenges for the electric system over the next ten years.” 

The reality is that the issue is going to extend well past 2033 and the energy shortages will get worse as gas plants aren’t replaced. 

However, let’s look at what would be required if we tried to be fully solar-powered at the factory.  

To generate the same amount of electric energy that we currently use, we would need a solar array six times the size of what we currently have. Below is a photo of the 25,000+ square foot roof of the factory with the 50,000 watt (50 KW) solar array on it. (The factory is 55,000 square feet across two floors).    

We could fit an additional 50 KW array on our roof for a total of 100 KW. However, we would need a roof three times the size of what we currently have to house a large enough solar array to generate the amount of electrical energy that we currently use. That doesn’t include the heat generated by the CHP system. 

If we switched to heat pumps, we would need at least an additional 300 KW of solar arrays to support the building’s thermal load. So in total we would need 12 times the panels—on a roof six times the size. 

Beyond the enormous additional costs needed to build a system of that magnitude, we don’t have the physical space or the roof area to remotely come close to supporting a system of that size. Nor does the population of the entire downstate region that is in the same densely populated, or more densely populated, area as the factory. That is 60 percent of the state’s population. 

A solar array to support One Vanderbilt, the new skyscraper next to Grand Central, would require an array one-third the size of Central Park plus enormous batteries—and that is just one building.  

Putting the arrays in a remote location upstate would raise the costs even higher as more capacity would have to be installed to compensate for transmission losses and exorbitantly expensive transmission would have to be added to the total project cost to send the energy downstate. 

The Storage Problem 

The biggest problem is the storage. 

Because of the looming plight of New York utility system, my team and I have been looking for ways to supply the building during a power failure. We first looked at a backup generator but Con Ed wanted $140,000 to run a larger gas line to our building. That being cost-prohibitive, we have been looking at a new type of energy storage that does not have the deficiencies of lithium-ion batteries. 

The newer storage, using supercapacitors, has a comparable cost to lithium-ion, will last 25 to 40 years instead of the eight to 10 years of lithium-ion, and it will not go into a state of thermal runaway and burn at 2600 degrees Fahrenheit as occasionally happens with lithium-ion batteries. It will fit in a space the size of a sea container and it can be charged at night from our CHP system and on weekends from our solar array. With an energy storage system of 720 to 900 KWh in conjunction with the CHP system and the solar array, we could operate 100 percent free of the utility with a carbon footprint 10 percent lower than what we have now. 

But the CLCPA requires us to imagine life without the CHP system. No natural gas for residential or industrial use. 

Compared to their first full year of operation, the solar array’s generation has decreased about 16 percent due to normal degradation with age. (A portion of that drop relates to moisture in the air—which will become a bigger issue as climate change increases). 

In June, the solar panels generated 6.3 megawatt-hours of electricity. In the entire month of January, they generated less than 1.3 megawatt-hours. There are days when the solar array generates almost nothing and when there is snow on it, it does generate nothing as happened for the entire month of February a few years ago. 

If solar panels and wind turbines, here or offsite, aren’t going to be generating electricity, that electricity must be stored in advance. 

We would have to install nearly sixty times the amount of energy storage as what we currently need for backup purposes—at sixty times the price–to ensure that the panel’s energy was available at night or for extended periods during the winter months. That storage would occupy a volume approximately equivalent to that of fifty large sea containers—for my factory alone.  

NYSERDA, the state’s energy agency, in late 2022 said “complete replacement” of fossil fuel plants with solar and wind generation would require 2,400 gigawatt-hours of storage to get the state through lulls when wind isn’t blowing and output from solar panels is low. At $567 per kilowatt-hour, the recent average cost of new non-residential energy storage, that works out to more than $1.3 trillion in new costs, or about $68,000 per New Yorker.

Excerpt from NYSERDA’s 2022 Energy Storage Roadmap

The Dispatchable Emission Free Resources (DEFR’s) needed to support the CLCPA’s plan don’t exist or don’t exist at the required scale, nor will they for decades. 

Unlike New York’s plan that is relying on resources that either don’t exist, don’t exist at scale, are prohibitively expensive to install, are opposed by the residents near the sites, double utility costs, and as a result cannot be installed in any reasonable time frame so that they are not reducing GHG emissions, the technologies that we have used to achieve our carbon reductions are just the opposite. My neighbors are unaware of what we have onsite. The only thing that is visible is the solar array on the roof that can be seen with aerial photos or from a distance from the new high rises that have been built. 

The technologies we used existed 20 years ago, reduce GHG emissions, are cost-effective, reduce line losses, reduce transmission and distribution costs, save money for the end user and the utility simultaneously, and can be implemented now in densely populated areas eliminating the need for multi-billion dollar transmission lines. 

This conclusion wasn’t derived from what I like or don’t like, or about what I want or don’t want, and unlike the CLCPA, it is not based upon emotion. It is based upon tens of millions of data points that definitively say that if NY State keeps proceeding on this path, it will be a calamity for the state. If the Comptroller or others in state government wonder why the Climate Action Council never did a financial analysis of the CLCPA that they forced upon the state, with the assistance of unknowing legislators, it is because the costs are so ridiculously high that if the number was actually publicized, it would be political suicide. 

People would ask why we spent five years and billions of dollars even trying it. 

The final cost of the CLCPA will be well into the trillions of dollars. 

New York policymakers are ignoring lessons from Germany’s “energiewende,” where officials have sought to significantly reduce fossil fuel consumption (and nuclear power) while increasing reliance on wind and solar. The increased costs have slammed the nation’s manufacturing sector and effectively thwarted GDP growth for the past two years. 

Just recently, Volkswagon announced the first layoffs in company history and a plant closure citing high energy costs as a major part of the problem. Wholesale electricity prices in Germany today are 48 percent higher than neighboring France, which in 2022 was powered mainly by nuclear energy (62 percent) and another 11 percent from hydroelectric. While Germany has been mired in a recession for over two years, France had a record number of business starts in 2022. 

In the meantime, Albany has chosen to follow a decades-old failed plan from Germany. They keep throwing good money after bad and expecting different outcomes. It has been truly fascinating to watch proponents of the CLCPA call it a science-based policy because it is anything but. Math and science are unforgiving and the day of reckoning for New York is fast approaching. The state is also headed towards insolvency because there is no way to support a project of this cost. 

Again, I am not a climate denier or anti-renewable, but when you can see the future of New York in the numbers presented above, it becomes apparent that its businesses and residents are headed down a road to energy deficiency because the state has precluded alternative forms of generation that don’t meet ideological purity while their preferred generation can’t be installed or doesn’t exist.