REV: A Quiet Energy Revolution in New York State

What is the Public Service Commission's 'REV' Initiative and 

how will it affect our lives?

By Larry Beahan, Habitat chairman of the Sierra Club Niagara Group

Have you heard of the “REV”? It is a revolution in the supply and regulation of New York’s energy. It is a dramatic and fundamental change and it is a dirty shame that most New Yorkers have never heard of it. REV stands for the NY Public Service Commission’s initiative, Reforming the Energy Vision.

When my mother was 5 in 1911, a man came to the front door. “Do you folks want electricity?” he asked. She said “no,” and shut the door. Grandma overheard and rushed after him to have gas lights replaced with Edison bulbs. Tesla and Westinghouse had built an electric power plant at Niagara Falls and formed a company that shipped power by wire all over the region.

That basic model for electric power is still with us. Investor-owned utilities produce electricity in large central plants with hydro, coal, natural gas and nuclear energy and transmit it to consumers over a complex grid. Doing an affordable and reliable job of it is an increasingly complex puzzle.

Power plants and their transmission systems are aging and energy demands are rising. Unusual weather creates demand peaks. Plants are prime terrorist targets, and fossil fuels have filled the air with pollution and the skies with global warming gasses.

In response, we have shifted away from central sources of power and moved to windmills, solar panels and geothermal installations that are widely distributed and close to consumers. These renewable energy sources don’t pollute or cause global warming. But they raise questions. Who will own them? How will they be paid for? How will they be integrated into a mutually supportive system?

Last April the Public Service Commission issued orders for the REV initiative. The commission staff went to work chiefly with utility company executives to answer these and many related questions. It has come up with a “straw proposal,” a complex technical document that needs an engineer with training in linguistics to understand.

On the insistence of environmental organizations, the PSC has agreed to hold six forums across the state where the REV will be explained and the rest of us will have two minutes before a microphone to make our contributions.

This scanty opportunity to be involved in a titanic change in the power supply to our civilization is a travesty. Tesla’s salesman offered my poor mother as much in 1911.

New Yorkers deserve to thoroughly understand what is being proposed and how it will affect our lives. We deserve an opportunity to have our own experts contribute to the design of a distributive power system for the 21st century.

The Public Service Commission meetings on the REV in Buffalo are at 2 p.m. and 6 p.m. Thursday, January 29th in the Central Library in downtown Buffalo.

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This article originally appeared in The Buffalo News and at BuffaloNews.com

Don’t renew National Fuel’s gas lease in Allegany State Park

By Larry Beahan

National Fuel Gas owns a lease on 9,000 acres of Allegany State Park. It can drill storage wells as it sees fit anywhere in that area. The lease ends in June 2014. Let’s not renew it.

National Fuel has been in Allegany State Park too long. For 50 years, its 12 gas storage wells and the tangle of roads that service them have kept 9,000 acres in the heart of the park from returning to natural forest. Now its website advertises the possibility that it will increase the number of these wells.

Few park visitors know it is there. The park neither prevents nor encourages visitors hiking in this huge area. The National Fuel right of way is an ample gravel road that starts from halfway between ASP-1 and ASP-2 on France Brook Road and winds north toward Red House Lake. Both of these major highways are inside the leased territory and it stretches beyond them to the east and west, even including the 350-year-old old-growth hemlocks in the Big Basin [click map to enlarge].

A barrier across the storage well road prevents driving farther, so your hiking tour begins at the barrier. Go take a look for yourself. See the acre-sized clear-cuts around the 12 storage wells and the roads slicing up the forest. Or tour the wells on your computer via Google Earth. Google shows this road system laid out like a human victim in a crime-scene sketch.

It is an ecological crime. What could be a hundred-year-old intact forest has fallen victim to the fossil fuel industry. A hundred years ago, most of the park was cleared of its trees, crisscrossed by hundreds of miles of logging railroads and pocked with 200 gas and oil wells. Eighty-five percent of the park has been allowed to cover these scars with oaks, maples, beech and ash. National Fuel’s 15 percent of the park remains cluttered and broken.

Perhaps that made sense 100 years ago, but New York State has now recognized the global warming consequences of using gas, oil and coal as energy sources. We are on track to have 30 percent of our energy sourced from wind, sun and water by 2015. Closing those wells moves us in the right direction.

Two years in a row, National Fuel has been criticized for paying executives too much, including $7.5 million to its chief executive, the highest salary in Western New York. Last year, National Fuel Gas made 2 percent more profit than the New York State Public Service Commission, charged with regulating utilities, considered to be fair. The PSC is forcing National Fuel to repay us $7.5 million of this excess profit.

It is time for the people of New York State to reclaim their 9,000 acres of Allegany forest as well. Call the governor or write him a letter. Tell him we want our woods back. Tell him: Do not renew that lease. Tell the governor to tell National Fuel: Go take a hike.

Larry Beahan is conservation chairman of the Sierra Club Niagara Group.

Original article, without the map, appeared as an op-ed in The Buffalo News