Thursday, November 12, 2020 – LET’S EXPLAIN WHAT IS HAPPENING IN RAVENSWOOD

By admin

THURSDAY, NOVEMBER 12,  2020

The

208th Edition

From Our Archives

That Peaker Across the River

Stephen Blank

That Peaker Across the River

That grand pile in Queens across the river. The big thing with four towering red and white stacks – the Ravenswood Generating Station, to be precise. “Peaker” will come a bit later: read on.

It’s big. Ravenswood was the world’s first million kilowatt power plant.  It was one of the largest power generating stations in New York, with the capacity to supply 21% of all the electricity used in New York City.

Some (early) history

We learn from an article in the Brownstoner magazine that the plant sits on the former site of the Jacob Blackwell Mansion, built in 1744. Blackwell was a latecomer, of course — the Dutch were well established along this coast by the 1650s. Jacob was one of 12 children of Robert Blackwell (who, you recall, came to own our island when he married the daughter of its former owner, Robert Manning). Jacob Blackwell became the owner of a Ravenswood house – not yet “the Mansion” – in 1717. At that time, Ravenswood became a neighborhood of fine riverside estates – now “the Mansion”. Soon, however, the wealthy moved eastwards on Long Island. Their mansions were left behind and by the late 1870s many ended up as orphanages and asylums. As the LIRR moved in along Newtown Creek, hundreds of small factories sprang up in Ravenswood which prospered along the busy East River. Finally, during the 1930s and 40s, vast tracts of public housing (and Queensbridge Park) were erected and the recognizable shape of modern Ravenswood was formed.

The Ravenswood plant was initially designed to be a nuclear generator! 

Richard Gentilviso writes in a June 20, 2012 article in The Gazette that about the same time – summer, fall 1962 – the Japanese decided to allow Tokyo Electric to build a nuclear plant in Fukushima and Con Ed was about to go online at Indian Point, Con Ed also applied to the Atomic Energy Commission to build a 1,000-megawatt nuclear generating station at the Ravenswood generating station. This would have been the world’s largest nuclear plant, with a capacity greater than all existing nuclear power plants in the U.S. at the time.

Local opposition quickly coalesced against the proposal and succeeded in stopping the threat of a nuclear power plant in the Ravenswood area’s back yard. Expert views were conflicted. In April 1963, Con Ed Chairman Harland C. Forbes told a Congressional committee any concerns were “rather silly” and that “one or two people have raised some question about the genetic effects of radiation and so forth”. But in testimony to the same Congressional committee, David E. Lillenthal, a former chairman of the Atomic Energy Commission, said, “I would not dream of living in the borough of Queens if there were a large atomic power plant in that region because there is an alternative—a conventional thermal power plant to which there are no risks.”

On Jan. 6, 1964, Con Ed withdrew its application for the nuclear power plant at Ravenswood.

But, writes Gentilviso, the nuclear story wasn’t over. Con Ed proposed another plan in 1968 to build a nuclear reactor not more than several hundred feet from the Ravenswood plants below an abandoned hospital site on Welfare Island (now Roosevelt Island). A nuclear plant on our island!!! They made a third proposal in 1970 for nuclear plants built on man-made islands located several miles off Coney Island in Brooklyn and Staten Island. Neither plan went far.

At the end of the day, said J. Samuel Walker, a historian of the U.S. Nuclear Regulatory Commission, “Ravenswood was kind of a test case…” After Ravenswood, he said, the commission “agreed on kind of an informal rule: They wouldn’t allow a [nuclear] plant any closer to the city than Indian Point.

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The Great Blackout of 1965: “Big Allis”

Con Ed’s first two Ravenswood units constructed in 1963 were Ravenswood 10 and 20, each having a generating capacity of approximately 385 megawatts. Then, in 1965, Cen Ed commissioned Ravenswood 30. It was built by Allis Chalmers which announced that Con Ed had ordered the “world’s first MILLION-KILOWATT unit…big enough to serve 3,000,000 people.” This sheer scale helped the plant become popularly known as “Big Allis”.

Big Allis played a role in the Great Blackout of 1965. The blackout – which affected many communities in the Northeast and Canada, began at a misprogrammed protective relay on a transmission line on the Beck power station in Queenston, Ontario, near Niagara Falls. The safety relay was set to trip if other protective equipment deeper within the Ontario Hydro system failed to operate properly. On a particularly cold November evening, power demands for heating, lighting, and cooking were pushing the electrical system to near its peak capacity. Transmission lines heading into southern Ontario were heavily loaded. The safety relay had been programmed incorrectly, and it did what it had been asked to do: disconnect under the excess loads it perceived. Bear in mind that at this time, all of these power generators scattered across the two countries were interconnected with few firewalls between them. The idea was that it would be easier to share power as required.

As a result of this failure, a small variation of power originating from the Robert Moses generating plant in Lewiston, New York caused the relay there to trip, disabling a main power line heading into Southern Ontario. Instantly, the power that was flowing on the tripped line transferred to the other lines, causing them to become overloaded. Their own protective relays, which are also designed to protect the lines from overload, tripped, isolating Beck station from all of southern Ontario.

With nowhere else to go, the excess power from Beck then flowed east, over the interconnected lines into New York State, overloading them as well. The Beck generators, with no outlet for their power, were automatically shut down to prevent damage. The story goes on, but basically a ”tsunami of power” was heading south. In New York City, as monitoring dials went wild, a crucial operator at the main power control station made frantic phone calls upstate instead of preemptively shutting down the city’s system to protect it. Automatic shutoffs took over and suddenly closed down the Con Ed system for the first time in its history, causing damage to the power system.

I was told (which means that I cannot confirm this) that people at Ravenswood hoped the Big Allis would withstand the oncoming load and keep the City’s power on. Alas, it was not to be. Big Allis’ burned up its bearings – because the device that kept the bearings oiled ran on the power generated by Big Allis – so Big Allis went down too.

Ultimately the 1965 power failure covered 80,000 square miles and affected about 25 million people. (But the Blackout Baby Boom turns out to have all been a myth.)

Who Owns Ravenswood?

Ravenswood was originally built and owned by Con Ed. Due to New York State’s energy market deregulation, Con Edison was required to sell all of its “in-city ” generating stations in New York City including Ravenswood. In 1999, Con Edison transferred ownership of Ravenswood to KeySpan Energy. In 2004, KeySpan constructed a new unit, Ravenswood 40, using combined cycle technology with generating capacity of 250 megawatts. National Grid plc acquired KeySpan in 2007 but due to its involvement in electrical transmission, the New York Public Service Commission required National Grid to sell Ravenswood to ensure competition in the market. On August 26, 2008, Ravenswood was sold by National Grid to TransCanada Corporation for $2.9 billion. Trans Canada sold Ravenswood to LS Power/Helix Energy Solutions Group with Ethos power running it. In 2018, Helix Generation LLC filed a lawsuit against TransCanada Facility USA Inc. for allegedly fraudulently misleading Helix prior to the sale.

And today – Peaker Plants

Ravenswood is not now of 16 operating Peaker plants in New York City that fit into the New York Power Authority’s market and send their energy to the city’s power grid. Peakers are run to provide power to the grid to meet peak demand. They were intended to be used only once or twice a year, but they now run in New York City on a more regular basis to meet the city’s growing energy demands, particularly in the evening when more lights and devices are turned on.

Peakers may be run only a relatively few hours in the year, but they often tend to be among the most polluting assets on the electrical grid. Reasons are they are older and they are fed by the most polluting fuel oil. Clean energy groups contend that the reductions in greenhouse gases are tremendous, when Peaker plants are replaced with renewables-plus-storage.

Peaker plants are also expensive. A new report (“Dirty Energy, Big Money,” published by the PEAK Coalition, which consists of New York City environmental justice groups NYC-EJA, UPROSE, and The Point CDC, as well as New York Lawyers for the Public Interest and Clean Energy Group) found that New Yorkers over the last decade have paid more than $4.5 billion in electricity bills to the private owners of the city’s Peaker plants, just to keep those plants online in case they’re needed—even though they only operate between 90 and 500 hours a year. Even at the upper limit, that’s less than three weeks. This all means that the price tag for peak electricity in the Big Apple is 1,300 percent higher than the average cost of electricity in the state. The report also found that about 85 % of the last decade’s peak electricity payments were funneled to three private, out-of-state firms—a Boston hedge fund, a Houston fossil-fuel generation company, and a New Jersey private equity firm—that own a large share of the oldest New York City Peaker plants.

In July 2019, the New York State Energy Research & Development Authority study identified Peaker plants in the state that could be replaced with battery storage, and Ravenswood was identified as a candidate to have an 8-hour battery storage facility that can power 250,000 homes. The report concluded that most of the Ravenswood transition could be completed by March 2021, and this transformation would be a new sustainable model for the city to transition other Peaker plants to zero emissions.

The Ravenswood plant would be the largest battery-run plant in the state, considered the first of its kind in the region, and would fall in line with Governor Cuomo’s Green New Deal goals of 1,500 MW of storage in New York by 2025 and 3,000 MW of storage by 2030. The state recently finalized new pollution restrictions that would drive the most polluting plants into retirement. Still, batteries are only as environmentally friendly as the sources of the power that recharge them. The Ravenswood battery would continue to be charged in part by existing fossil fuel infrastructure.

In this past October, the New York Power Authority (NYPA) said that it had agreed with a coalition of clean energy and environmental justice groups to assess how NYPA can “transition” the Peaker plants in its service area to “utilize clean energy technologies”. According to the NYPA and PEAK Coalition, the available options could include “battery storage and low to zero carbon emission resources and technologies”. As well as lowering greenhouse gas emissions and other pollutants, the transition plan is aimed at improving air quality. The NYPA-PEAK Coalition release emphasized that plans to transition NYPA’s six Peaker plants in New York City and one on Long Island, which have been in operation since 2001, must maintain the electric system’s reliability and resiliency requirements while helping the state meet its policy goal of achieving zero carbon electricity statewide by 2040.

Under New York’s groundbreaking climate law passed last year, the Climate Leadership and Community Protection Act, the state must reform this system to achieve a carbon-free electricity generation system by 2040. But many argue that there is no need to wait that long – the technology exists to transform the system – and that what is needed now is a commitment to prioritize the health and resilience of our hardest-hit neighborhoods.

The story continues, of course.

Stephen Blank

RIHS

November 9, 2020

THURSDAY PHOTO OF THE DAY
SEND YOUR SUBMISSION TO:
ROOSEVELTISLANDHISTORY@GMAIL.COM

WEDNESDAY PHOTO OF THE DAY

QUEENSBORO BRIDGE FROM MANHATTAN WITH
ELEVATOR STOREHOUSE BUILDING
BY BERENICE ABBOTT
No one guessed this one

FROM A READER

Hi Judy,
I just saw the newsletter about Wodemar, and scrolling down I got a surprise–I have two of Woldemar’s prints,  in your newsletter (versions of the two, I should say). I bought them more than 50 years ago, when I lived a few blocks from Gracie Mansion (in an old tenement walkup) and could barely afford art. They are quite large, and their colors are slightly different from the ones you show. Both are winter scenes, and show at least part of Roosevelt Island. They were something of a premonition of my future, at a time when I never imagined I would marry or move out of Manhattan. My dream then was to live in one of those East Side buildings that look out on these scenes. 

I never knew anything about Woldemar Neufeld, so I thank you for the information. I don’t know why I never looked him up–the prints, which have the look of original woodcuts or linoleum prints–have been with me for so long, and I did buy them before there was internet or google. I have had them in my summer place in Maine for many years, because I like to have Roosevelt Island to look at while I’m away from here. I hope they’re ok–I haven’t been back to Maine this year and it’s unlikely that I’ll see my prints until next summer if we’re all lucky.

Susan Lees

Text by Judith Berdy
Thanks to Bobbie Slonevsky for her dedication to Blackwell’s Almanac and the RIHS
Thanks to Deborah Dorff for maintaining our website
Edited by Melanie Colter  and Deborah Dorff
All image are copyrighted (c)

https://www.brownstoner.com/history/big-allis-aka-the-ravenswood-generating-station/
https://www.qgazette.com/articles/50-years-of-opposition-brings-ravenswood-nuclear-power-plant-ban/
Ravenswood Generating Station From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
https://www.motherjones.com/environment/2018/12/power-plant-explosion-casts-new-light-on-new-yorks-addiction-to-dirty-fuel/
www.utilitydive.com/news/replace-nyc-peakers-with-renewablesstorage-plant-owners-say-theyre-worki/577742/
https://www.energy-storage.news/news/clean-transition-for-peaker-plants-new-york-power-authority-environmental-j
https://gothamist.com/news/the-push-to-turn-nycs-polluting-peaker-plants-into-publicly-owned-solar-power

The Miriam and Ira D. Wallach Division of Art, Prints and Photographs: Photography Collection, The New York Public Library. “Queensboro Bridge: I. From 63rd Street Pier, Manhattan.” The New York Public Library Digital Collections. 1937. https://digitalcollections.nypl.org/items/510d47d9-4f4c-a3d9-e040-e00a18064a99

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