New York State energy policy (and home rule)

by: simonstl

Fri Jan 06, 2012 at 15:05:19 PM EST

[ Update: this New York Times article tells a similar story with a lot less background.]

New York State energy policy is a game that's largely about territory and players and not so much about principles. I obviously don't work in Albany, and would be happy to be wrong about much of this, but this is the story I tell based on what I've seen.

The key pieces of this story are New York City and Westchester County.

New York City depends on power generation from outside of the city much the same way it depends on water from outside of the city. One of the key tasks of state government for the past century or so has been keeping New York City supplied.

Electricity has been a particular challenge, as NYC's supplies sometimes get stretched, especially in summer, and the temporary generators Con Ed pulls out haven't been very popular. On top of that, there's a pretty loud call to shut down the Indian Point nuclear power plant just north of NYC, which needs its licenses renewed in 2013 and 2015 to keep operating. Sure enough, it's on a fault line, and Westchester is too densely populated for the evacuation plans to make much sense.

Back in the late 1980s/early 1990s there were hopes to buy electricity from HydroQuebec's ever-larger hydroelectric plants, but Governor (Mario) Cuomo stopped that, or at least barred one set of plans for doing so. The Shoreham nuclear plant could have provided power too, but a nuclear power plant in Long Island had even crazier evacuation plans than one in Westchester.

More recently, the city has been looking to Upstate for power. Around 2004, NYRI, a Canadian company, proposed a major power line from around Utica to Middletown (map), serving NYC, and residents fought hard (rough summary). After a lot of wobbling, Governor Pataki denied them the use of eminent domain in 2006, and it's more or less died since.

However, the Federal Government created a "National Corridor Designation" including roughly the same area. We didn't hear too much about it here because neither Tompkins nor Cortland County is included, but Cayuga, Chenango, Otsego, and Broome are.

That's designed to make it easier for power companies to build corridors. From their FAQ (49KB PDF):

On a more specific level, the designation of a National Corridor is a necessary first step in providing the federal government - through the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission - siting authority that supplements existing state authority. The Energy Policy Act of 2005 provides a potential siting venue at FERC for transmission facility proposals within a National Corridor.

In practice, this will mean that if an applicant does not receive approval from a State to site a proposed new transmission facility within a National Corridor, the applicant may then apply to FERC for a permit and authorization to construct the facility. If FERC accepts the application, before it would issue a permit, it would conduct a full National Environmental Policy Act review and consider alternatives.

Such a federal permit would empower the project developer to exercise the right of eminent domain to acquire necessary property rights to build the facilities. However, that authority could only be exercised if the developer could not acquire the property by negotiation, and even then would not apply to property owned by the United States or a State, such as a national or State park. (Emphasis and paragraph breaks added.)

Powerlines, of course, are just one piece of the story. (For more on them, this article on a proposed Champlain-Hudson line has good background.)

Article X, a law for fast-tracking power plant placement decisions, had expired in 2002. Its long failure to get renewed had a lot to do with past crazy powerplant siting decisions, but it finally moved ahead this year. Why?

I think the story politicians (Governor Andrew Cuomo in particular) were hoping would yield political happiness was:

1. Add powerlines and/or gas pipelines from Upstate to the NYC area.

2. Generate power Upstate with wind farms and new plants running on natural gas. (Article X helps with both of these.)

3. Shut down Indian Point.

Point (3) appeals to most Downstate environmentalists. Until recently, natural gas seemed like the miracle fuel, burning cleaner with less climate change impact (yes I know that's questionable), and wind farms were the future, so point (2) also appealed to Downstate environmentalists. Point (2) tied in nicely to growing desperation Upstate for economic development of any kind as well.

Point (1) has always been ugly, but maybe the Feds would take care of that for the state, and let Albany off the hook?

Until it became clear that hydrofracking had massive side effects, this was a plausible story. It's not the only possible story - see, for example, this expensive offshore possibility - but it at least sounded like a balancing of Downstate consumption with clean Upstate production. (And yes, Liquified Natural plants, pipelines elsewhere, etc., mean that this is not just a New York State story.)

This plan, of course, isn't going over very well in a lot of Upstate communities, largely because of hydrofracking. Powerlines don't make people happy, but pollution can force them to desert a place.

How does this tie to home rule, in particular Senator Jim Seward's push for it?

Seward's home rule position lets him find political balance on most of this, except with the relatively small group of voters who have the time to see how the pieces don't fit.

He can tell places like Dryden and Middlefield that overwhelmingly want to avoid hydrofracking that they can stay out of it, while letting places that cheer it on move forward. It takes the heat off of him for the ugliest piece of this puzzle, while letting him stay more or less in the general story Albany is pushing. (And it leaves the conflict open place-by-place for the long run, too.)

It's a classic Albany compromise, in which elected officials can make themselves look better than the oil and gas industry who are busy suing Dryden, while still permitting the companies to do a lot of what they wanted anyway.

(If you have time for the broader story, I suggest the classic Why There Will Always be an Upstate.)

Cross-posted with minor differences from Living in Dryden.

You can do what you want with your property if and only if...

by: simonstl

Tue Sep 20, 2011 at 17:10:14 PM EDT

it's compatible with what the oil and gas companies want to do with it.

That seems to be the message of the career of Thomas West, the "Super Lawyer" who announced that his firm would be bringing a lawsuit against the Town of Dryden last week. (I didn't originally mean to single out West, but he's proud of his work and appears at many of the most important places where gas drillers demanded that everyone else bow down before their power.)

Do you ever wonder how compulsory integration, which basically lets drillers force their way under up to 256 acres of a 640-acre drilling unit, could have happened?

He was one of the principal authors of the spacing and compulsory integration legislation that overhauled New York's oil and gas program in 2005.

Or, in a version with more detail:

Compulsory integration now plays a crucial role for gas drillers assembling sites in New York. No well can be drilled without a state permit. And no permit can be awarded until the drilling company creates an approved "spacing unit" -- typically 640 acres -- at the proposed well site. The spacing unit is made up of property leased to the drilling company, plus property owned by holdouts who won't lease.

Compulsory integration may only be applied if the driller obtains leases on property totaling at least 60 percent of the proposed spacing unit. After that threshold is reached, the company can force the holdouts to join against their will.

To some, that arrangement seems an outrageous violation of basic private property rights.

"It is a way to get around negotiating price with landowners, a way to acquire gas rights at below-market rates, and a way to force people into leases or lease terms they don't want," said Fractracker, a website managed by a group founded at the University of Pittsburgh's Graduate School of Public Health.

When the gas industry in Pennsylvania sought a milder version of New York's compulsory integration statute for drilling in that state's Marcellus Shale — the leasing threshold was 75 percent instead of 60 percent — it met vehement opposition and died.

In New York, opponents never had a chance to mobilize because there were no public hearings before the bill sailed through, Denton said. Albany attorney Thomas West claims on his website bio that he "played a key role" in winning passage of the 2005 bill. Denton agreed, saying, "Tom West shepherded it through the Legislature."

Yep - New York's delightful combination of a sleepy legislature and sleazy lobbyists frequently adds up to a not very funny joke. For all the complaining industry does about the cost of doing business in New York, we sometimes sell ourselves cheap.

As that article notes, West's firm also delivers the notices that your mineral rights are being taken from you at a low bargain price with pretty awful options. It's not clear if that same firm is leading Anshutz's charge to countersue people in Big Flats who dared take legal action when their water turned black and smelly.

And now, of course, this line of thinking has come to Dryden. Dangle riches in front of large landowners, downplay the risks, and hope they'll come along voluntarily. If they don't, worm your way toward enough acreage to take the rights anyway. And if they step up to say "Stop! This is a lousy idea!" - well, sue them.

Update: Here's an article that explores some of the precedents. It leans almost completely on gas company attorneys, but at least you get the idea.

[Cross-posted from Living in Dryden.]

Power failures

by: simonstl

Wed Jul 01, 2009 at 12:45:47 PM EDT

A piece on the 1965 breakdown in the New York State Senate (h/t Andy Arthur) includes a line which explains the past few weeks, if not decades, in Albany pretty well:

On the morning Espada appeared to make his coup official, I was on my way to interview a former New York politico, a big mover in the 1970s. I informed him that Espada was now a heartbeat away from the governorship and he told me a simple rule of New York politics: "If someone is given the opportunity to increase his power, he will take it, every time. No question."

For reformers who want to distribute power more evenly, widen the conversation, and allow separation of powers to work the way it's taught in civics class, the past few years of this maxim have been hard to stomach. We've seen Republicans tighten their grip on the Senate's rules and resources to ensure their dominance, while Democrats in the Assembly have built overwhelming power but don't seem inclined to share it, even across their own membership.

This year's collapsing Senate ran according to those rules exactly. Both Democrats and Republicans were willing to negotiate with the Gang of Four because they wanted the power of the majority. Once in power, the Democrats suddenly stalled on actually implementing the rules reform they'd wanted for decades, even voting down the very set of reforms they'd previously supported. The Republicans got a dramatic lesson in what it feels like to be out of power under a regime much like the one they'd had before.

In the coup, the Republicans were happy to negotiate with people they'd earlier denounced as criminals, so long as the power shifted their direction. Democrats were able to bring back Monserrate, I think because he realized that his power depended on local Democratic party institutions. Pedro Espada, however, is independent of that, and saw plenty of power, at least for the short term, to back him up.

How can anything good come of this deeply cynical endeavor?

For the first time since 1965, we have multiple groups with a substantial claim on power. Instead of a single power center, we have two at least, with a third (Espada) taking advantage of the possibilities that creates.

In the short term, this is terrible. We've all heard of legislation getting delayed, the reputation of the Senate being tarnished, and so on.

In the long term, though, this blind pursuit of power creates an opportunity for compromises that would make it easier for the Senate to stay multi-polar permanently. The hard question is whether either side can imagine a multi-polar Senate, or can think far enough ahead to see how it might help them.

For Democrats, demographic dominance awaits, but so does the reality of being an unsteady coalition. Distributing power might well seem like treason, but it's also the best way to ensure that the fractures within our party don't bring our plans to a crashing halt. It could ensure continuing power.

For Republicans, the look on Dean Skelos' face isn't merely a pout - it's the face of a guy who couldn't imagine losing an election, whose pursuit of power blinded him to the possibility of losing it. It's the face of a guy who's saying "Damn, I guess we really should have set precedent beyond redecorating the minority meeting room."

If you were an arbitrator

by: simonstl

Mon Jun 15, 2009 at 19:36:03 PM EDT

No one really wants to step in and compel a settlement in the Senate. The judge is certainly avoiding it, and while Governor Patterson offered a meeting, no one took him up on it, and he has little power to do anything. The Attorney General is being conspicuously quiet. The Republicans apparently won't meet with the Demcrats unless they accept last week's coup as legitimate, which seems like a recipe for nothing when there's a 31-31 split. The Democrats have reported their power-sharing proposals, which seem mostly sane to me.

But if you were an arbitrator, able to set terms, but aiming for them to last through the entire session and set good precedents for beyond, what would you propose?

(If NYCO can declare herself a State Senator, I think everyone here can declare themselves arbitrators.)

What might work?

Will Al D'Amato save reform?

by: simonstl

Tue Aug 07, 2007 at 17:48:16 PM EDT

A couple of days ago I wrote an abstract diary about power. After a few cycles of comments and another blog post, I'm here to write about what's developed from that, "trying to build a working Rube Goldberg machine out of rotten fish."

New York State Power and Authority

by: simonstl

Sat Aug 04, 2007 at 11:08:48 AM EDT

I know there's a New York Power Authority, but this isn't about electrical energy - it's about the concentrations of political power that New Yorkers take for granted. Putting power against power isn't working so well, and we may need to find a different approach.

Only the faces change

by: simonstl

Thu Apr 05, 2007 at 17:27:39 PM EDT

I think I found this through CapCon this morning, but just stumbled on it again while closing a pile of windows. Assemblyman Anthony Seminerio shares his views on how Albany works with The Observer:

"Eliot may wish he had another way, but there’s only one way the budget is ever going to get done, son... It’s three people, each getting a piece of the pie, and that’s it....

"And it’s not that he did anything wrong. He thought the process should be done one way, and he thought, you know, he could accomplish it. And now I think he must understand—I can’t speak for him, certainly; you know he’s a brilliant man. I can’t speak for him—but I think he understands now that, hey, you have to sit down, and it’s a give-and-take.

"The only thing that ever changes in Albany are the faces. The system stays intact."

That's what we're up against.