On one recent weekday when temperatures soared into the 90s and air-conditioners ran at full blast, the Island consumed 5,259 megawatts of electricity, beating the all-time record by 200 megawatts. A megawatt lights roughly 1,000 homes.
On a recent Saturday, the Island devoured 5,141 megawatts of power, destroying the weekend record by 714 megawatts.
Kessel says new construction on the East End of the Island is creating a huge demand for electricity. He also said many residents are enlarging their homes and adding central air-conditioning units, only furthering the need for more energy.
When LIPA took control of the Island's power grid from the Long Island Lighting Company in 1998, it was predicted that the Island wouldn't need 5,000 megawatts of electricity until 2013.
To keep up with the growing need for electricity, LIPA is partnering with a number of energy providers to bring new power sources to the Island. Among the local projects are:
€A 660-megawatt undersea electric cable from Sayerville, N.J., to Jones Beach. The cable will run up the Wantagh Parkway to a converter station in New Cassel. Groundbreaking on the project is expected to take place in the next 60 days. The cable should be complete by the summer of 2007.
€A 140-megawatt, offshore wind farm, which should be ready by the summer of 2008. Forty 260-foot-tall windmills will be sited 3.2 miles out in the Atlantic Ocean, southeast of Jones Beach and southwest of Robert Moses state parks.
Pt hed: 'Win-win' for the South Shore
Drophead: Merrick, Bellmore breathe easier with Freeport's new gas plants
By Scott Brinton
Freeport Power Plant No. 2's diesel engines stand silent these days. Most of the hardware on this pair of 13,000-horsepower, three-story behemoths has been removed, and their two aluminum smokestacks are gone, rendering them inoperable. In power-industry parlance, the engines are "fully decommissioned."
Little would one suspect that these modified ship engines were a source of enormous acrimony in Freeport, Merrick-Bellmore and Baldwin. These "dirty little diesels," as they came to be known, belched acrid, potentially carcinogenic smoke into the local atmosphere for three decades, riling residents, who in 2001 finally had enough of the smell and noise they generated.
Hundreds of mostly Merrick-Bellmore residents, led by civic activists Joe Kralovich and Bob Young, protested the diesels' operation because the engines lacked any pollution controls.
Fast-forward to August 2005. It's a recent Tuesday morning. Hubert Bianco, Freeport Electric's superintendent, is leading this reporter on a one-hour tour of the two natural-gas plants that replaced the diesels. It is the public's first glimpse inside the new plants, which sit beside the old diesels, since they started operations a little over a year ago.
New York state Sen. Charles Fuschillo Jr. and Long Island Power Authority Chairman Richard Kessel, both of Merrick, negotiated for months with the Village of Freeport in 2001 to ensure shutdown of the diesels and creation of the gas plants. The two are also taking part in Bianco's, and gush with praise for him and Freeport Mayor William Glacken, both of whom were the targets of considerable derision during the very public battle against the diesels.
The smell of grease suffuses the air inside the building that houses the now defunct 1969 Fiat diesel engines, which are frozen like two dusty, lime-green monuments to the past. Bianco wants to move the tour party out of this towering structure and into the future. He's eager to show us the technological marvels of the new gas plants, which are located off Albany Avenue in south Freeport, a half-mile west of Merrick.
Once, the diesels were counted among Long Island's worst-polluting energy producers. Now the gas plants are two of the Island's four cleanest.
The Village of Freeport owns and operates one gas plant, which provides electricity for the village's 12,000 residential and nearly 3,000 commercial ratepayers. The village also sells some of its energy to LIPA. The power producer Equus owns the other plant and sells all of the electricity it generates to LIPA.
Two General Electric LM6000 modified jet turbines power the new plants. In stark contrast to the diesel engines, the new 60,000-horsepower gas turbines burn soot free. Any residual pollution is cleansed by a massive Select Catalytic Reduction system. The plant's only emissions from its 182-foot-tall smokestacks are heat and water vapor, Bianco notes.
Pollution monitors inside the stacks keep continual track of the plant's emissions. Data from the sensors is fed into a bank of computers, which is housed in a small building at the foot of the stacks. The state Department of Environmental Conservation can call up the data remotely at any time to ensure that the plants meet emissions requirements.
By comparison, with the old diesels, the DEC had to make an appointment with Freeport Electric to inspect Plant No. 2. State officials would come, and if the plant were running at the time, they would perform an "opacity test," meaning they would shine a flashlight into the diesels' smoke. If they determined that the flashlight could be seen on the other side of the smoke, the diesels passed their emissions test. And they always did, even though they never truly met federal and state air-quality guidelines.
Freeport has also constructed a 42-foot-high cement barrier to the south of the new plants to shield nearby residents and businesses from any sound they produce, which is minimal, Bianco says.
Kessel credits Gov. George Pataki. With encouragement from the LIPA chairman and Fuschillo, the governor personally intervened in negotiations over shutdown of the diesels and construction of the new plants, and pushed the deal through. Kessel added that other local officials like county Legislator David Denenberg, a Democrat of Merrick, who is running for re-election this year, played a role in getting the new plants up and running by working to raise public awareness about the diesels' many deficiencies.
The new plants, Kessel said, are "such a win for everyone. [They're] a win for Long Island and Freeport. You're providing more power, cleaner, cheaper. This is going to be a lasting legacy for the South Shore."
The LIPA chairman noted that, increasingly, smaller natural-gas plants such as the two in Freeport are powering Long Island. Big "baseload plants," which produce enormous amounts of electricity, are hard to site, because they take up so much room and significantly alter a community's landscape, causing public alarm.
Fuschillo said that, with Freeport's new gas plants, "all of the needs have been met - the community's, the civics', the environment, the energy."
Comments about this story? Sbrinton@liherald.com or (516) 569-4000 ext. 203.
