By Scott Brinton
Company representatives say the $400-million project would alleviate the need to build power plants locally, such as those recently proposed in the Village of Freeport across from the Norman J. Levy Preserve in south Merrick.
There is a real need for electricity on Long Island, said Charles Micoleau, director of and regulatory attorney for Neptune Regional Transmission System LLC, the company that wants to construct the cable.
The cable to Nassau would start in Sayerville, N.J., and run for 47 miles, three to six feet below the Atlantic Ocean floor, through Jones Inlet and Hempstead Bay south of Bellmore-Merrick, before finally making landfall in Wantagh, according to Neptune.
In Wantagh, the cable, measuring seven inches in diameter, would connect to a converter station that would transform direct current from New Jersey to alternating current. (Long Island's power grid runs on alternating current.)
Neptune is seeking to buy eight acres of Nassau County land behind Cedar Creek Park on Merrick Road, where it would build the five-story converter station, according to county Legis. David Denenberg (D-Merrick), in whose district the station would fall. The land, which sits next to the Cedar Creek sewage-treatment plant, is now home to a car impoundment lot. Sale of the property would require approval by the county legislature and executive. The county's asking price for the land: $10.3 million.
From the converter station, another cable would be buried along the Wantagh Parkway right-of-way. The cable would beam electricity from the converter to a Long Island Power Authority substation on Newbridge Road in Levittown. From there, electricity would enter the Long Island power grid, which LIPA controls.
Neptune would spend roughly $90 million to build the Cedar Creek converter station and run cable from Wantagh to Levittown.
The oceanic cable would allow Neptune to import to the Island relatively inexpensive electricity that is produced in New Jersey, Pennsylvania and Delaware.
Neptune, whose strategic partner is the Texas-based TXU utility, is now in talks with the Long Island Power Authority to buy scheduling rights at the Newbridge substation. Essentially, scheduling rights would allow Neptune to use the substation.
The three-year-old Neptune company is also discussing the possible sale of electricity to LIPA, though it could sell to other local utilities such as the villages of Freeport and Rockville Centre.
LIPA Chairman Richard Kessel, of Merrick, said, We have had discussions with Neptune. He would not, however, disclose the nature of those talks.
He did say, We need additional transmission lines to Long Island.
In its recently published Long Island Energy Plan, LIPA spoke of the need for at least one new line into Long Island. The power authority had begun construction of a cable across Long Island Sound this year when opposition from Connecticut stalled the project.
The power authority is now working furiously to ensure that Long Island's electricity supply doesn't run out next summer.
Last week, LIPA announced that Florida-based FPL Energy would build a power plant in Far Rockaway and that PSEG would construct one in North Bellport to help supply the Island's energy needs in the summer of 2003 and beyond. Immediately, residents in both communities began speaking out against the plants.
According to Kessel, Long Island's energy demands soared last summer during a prolonged heat wave, jumping by more than 10 percent over the same period the year before.
Excessive heat drives everyone to use air conditioning as much as possible around the clock, Kessel said. With the growing dependency on an air-conditioned environment either in the home, workplace or in stores and restaurants, Long Island is not only demanding higher amounts of electricity during the normal peak demand hours on a hot summer day, but the demand for electricity builds quicker earlier in the day.
Kessel said that he expects opposition to the Neptune project because people are generally opposed to anything. He noted, though, that we're all using more electricity, and additional power sources are needed.
Already, Wantagh-Seaford civic activists such as Vicky Rosenberg and Christine Marzigliano, who successfully battled a proposed sewage pelletization plant at Cedar Creek, have started speaking out against the project, saying the converter station would depreciate home values in their area.
Denenberg said he's weighing the Neptune project's costs and benefits. He likes the fact, though, that it would provide Long Island with a considerable amount of power Ñ 600 megawatts Ñ without construction of new power plants, which, no matter how clean-burning, still give off emissions and degrade air quality.
To inform the public about the proposal and hear possible concerns over it, Denenberg hosted a community meeting last Tuesday at Seaford High School. Neptune representatives were on hand to answer questions, using diagrams, charts and even a sample of the cable to illustrate how it would be built.
In a Herald interview, Micoleau said Neptune would use directional drilling to lay the cable through environmentally sensitive sections of Hempstead Bay. With directional drilling, a hole is bored 10 to 15 feet below the ocean floor and a drill then tunnels horizontally underneath the area, leaving the surface untouched.
Micoleau also noted that, as the cable neared land in Nassau, it would run through the deepest part of Wantagh Channel, the center, without disturbing surrounding saltwater wetlands.
In the open ocean, a trench would be dug. The cable, made of copper and steel with a plastic coating, would be laid in the trench and buried. A fiberoptic cable would run alongside it to take readings and ensure that electricity was flowing through the main cable.
Micoleau estimated that the cable could come online as early as 2005. Neptune would need at least a year to get all the needed permits from the state Department of Environmental Conservation, the New Jersey Department of Environmental Protection, the federal Army Corps of Engineers and the Public Service Commission, among other government agencies, before construction could begin.
Denenberg spoke of electromagnetic fields as a possible concern associated with the project. The increased electricity entering the Newbridge Road substation would, logically, increase EMF's. High-tension wires have come under criticism in communities around the country because they give off EMF's, which are feared to cause cancer.
Micoleau said EMF's from the Newbridge station would meet New York state standards. He added that the EMF's would dissipate by the time they reached the substation's property line.
EMF's from the underground cable would not be detectable at the surface.
Micoleau said the New Jersey-New York cable is one of several planned from the mid-Atlantic states northward as far as Boston. The cables, he said, are intended to relieve electricity bottlenecks in densely populated areas.
Bottlenecks are essentially electrical traffic jams, and they occur when electricity demands exceed cables' ability to import power into a region. Long Island is especially prone to bottlenecks, according to the New York Independent Service Operator, which manages New York's power grid.
Micoleau envisions a network of major cables that could import electricity up and down the eastern seaboard from such distant sources as New Brunswick, Canada, and Maine, where there is a plethora of power plants and an oversupply of electricity.
Denenberg said he sees a possible upside to the Neptune project. The county, in agreeing to sell off acreage at Cedar Creek, could negotiate to have the company build amenities such as bike and skateboarding parks in the Wantagh-Seaford area, as well as a recreation center that would be open to all county residents.
Micoleau declined to commit to any such projects now. He did say, however, What we're doing is listening. We want to be a good neighbor. He concluded by saying the cable is remarkable in its overall simplicity, and it will meet a real need.
