By Frank Andorka, Senior Correspondent
New York has developed something of an inferiority complex about its renewable energy and storage market. They ceded leadership first to New Jersey, then Vermont (yes, VERMONT, of all places) and now Massachusetts gets the majority of headlines in the Northeast.
So New York Governor Andrew Cuomo, no shy retiring flower himself, has made it his life mission to seize back the headlines from his fellow Northeastern states by setting aggressive goals for both renewable energy and storage growth – and he’s not hesitant to tell anyone who is listening how fantastic his plan is going to be.
And make no mistake, Cuomo’s plan is ambitious, particularly for energy storage. Starting from zero, Cuomo has pledged to reach 1,500 MW of energy storage and put out a plan in June that would set a target at double that.
But what Cuomo seems to forget is that the wheels of bureaucracy turn slowly and often painfully, and according to at least one company that desperately wants to participate in New York’s energy storage boom is objecting to the rules as they are now in place, saying they make it impossible for third-party storage projects to compete.
Our friends at Microgrid Knowledge have the details of GI Energy’s complaints:
Because third parties are unable to price their projects properly, they face an uneven playing field, GI Energy argues.
“And, “perhaps most confounding of all,” GI Energy writes, utilities can deem their own energy storage projects as grid assets subject to no delivery bills while third party projects are treated as new retail accounts that are billed for delivery” — as if they were any other commercial behind the meter service.
As a result, what could be the single biggest operating expense for energy storage developers remains undefined in New York, the filing states.”
How can third-party storage projects compete when they’re not sure how much the utility is going to charge them for the delivery? No, we have no idea either.
These and other rules are going to have to be hashed out right quick if New York is going to be any sort of significant player in the energy storage market, and New York is going to have to address complaints like those of GI Energy if they want to stay ahead of their Northeastern neighbors in this new race to the top.
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