On Dec. 13, the Long Island Power Authority board voted yet again to approve a raise in electric rates, this time over 11 percent for next year. Long Islanders have little choice but to absorb these price increases, as they have before.
At the same time, the state is scrambling toward goals set by the Climate Leadership and Community Protection Act that it seems unlikely to meet, while outdated and costly-to-operate power plants continue to pollute our state day after day. Meanwhile, New York’s landscape is a giant crime scene, littered with the bodies of countless dead renewable projects, opposed in town after town by locals who don’t want their fisheries destroyed, their forests cut down, or their quality of life ruined.
What’s worse, according to the New York Independent Systems Operator’s own analysis, the New York City area could have “a deficit as large as 446 megawatts as early as summer 2025.” We have begun construction of our first offshore wind farms, but at the current rate of deployment, wind can never be a reasonable path to a decarbonized future on its own. Solar generation is an important part of any diversified energy portfolio, but it also cannot shoulder the massive burden of powering New York alone. We need to continue to encourage solar and wind development, but we must also confront their current limitations.
New York must embrace energy diversification, and the point of convergence for all the various renewable or decarbonized forms of energy — from hydroelectric dams to nuclear power plants, and from wind farms to the solar panels that countless New Yorkers have on their roofs — is hydrogen.
Hydrogen is the most abundant substance in the universe. If you stand at any point along New York’s Great Lakes coastline, keep in mind that the primary way in which hydrogen is generated is electrolysis, a process in which you run an electric current over water and then collect the hydrogen that splits out. So all that water is our potential fuel source. When you combust hydrogen as a power source, all that is released is water vapor. So it is a nearly infinitely renewable, there is a nearly infinite amount of it, and it is 100 percent decarbonized.
Jake Blumencranz represents the 15th Assembly District.