With summer here, generators are ready to go in Rockville Centre

Second of two parts.

On an early-June day, before this week’s sudden high heat and humidity, the Rockville Centre power plant was strangely silent. There were no outages in the village, nothing was malfunctioning and employees were at their stations.

With the flip of a switch or two, however, the village’s eight generators could come alive with a deafening roar to provide the megawatts of power that residents and businesses need. “The reality is that whatever the customers are using, we have to provide,” explained Electric Department Superintendent Paul Pallas.

Residents might think that a village that can generate its own power would do so on a daily basis, but this isn’t the case in Rockville Centre. In fact, the village generates its own power only on days of peak demand, normally in the summer.

Instead, to minimize the cost of power, a majority of the wattage that is used by the village is purchased from upstate. “We have a long-term contract with New York Power Authority for hydropower from Niagara Falls,” Pallas said.

The contract, first signed in 1979, allows the village to import as much as 30 megawatts of cheap hydropower from Niagara Falls. The power flows through a grid that spans the state, and the village Electric Department can draw from it as needed. The grid is filled with power from all the electric utility generators in the state.

“It’s like putting it into a giant bucket,” Pallas said. “The sellers throw it into the bucket and the buyers take it out of the bucket. It’s not really a direct path.”

Supply and demand

If the village ever needs more than the 30 megawatts it can purchase from upstate, it can buy power from the open market before turning to its own generators. The village can import 15 megawatts from other utilities on the open market — at a cost that is nearly double that of hydropower from Niagara Falls, but still half the cost of running the village’s own generators.