[00:00:00] Speaker A: Foreign.
[00:00:18] Speaker B: Welcome to Uptown Chats, a podcast where we share stories about environmental justice by and for everyday people. I'm your co host, Jaron and.
[00:00:25] Speaker A: And I'm your other co host, Lonnie.
[00:00:27] Speaker B: And today we have another great and timely episode for you where we'll be exploring the issue of peaker plants in New York City with the help of WEAC's senior policy advisor, Yuv Osper.
[00:00:40] Speaker A: Yeah. And for anyone who is unfamiliar with the term peaker plant, do not worry, this is the episode for you. We're gonna explain what they are in just a second.
[00:00:49] Speaker B: But first, Lonnie, can you share weac's mission?
[00:00:52] Speaker A: Yeah. We act's mission is to build healthy communities by ensuring that people of color and low income residents participate mean in the creation of sound and fair environmental health and protection policies and practices.
[00:01:02] Speaker B: Thank you.
So before we explain what peaker plants are, I think it's helpful to explain the concept of peak demand first, which is related but different.
As you may already know, the electricity grid is made up of a network of wires or transmission lines that connect power plants to our homes and businesses.
And it's designed to provide reliable electricity service at all times of the year. Spring, winter, fall, summer, all of it. To make sure that whenever you flip a switch on in your home or you turn an appliance on that the electricity turns on, the grid has to both produce enough electrons or electricity to match the amount of electricity that everyone is using throughout the year, as well as enough to power everything that's turned on at the same time. So imagine every single person turned on all of their devices and appliances at the same time. There needs to be enough power to ensure that there's enough electricity to meet that demand. So that second ability to meet that amount of demand if everything were to be turned on is called peak demand. So that's the important term that's helpful here to keep in mind.
[00:02:15] Speaker A: Understanding peak demand is an important tool for utilities and grid operators like Con Ed or National Grid. They need to know how many power plants to have available at any given time on any given day to keep the grid up and running. And it's pretty elaborate setup. I don't know if anyone's ever googled any photos of that, but it looks like a big mission control room.
And if there's not enough electricity being supplied by power plants or other sources of electricity like solar panels, grid operators may implement blackouts or power outages to reduce electricity demand in order to prevent permanent physical damage to electrical equipment. Right. So it's really important and vital that they get this right, because electricity is the only commodity that is produced at the exact same time that is consumed. Historically, grid operators have been required to keep around certain power plants, often called peaker plants, that are only run during peak times because they are designed to run so infrequently. These power plants tend to be inefficient and expensive to operate from both the cost and environmental impact perspective.
[00:03:24] Speaker B: Exactly. And the issue of balancing the amount of electricity on the grid has motivated policymakers, utility companies and others to make our homes and devices more energy efficient and has also driven the demand for things like battery energy storage systems that can help store extra electricity and put it back onto the grid when it's needed. To kind of offset this, the function of what these peaker plants are fulfilling right now.
[00:03:52] Speaker A: And our focus today is unpacking how peaker plants impact environmental justice communities in New York City and learn about some of the work WE ACT is doing to help speed up the transition to cleaner and more sustainable solutions.
With that said, keep an eye out for future episode where we will continue our conversation and and hear more about battery energy storage systems.
[00:04:11] Speaker B: All right, with that said, let's go ahead and jump into our interview with you to learn more about peaker plants.
[00:04:17] Speaker A: Let's go.
[00:04:24] Speaker B: All right. Well, welcome back, you. It's been a minute since you're on the show. I'm. I'm breaking my habit of not talking about how many times everyone has been on the show, so we'll just say it's been a minute. We're super happy that you're back to talk to us today about peaker plants. Well, before we get into some of the questions that we have for you, do you mind just giving a brief introduction of yourself and a little bit about your role at WE act.
[00:04:49] Speaker C: So again, my name is Yua Vosper. About me, let's see. Well, first I shall go back. I hail from Louisiana and I came to New York quite a bit ago, almost 10 years ago. Would that make me a New Yorker?
Some say to differ. Some say, true, you are a New Yorker. But I came to We act in 2020, was one of the last hires of the late great Cecil Corbin. Mark.
I began working with out of Gas and with justice and then focusing on the building sector toxics.
Then transitioned into the federal office of WE act for Environmental justice and kind of kept my role there.
Then briefly, I left WE ACT and went to the city and now I'm back and now I'm doing Pica plants.
[00:05:45] Speaker B: Welcome back.
[00:05:46] Speaker C: Thanks.
[00:05:47] Speaker B: Well, with that, I guess we can jump right in with our first question for a lot of folks. They may have heard the term peaker plant before, but a lot of folks are not really familiar with what it means or what kind of their purpose is. So I guess maybe that's the best place for us to start to just unpack. What are peaker plants?
[00:06:05] Speaker C: So I think that's a good place to start because a lot of people don't know what peaker plants are, and a lot of people don't know a peaker plant when they see one.
But what peaker plants are are power plants basically, that originate or come off operate, I should say, but only during peak demand. Hence the word peaker plants.
So if you think about days in the summer where you are in 100 degree day or a 97 degree day and everyone's talking about how the grid is, you know, already taxed, those are when peaker plants would start to come in.
They operate when the demand for electricity spikes. So in that same aspect, when it's extreme cold, you know, a peaker plant, a peaker plant would begin to operate to meet that demand of all the energy that's being consumed. So they basically serve as a backup resource to help maintain grid reliability and prevent back blackouts. In New York City, do you have
[00:07:07] Speaker A: any, how many that are in a city, in New York City currently, I
[00:07:11] Speaker C: don't have those specific numbers with me, but I do know that the neighborhoods where they're more concentrated would be South Bronx, Astoria, Sunset park, and there's, I think, one in Harlem as well.
But the South Bronx is particularly concentrated. We all know it's called Asthma Alley. So.
[00:07:33] Speaker A: And I think you're alluding to kind of one of the reasons why we talk about peaker plants in the environmental justice space, because you talked about Asthma Alley and then being concentrated obviously in the Bronx. So. So can you talk a little bit more about, like, why picker plants are considered problematic in an environmental justice issue?
[00:07:48] Speaker C: Yeah.
So peaker plants run on very old resources and fossil fuels like natural gases, oils.
So you have this, this plant that's used, it's burning horrible fossil fuels in the worst kind of air quality possible.
So you already have a polluting source in an already polluted environment is a cumulative form of pollution.
So for those people who are living in that area and are particularly vulnerable to respiratory illnesses, asthma, it just exacerbates that illness.
So these peaker plants who were running on this certainly dirty fuel is running, it's basically emitting These pollutants in the most dangerous moments.
So that is why that's a health concern.
But as I was stating earlier, many peaker plants are overwhelmingly sited in communities of color and low income areas.
So residents living near those facilities and already facing these cumulative environmental burdens from other industrial facilities already having poor air quality highways, having a polluting plant is just increasing the amount of hospitalizations from respiratory illnesses.
[00:09:22] Speaker A: And I guess some people would ask or say, well these are only supposed to come on when there's high demand. Right. So if it's only coming on high demand and we're only using it for emergency use, what's the big deal?
[00:09:33] Speaker C: Well the big deal is like for, and when I think about it, I think about, you know, people are saying it's supposed to be coming on when, only when you need it, it's for reliability purposes.
But we have all of, we're asking for this reliability with consider with sacrifice zones which because it's already cited in areas where it's communities of color and low income area. So you're doing this at the expense of a people. So a grid reliability, we're purchasing that at the cost of people's like respiratory health, at the cost of people's lungs, basically. So NISO stands for New York Independent Surface Operator.
And so that's the grid operator. And it designates plants as designated all pica plants. And they go on a designation as needed for reliability. And once a plan has that designation then the retirement of a PQR plant becomes the problem.
And that's a very condensed way of putting it.
So if, if a grid is, if a PCR plan is cited as being needed for reliability, it's very hard to say, oh, this needs retirement because there are all these counter arguments. So plants are staying open because replacements haven't been fully vetted or trusted yet.
And basically when you produce electricity or energy, you have to, something has to produce it. So it has to like a one to one, if you get my drift.
If you're producing it, there has to be something.
The demand for the produce has to, you know, get that mitre, it's like a circle, you know, you have to meet that demand. So if you take off the grid, the power, the peaker plant, the question is what's going to meet that demand? And there's nothing that people can say right now. Well, people are really touting battery energy storage systems but people question them right now, just to be blunt, even though they can be a very reliable source. So. Right. Replacements right now are being slow to be built out. And that's partly because plants are still collecting capacity payments.
And retiring a plant is more complicated than simply like saying, oh, let's turn this plant off.
Because regulators must ensure there's a replacement that's available right now. Basically the retirement question isn't being answered in full. There's no, people will say, well, we want this to retire, but no one's really handling that question in New York City or state.
There are many New York organizations that are making progress with battery energy storage and demand side resources.
But the deployment of these resources are very slow to be put on the market.
[00:12:33] Speaker B: Yeah, I think so. And then just to make sure I'm understanding it correctly. So one of the challenges with retiring these, these peaker plants, given that we know that they're emitting a lot of pollution and that they're being, that they exist in our already burdened communities, is that it's like a, it's like a math equation for anyone like remembers back to, back to their school days where like you have to balance both sides of the equation where like if you want to replace this peaker plant, you have to be putting back on the same amount of capacity, there has to be the same amount of power that's supplied to replace that so that you're still balancing that equation to provide enough power for everyone that's using it. Right, got it.
[00:13:13] Speaker C: I wasn't good at math, so I never thought about math.
[00:13:18] Speaker B: I'm a math nerd, so any excuse I have to drop some math, some math references.
Math references in there I will take. But you, you actually kind of started to get at one of our next questions.
We'll just give you a little bit more space to continue to unpack that. But given that we kind of know there's issues and there's impacts from peaker plants and we know that they're a problem, especially in terms of public health.
Why are they continuing to operate? What's some of the driving forces that's allowing them to continue to be used and why they're not being replaced. I know you touched on this a little bit, but I don't know if you had anything else that you wanted to add to that, that.
[00:13:53] Speaker C: Well, the replacement has. Well, there's a lot of things. There was, there are regulatory issues like. So I was, I was going into the regulatory aspect. So dec, which is Department of Environmental, I want to say conservation regulates the emissions, the Public Service Commission regulates utilities, NISO runs that market. And then the New York Power Authority own some plants outright.
So Each agency can make that little Batman point.
I don't know if you think about that meme because as I was saying before, no one's really owning the retirement question.
So you know, that's, you know, we act right now has a project, I've named it Reliability without Sacrificing. So I don't know if that's what it's called, but I've named it that. And you know, so we, you know, we've kind of made it our purpose to force that question. What it would look like if we start compelling retirement, if we start asking those questions, like what would it take to retire these plants?
Also there are energy markets and they're designed around conventional power plants. And those market structures continue to support older facilities even as the cleaner technologies still emerge.
But as I said, New York is making progress with battery storage and demand side resources. But the deployment has not yet fully replaced the need, need in quotes for peaker plants. And also the really big counter we get is reliability. Reliability. But that's, I think part of the problem is that there's nothing anyone can say that can fully replace that right now. So if you, we don't have a counter. If everybody's like, well, reliability. And we're like, well this may work, that's not sufficient because people could have brown arts or blackouts. So I think that's what's going on.
[00:15:57] Speaker A: So it seems like there's a lot of different players involved in stakeholders. And so when it comes to doing the retirement, I think that's an interesting way to think about it is like, oh, there's four or five different entities here.
None of them are talking about retiring, but when they do, they're pointing the finger at each other. Like the Spider man meme that you, that you kind of reference or Batman meme. It's one of them.
[00:16:18] Speaker C: It's Spider Man.
[00:16:19] Speaker A: It's Spider Man. I don't know it's one of them. But the meme where everyone's pointing at each other and you started to talk a little bit about some of those opportunities that are there? So what is the kind of the hope for, if we were able to have a true plan to shut down peaker plants, to retire them, what would be like the ideal replacement for, for those, for those peaker plants?
[00:16:40] Speaker C: So peaker plant sites are actually gold mines for a clean energy transition because they're these large parcels within something very valuable in it. It already has grid interconnection. Okay. So there are wires, there are substations, there's transmission that already access that already exists on that property.
So existing peaker plants that already have these valuable electricity electrical infrastructures, they have substations, they have transmission connections. Repurposing these sites can reduce a lot of this development cost and shorten these project timelines. So going back to battery storage, which is where many people are leaning, they do the job that a peaker plant would do. They inject power at moments of peak demand, but they have zero on site emissions.
So that would be a more feasible solution for right now.
They can lead to workforce training for storage operations and maintenance, resilience hubs and learning. They can also help with lowering emissions decrease. This industrial siting that you know, plagues some communities.
And also while they're deploying battery storage or if they choose to deploy battery storage, communities can also have a voice. If they do community participation and have a voice in what are the first community education is key. Like tell people what a battery storage is, what it does, how it's used and what the differences are, how it's being measured for safety, things like that. And have communities have a real voice in what replaces these facilities. Especially if that facility, meaning a peaker plan, has been burdening that area for, you know, I don't want to say centuries, I'll say generations.
[00:18:39] Speaker B: I guess with that, one of the last questions that we have, again, you kind of alluded to this already, but just giving you a little bit more space to unpack. You mentioned the work that we ACT is doing, including yourself, the work that you're doing related to peaker plants and in this area of thinking about what does phaseout look like, replacing them with more clean technology.
Just wanted to give you more space to unpack some of the work that you're doing, some of the work that we ACT is doing in this space. Anything else that you wanted to share that you think our listeners might be interested in?
[00:19:11] Speaker C: So we act right now has a project that we are building out and we've already kind of laid the house down, laid the bricks, and now we're building it up to put the furniture in. I call it TM Reliability without trademark, Reliability without sacrifice zones. That's my thing.
And that's focusing on compelling of retirement of peaker plans.
So focusing on the peaker plants that are in New York City, around the Bronx, Harlem River Yard, Hell's Gate facilities, that little Astoria cluster. So we ACT is working with community members, policymakers, coalition partners to kind of accelerate the concept of retirement of these aging peaker plans. So of course we're Making sure that there's a lot of commitments out there, but a lot of the commitments do not have teeth and the timelines are getting pushed back and community accountability is not, is basically lacking. So we're making sure that, you know, we have public records enforcing transparency.
If an agency claims a plant must be operating, we need to know why, how is this being justified under the CLCPA and you know, defend it. Why, why is this plant still being operated and you know, justify the, the, the means?
How are you justifying this problem?
So, and we're also building with partners, community based organizations that you know, are trusted by the community and we are working with them to advance possible other cleaning, other cleaner solutions.
But what we're basically looking for is a push for retirement.
But when we think about retirement, we're trying to like advance that concept of yes, you have to have retirement, but there's nothing to fear.
We need to figure out because of the counter to reform retirement is reliability and what can replace that, like what can feed that counter. So if someone's saying oh it's reliable, then what can we say is going to replace that efficiently and hate to use the word again, but reliably so having something there and the best, most feasible thing we have right now is best battery energy storage solutions.
How can that be cited in a way that has a community involved?
How can that be transparent in its emissions?
So basically we want every tool in our, in our belt aimed at the outcome of retirement, retiring these pica plants, but on a feasible timeline and making sure that the community still doesn't pay a price because they've already paid the price for decades.
So our vision is, as I said before, tm reliability without sacrifice zones. We're not choosing between a reliable electric grid and healthy outcomes.
We have the technology, we have some of these policy tools in our belt.
So how can we build these energy systems where there's no neighborhood that will bear this disproportionate burden of pollution just simply to keep the lights on?
So reliability is a design constraint as of right now, but it's not an excuse.
The grid's reliability does not have to be purchased with people's lungs.
[00:22:58] Speaker A: Well, I guess that definitely that's a, that's a great way to end that. And I think we're looking, we're going to be looking forward to kind of what comes out of, you know, this project in reeducating everyone on the dangers of peaker plants and why we're so against them. I think we've kind of forgotten about them a little bit. But you was here to to put us back on track and the community. So we're looking forward to to what's come next. So thank you so much again for giving us that nice baseline understanding of what peaker plants are and what we ACT is going to be doing about it.
[00:23:28] Speaker B: I guess before you do, one last thing, just for folks that heard you talk about this in our this is exciting to them. I was going to say, is there a place that people can look for updates about what's happening with peaker plants or any specific ways for people to be involved?
[00:23:44] Speaker C: Well, we ACT will be coming out with. We have a toolkit we'll be coming out with also if you want to maybe search your area and see if you have a peaker plant near you, you know, that should be some homework.
[00:23:57] Speaker B: There we go. Always like a good action item for people to do at home. So yeah, do your research and see if you live near a peaker plant because you may be impacted by air quality and not realize it from from those peaker plants. So thanks again Yua appreciate you having having you on and we'll make sure not to wait so long to have you on again.
[00:24:16] Speaker C: I know.
[00:24:24] Speaker B: Thanks for listening. If you like this episode, make sure to rate and review the show on whatever platform you listen on. If you have thoughts about the show or suggestions for topics you want us to discuss, we encourage you to reach out to
[email protected] I also want to
[00:24:39] Speaker A: remind folks about Uptown Chat's hotline where listeners can call in with questions they have about environment and climate justice.
Got a question called 877-Uptown-6. That's 877-878-6966 and check out react on Facebook at react4.
[00:24:57] Speaker B: That's W E A C T F O R E j on Instagram, bluesky and YouTube eact4ej. That's W E A C T number 4ej and check out our website weact.org for more information about environmental justice.
[00:25:13] Speaker A: Until next time.
[00:25:15] Speaker B: Bye.
[00:25:15] Speaker A: Ciao.
[00:25:23] Speaker B: Sam.
