The Green Catch

Governor Kathy Hochul is pitching ambitious but necessary proposals to phase out fossil fuel-powered heating and cooking appliances in new homes, and to eventually prohibit the replacement of oil and natural gas furnaces and boilers with anything but “green” heating equipment. These are ideas that feel at once a little too premature yet long overdue.

The climate crisis is here, and human activity — namely, burning oil, gas and coal, and destroying carbon-storing forests and peat lands — is the driving force behind it. The effects are experienced in more severe and more frequent extreme weather events and vacillations between extended drought and unprecedented flooding. Things will only get worse the longer governments take half-measures to reduce carbon emissions. So, here, the governor deserves to be applauded for taking steps that are certainly in the right direction, despite being unpopular with many.

But there is a catch, and it’s a big one: New York, despite being a national leader, does not have the clean energy infrastructure to power all of these new all-electric homes, let alone to convert homes now heated by oil or gas. If homes go all-electric but are plugged into the same old grid, they will be drawing on power that is still largely produced by burning fossil fuels.

New York’s long-term plans call for the state’s electric grid to reach 70 percent clean energy by 2030 and 100 percent by 2040. Downstate, this plan largely relies on rapid development of wind and solar projects. There are a number of projects in various stages of planning and development that will green up New York’s grid, including South Fork Wind off Montauk and Sunrise Wind to the west. But they’re not enough.

2040 will be here before we know it. Will we be celebrating reaching this goal or lamenting how far behind we are? In 2019, the state grid was already at 54 percent carbon-free, including nuclear energy, so meeting this goal may be more readily achievable than we realize. However, as electric motors replace combustion engines on our roads, and as homes — if the governor’s plans go through — all begin to convert to electric heat and stoves, the growing demand on the grid could make it an unsurmountable task.

For the governor’s fossil fuel appliance bans to work, she must couple the proposals with requirements that all new construction projects either produce their own electricity with solar panels or contribute to cover the costs of a new solar farm or wind farm that can absorb the projects’ demand. And for existing homes and commercial buildings, the state needs to step up its incentives for rooftop solar to ensure that the growth of carbon-free energy production in New York is outpacing the growth of energy demand.