Stop Battery Energy Storage Systems
(BESS) on Long Island
No, batteries won't keep the lights on in a storm...
It is always a curiosity to hear people at public hearings arguing in favor of batteries because they can keep the lights on in a storm. In fact, they complain that the batteries are typically only four hour batteries! They want more!
The reality is that this is not the purpose of the batteries at all. First of all, when the lights go out in a storm there is a 99% probability that the reason is that a distribution line was damaged by a falling tree or a transformer blew. Batteries can't do anything about those problems.
The purpose of the batteries is load management. The operator of the BESS charges the batteries at night when there is excess electricity being generated by the windmills. Then they sell that power back to the utility during peak hours.
In the case of the Oyster Shore, the BESS is owned by Jupiter Power, which is a private equity investment of the very large investment firm, Blackrock. Private equity investors demand high returns, so those investors are expecting to earn 20% returns by buying when electricity is cheap and selling it back to us when it is expensive. Make no mistake, the source of those sizable returns for Blackrock will be our utility bills.
So, they make a lot of money and we get stuck with dangerous technology for the next 30 years. Sounds like a good deal... for them.
How Much Does Wind Power Cost?
New York State Offshore Wind claims that:
"The average bill impact for customers over the life of these projects will be approximately 2%, or about $2.09 per month. The weighted average all-in development cost of the awarded offshore wind projects over the life of the contracts is $150.15 per megawatt-hour, which is on-par with the latest market prices." (Link is here.)
If the state pays $151.15 /MWh, that is equivalent to 15.115 cents per KWH. The picture above is from a local residential electric bill for January 2025. Note that the power supply charge is currently 11.9247 cents per KWH.
The State intends to pay the windmills 26.7% more per KWH for power than is currently being billed to residential customers. Of course, there are also overhead expenses, and the cost of cost of battery storage, which will also be reflected in power supply charges.
And last but not least, we will also have to pay for the new grid transmission backbone (the {Propel Project).
Does that sound like a 2% increase to you, or does it sound like a con job?
Let's Do The Math!
Green Energy Honesty
Green Energy sounds great in theory, but reality is often significantly less than advertised. We are naturally biased to want green energy to work, and that tends to bias our thinking when analyzing green energy. Nothing here suggests we should stop green energy research, but we need to be aware of the current limitations before we waste billions of dollars on pie-in-the-sky projects.
The pictures below are from slide presentation created by Vistra Corp. - the owner/developer of the Moss Landing BESS facility. Vistra describes itself as "a leading Fortune 500 integrated retail electricity and power generation company based in Irving, Texas, that provides essential power resources to customers, businesses, and communities from California to Maine." As you view these slides, it is important to remember that these were created by a green energy company!
This first slide compares a modern efficient 1GW gas plant that can power 200,000 homes with a system of renewable sources designed to power the same 200,000 homes. The renewables system requires 9X the capacity (9GW vs. 1 GW); 1,300X the required land (147,540 acres vs 110 acres); and is 10X the cost.
In fact, Vistra's estimated cost of the batteries alone is $807/kW for (2GW of 1 hour batteries), which is about 75% of the estimated total cost of the 9GW combined cycle gas plant! The idea that renewables are going to reduce electricity costs for Long Islanders is preposterous. What we need more than anything is research to discover more cost effective green energy.
To put that size into some perspective, the area required for the 9GW renewable system is the equivalent of 60% of the area of Dallas Texas and 1.7X the area of Philadelphia!
Texas has been a leader in renewable development. ERCOT (the Electric Reliability Council of Texas) operates Texas' electrical grid, known as the Texas Interconnection, which supplies power to more than 25 million Texas customers and represents 90 percent of the state's electric load.
From 2014 through 2023, renewables capacity has expanded by 4.5X, and at the end of 2023 ERCOT had 14 GW of nameplate solar capacity and 37 GW of nameplate wind capacity. However, actual generation, on average over the course of a year, is only about 40% of name plate, and in winter, actual generation is only 21% of nameplate generation capacity!
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