News Archive 2003

In Place of Indian Point
MAREK FUCHS
The New York Times
August 3, 2003

THE call to close Indian Point is so snug and simple that it fits perfectly onto a bumper sticker. But what is not so simple is the question of where the power-hungry Westchester and New York City regions would look for replacement power for the plant's output in the event it is closed.

The drive by Indian Point's opponents to close the plant took a heavy blow when the federal government endorsed the controversial emergency evacuation plan for the plant recently. Nevertheless, those opponents have continued to say that Indian Point must be closed for safety reasons, and that the plant's power can be replaced well and even cheaply. Yet at the heart of each power replacement argument is a certain amount of estimating, guesswork and leaps of faith.

One thing is undeniable: Apart from natural gas and coal, there are no alternatives immediately available that currently produce electricity on the scale of the two reactors. Yet opponents are carefully seeking alternatives.

One often-mentioned possibility is a giant extension cord from upstate. Solar power and windmills are often raised, as is increased conservation. Conversion of Indian Point from a nuclear plant to a gas-fired one is another favorite option of plant opponents. The bottom line? There doesn't seem to be one. When it comes to what might come after Indian Point, the point of view depends on the speaker, with no clear answer, no real front-runner and no clear decision-maker.

"For each Ph.D.," said County Executive Andrew J. Spano, speaking on the issue in his White Plains office on a recent afternoon, "you have an equal and opposite Ph.D."

And it's not only the energy production capabilities that must be weighed. There are other variables: If replacement power can be produced, will it be prohibitively expensive? What hurdles will be encountered by, say, proposed windmill farms like those that have encountered staunch local opposition elsewhere? Can any energy project win financing from the private sector in a post-Enron world that has not been kind to energy projects? And, by the way, what would Entergy, the plant's owner, have to say about its investment in Indian Point?

For all these reasons, even though grassroots opposition to Indian Point appears to be strong and growing, even the plant's staunchest opponents agree that one key to building a credible force behind the call to shut it down is to wade through the power replacement options in the hope of forming a viable alternative.

"To expedite the shutdown, you have to have a plan in place," said Alex Matthiessen, the executive director of Riverkeeper, an environmental group that is fighting the plant.

The fear of flickering lights, summer blackouts and plump bills casts a pall on power plant opposition from the sector of the population that can be swayed to either side of the debate. Mr. Spano said, "We have to be able to say, 'Here's the alternative, so now what's the argument?'"

Indian Point generates 2,000 megawatts of power, a huge amount of energy, when the entire complex is up and running. That is enough to power about two million homes. With small exceptions, all power for public buildings and for public uses in Westchester and New York City comes from the plant. This means schools, streetlights, town halls, firehouses, municipal buildings, subways and Metro-North trains all rely on the plant.

Can this much power ever be replaced? Technological advances mean that "there are a heck of a lot of options, a lot of different pushes into different type of energy generating," said Marshall Adkins, the managing director of energy research for Raymond James, a financial service firm. But for both consumer and investor, there are big financial concerns.

Mr. Adkins said that because nuclear plants have already been built, nuclear power's "ongoing costs are low." By contrast, many potential replacement sources of power require new investments and possibly higher continuing costs. All of this adds up to bigger bills for consumers.

Plant opponents point to the fact that local, state and federal governments foot much of the bill for securing nuclear plants. By this argument, even if the costs aren't showing up on the bottom lines of the plant's owners, they are being paid by taxpayers.

GETTING down to specifics of replacing the power output of the plant, several opponents, speaking separately, agreed that a combination of measures would be needed. Daniel Rosenblum, senior lawyer for the Pace Law School Energy Project, another plant opponent, said, "The combination of all the energy resources is what's needed to provide a reliable energy supply."

Windmills have already replaced nuclear power in some places in Westchester. The town of New Castle, for example, recently replaced the 29 percent of its municipal power that came from nuclear with wind-generated power. The extra cost is manageable, said Marion S. Sinek, New Castle town supervisor. She put the extra cost at $30,000 annually, out of a total of $450,000.

Windmills have advanced technologically in the last decade to the point that cost is near that of nonrenewable energy, or at the very least within range. "We felt strongly that if we wanted to close Indian Point, we had to find other ways to get the power," Mrs. Sinek said.

Since last February, Croton-on-Hudson has also been using wind power for all municipal needs, from firehouses to streetlights. The mayor, Robert W. Elliott, was surprised at how easy it was for the town to hook in. "Like a lot of people," Mr. Elliott said, "we didn't realize that alternative forms of energy are available right now, that we would tap into it this minute."

They, too, pay a premium, $8,000 a year, for electricity that amounts to 10 percent of their city power bill. and Mr. Elliott said that while the public was receptive to this, the big selling point was to explain the plan. "At first the questions were along the lines of, 'so we're going to have windmills on top of our buildings?'" Mr. Elliott said. "I had to explain that the grid is like a reservoir, with a lot of different power coming down the aqueduct and being pooled. Once people got that, they were supportive."

He added: "The subtext is that it is easy to be against something, like nuclear plants. But the opponents have to be for something, like wind power."

Both towns get their wind from Community Energy, a company that has been around since 1999, providing approximately 270 megawatts of energy in a dozen states. The company's New York State director, Ron Kamen, said the company had 37 megawatts of wind power available in the state and currently sells half. "People have to be willing to pay a little bit of green power premium," he said.

Though Mr. Kamen said that New York had the potential to produce 10,000 megawatts of wind power in the future, scale is a question now. (Wind power now accounts for less than 1 percent of all electricity produced in the United States.) Wind power is only as good as the wind; spots upstate and in eastern New York are generally the windiest and thus the best sites for windmills. That brings up two other problems.

"Wind power has already generated - no pun intended - controversy," said Warren P. Reiss, general council at Scenic Hudson Inc., an environmental group. The towers have drawn opposition from both environmentalists and nuclear plant supporters, mostly from people who think they are big and ugly but also from people who worry because they have been known to cut up flying birds.

Since 1992, Sandra R. Galef, a state assemblywoman, has represented the district that includes Indian Point. "People didn't want cell towers, why would they want a 10-story wind tower?" she asked. "People always want something somewhere, but it's always not in my backyard."

Even if a place can be found to place windmills where there is no local opposition, there is disagreement over whether the state's power grid is adequate for transmitting such power downstate. Ken Klapp, a spokesman for the New York Independent System Operator, a nonprofit organization established and regulated by the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission, said the answer is no. "At peak time, we are dealing with a system that is fully loaded," he said.

Mr. Kamen said, "Transmission is definitely an issue of concern, but it's a relatively manageable concern." Mr. Rosenblum said he also believes there is enough capacity to bring power downstate.

Solar power, like wind, shows promise, though it is a small-scale solution, and faces similar challenges of whittling costs and transmission. John Moore and his wife, Stephanie Stern, are thinking of installing solar panels on their house in Yorktown, to strike a blow against Indian Point.

But the initial bids for the planned conversion ran more than $54,000, which would mean it would take several decades for them to see a return on their investment. "Not a winner," Mr. Moore said. Through help from the New York State Energy Research and Development Authority, a state consumer organization, and elsewhere, however, Mr. Moore has brought the cost down to less than half of the original price.

ONE of the few energy projects that appears to have fairly solid initial support from officials and environmentalists is essentially a giant extension cord that will take energy from Albany County and bring it 140 miles south to New York City. Though the plan's proponents are not marketing it as an Indian Point replacement, they say that the line could bring 2,000 megawatts of power downstate, a magic number indeed.

The project is called Empire Connection and a company called Conjunction LLC has been marketing it. The company wants the cord (there will be two, actually) to carry DC power, not normally used in the United States. Steve Mitnick, the chief executive officer of Conjunction, said that DC lines are more efficient and safer, but its presence means he has to persuade Consolidated Edison to put DC converters on substations at either end of the cord. That is not the only hurdle; Mr. Mitnick has to persuade a number of railroads to allow him to lay the line under the tracks. Also, various applications have to be submitted, including a big one to the New York Public Service Commission. "It's an endless list," Mr. Mitnick said.

There is also the matter of financing. The project will be done on $200 million in equity and $500 million in debt, Mr. Mitnick said, adding that financing is being sought on Wall Street.

And then, the discussion of replacing Indian Point's energy usually turns to conservation, which is the big hope or hoax of the Indian Point alternative movement, depending on who you talk to.

A report prepared for Riverkeeper and the Pace Law School Project by Charles Komanoff, an independent energy consultant in Manhattan, said that Indian Point could be closed without adversely effecting energy supply by replicating what was done in California during its energy crisis in the summer of 2001. Mr. Komanoff is a proponent of peak period premiums, rebates for energy reduction and day-to-day conservation, from turning off the lights to not letting the hot tub run.

The range of savings, Mr. Komanoff said, could rise to the level of a 57 percent surplus, with the downside a 40 percent deficit. A shortfall could be made up by importing electricity from places like New England.

In April 2002, however, Entergy released a study that it had commissioned from two research groups, General Electric Power Systems Energy Consulting and National Economic Research Associates. The study said that if the two operating plants, Indian Point 2 and 3, were permanently closed, consumers would be out $3 billion over three years. At the same time, the study said, energy reliability would decrease by a factor of five, with reserve margins cut almost in half. The report said that if Indian Point is closed, the next step might be the closure of 23 other nuclear power units, in which case energy costs would increase by $10 billion in the same three-year period.

Even those who say they support conservation question whether it is any reliable replacement for Indian Point. Conservation, over the long haul, has never been shown to be much of a success in New York, or much of anywhere else for that matter.

Assemblywoman Galef said: "People are really good at conservation when there is a big crunch. In the 1970's we saw the long gas lines and cut back. But then we built big cars and guzzled gas."

One area of advancement that has conservation supporters encouraged is the marrying of technology and conservation. Smart appliances that can be programmed to run in the middle of the night can help, for example, as can a pilot program, started by the county in conjunction with several energy groups, that provides consumers with an advanced electronic meter that lets them know how much energy they use at different times of the day and when electricity is cheapest. No one expects advances like this to make up 2,000 megawatts; rather, most conservation supporters say that a systemic effort can be a good part of other Indian Point alternatives.

ANOTHER big hope of Indian Point opponents for replacing the nuclear output of the plant is a proposal to convert the nuclear power plant into a gas-fired plant. Echoing an attempt by the county made a quarter century ago to take over Consolidated Edison's transmission lines, Mr. Spano has even proposed buying or condemning the plant to convert it.

Through up to $500,000 in requests for proposals and studies, the county is looking at just how to go about this. Few will argue that a gas-fired plant can't produce energy, but there are other concerns: whether the county can be involved in any way in a construction project that will cost more than its annual budget, what to do with spent fuel rods, whether Entergy will ever sell and whether, if the county condemned the property, it would have the competency to proceed. Entergy has gone on the record as saying that it will listen to the county's proposals, but that it has no particular desire to sell the plant.

"It borders on the ridiculous," Jim Steets, a spokesman for Entergy, said of such proposals. "First of all, you'd have to buy because we're certainly not going to convert. If you even assume Entergy wants to sell, the plant could not be taken for less than $2 billion or $3 billion, maybe $4 billion. Then you have to decommission, do destruction and construction. And you have to do without the 2,000 megawatts for years, while all this goes on. You can't run one while you build another and then say, 'one, two, three, switch!'"

Mr. Klapp, a spokesman for the Independent System Operator, said that a conversion of the site would address an issue that many are overlooking. "Any type of replacement has to be physically located in the same spot in order to give voltage support to the transmission network," he said. "That's what's needed to keep power moving long distances."

But as in every other concern regarding Indian Point, this claim gets a quick rejoinder. "The plant has been down quite a number of times for repairs," said Mr. Rosenblum, adding that the sanctity of the lines has never been an issue. "They've worked fine."

As the discussion over potential replacements continues, experts note that history offers little in the way of guidance. The Shoreham Nuclear Power Station on Long Island was shuttered under public pressure. But the messy battle ended before the plant reached full power.

"An alternative plan wasn't a big issue," said Richard M. Kessel, who worked to shut the plant and is chairman of the Long Island Power Authority. "It wasn't producing anything so we didn't have to have the answers. We weren't losing anything. That problem was in the future."

And the stakes grow higher as time goes on. Despite all the security concerns, public energy needs are growing, not diminishing. Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg recently formed a task force to figure out how New York City can meet its rising needs for energy. He was reacting to estimates that the region will need to increase its energy capacity by 3,000 megawatts in the next five years, presuming Indian Point continues to run.

If nothing else, the entire debate over shutdown has transformed the landscape of local politics. "I used to focus on things like how fast the Playland roller coasters could run after rain," said Michael B. Kaplowitz, a county legislator who now spends a good portion of his time thinking about the disposal of spent fuel rods, the capacity of transmission lines and trying to pinpoint what could possibly come next.

Mr. Spano also spends a large portion of time on Indian Point. "It's just a major chess game," he said, "three steps forward and two steps back."

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