Extreme Green New Deal-styled policies that eliminate access to affordable and reliable natural gas disproportionately harm consumers and jeopardize grid reliability, a new study finds, with New England users again falling victim to electricity supply shortages and crippling energy costs.
Natural gas constraints in New York and across New England cost consumers an estimated $1.8 Billion over just one month in 2014, according to the CMU study.
The study, which analyzed power plant failures in the ISO-New England power market, found 2.4 gigawatts of ISO-NE’s natural gas capacity fails each year due to natural gas supply shortages. Recently, with electricity and gas demand growing, approximately 5-25% of all unscheduled power outages resulted from limited gas availability.
“Half of all installed power plant capacity in the region is fueled primarily by gas and nearly half of all electricity comes from natural gas power plants,” the researchers wrote.
“When heating demand spikes on key gas supply pipelines to the region, those pipelines cannot always meet all the region’s heating demand and demand for power-plant fuel at the same time.”
New York and New England border the largest and most prolific shale gas basin in the country, yet face soaring costs and reliability challenges because of politically motivated policies that ban natural gas development and needed pipeline expansions.
These policy decisions, rooted by Keep it in the Ground extremism over clear-eyed science and pragmatism, choke the region’s natural gas supply. Just a few years ago, in fact, New Englanders turned to Russian-produced natural gas due to pipeline capacity constraints to move Pennsylvania-produced natural gas into the northeast.
What’s more, in 2019, a small deli shop owner in Brooklyn couldn’t access the natural gas needed to run its grills and a developer in Westchester canned a project because natural gas supply wasn’t available.
These energy struggles seem foreign to Pennsylvanians, who save a bundle on home energy because we efficiently and responsibly produce, transport and use our natural gas abundance. Additionally, elected leaders here have prioritized developing our energy resources so that the industry’s benefits traverse the entire state.
The answer to enhancing New England’s grid reliability is clear: expand access to Pennsylvania natural gas and benefit from the societal and environmental advantages that domestic shale delivers.
“Expanding pipeline access to Pennsylvania-produced natural gas, which also creates good-paying jobs for the region’s building trades, would solve New York and New England’s chronic energy challenges,” MSC president Dave Callahan said.
