The New York State Energy Planning Board reconvened yesterday to kick off a new round of energy planning. And it violated the state’s Open Meetings Law before the gavel fell.

The Open Meetings Law requires public bodies to post the documents it will consider at a meeting online at least 24 hours beforehand. Yesterday’s agenda included the last meeting’s minutes, a draft scoping plan and a resolution to approve seeking public comment on the plan. None were posted on the Board’s website at 8:00 a.m. the day of the meeting.

The Open Meetings Law provides an out. The posting requirement is 24 hours “to the extent practicable.” Yet document metadata show the scoping plan was ready to be posted by Saturday evening, over 24 hours before the Monday afternoon meeting. The draft minutes and resolution were ready last week.

The Open Meetings Law violation is business as usual for this group. The Board has not produced a new state energy plan in nine years—since 2015. That’s despite the Energy Law requiring a new state energy plan every four years. It’s supposed to be a dynamic process, with every four-year plan undergoing a biennial review. The last biennial review was in 2017.

As the Board sat idle, former Governor Andrew Cuomo shut down the state’s coal-fired generation plants. The state also lost almost 2,000 megawatts of nuclear generation capacity from the reactors at Indian Point being decommissioned. And the Department of Environmental Conservation issued regulations in 2019 meant to push peaker plant owners to either upgrade or close plants with a collective capacity of about 3,300 megawatts.

The Board amended its 2015 energy plan and noted those developments. But the amendment focused mostly on new goals set by the 2019 Climate Leadership and Community Protection Act.

Under the Climate Act, New York is supposed to reduce greenhouse gas emissions by 85 percent of 1990 levels by 2050, generate 70 percent of electricity from renewable energy sources by 2030, and increase statewide energy efficiency by 600 trillion British thermal units by 2025. The Climate Act also set new targets for 100 percent carbon-free electricity by 2040, 9 GW of offshore wind by 2035, 6 GW of energy storage by 2030, and 6 GW of distributed solar by 2025.

State lawmakers added electrification requirements for buildings and vehicles since they passed the Climate Act. New York will have, beginning in 2025, a “cap and invest” program under which businesses that generate greenhouse gas emissions will need to buy allowances in an auction system. And legislators have proposed the NY HEAT Act, designed to phase out natural gas usage throughout the state (in some cases, involuntarily).

Meanwhile, experts predict New York is on a path to rolling blackouts unless it can add at least 20,000 megawatts (and up to 40,000 megawatts) of dispatchable emissions-free electric capacity by 2040 to replace the current 25,300 megawatts of fossil generation in New York’s fleet and meet forecasted increased demand.

Yet there are no technologies “commercially viable today at the necessary scale” to provide dispatchable emissions-free resources (DEFRs) New York will need to meet its required DEFR capacity by 2040, according to the New York Independent System Operator.

In that context, the Board flouting the Open Meetings Law is a minor foul compared to the legal obligation to issue updated energy plans the Board has been ignoring.