Reliable Clean City – Idlewild Project

Our Idlewild project is a proactive, critical upgrade to New York City’s electric grid that provides multiple benefits for our customers. This $1.2 billion investment will create two new substations and a new Springfield electric network to meet the growth in demand in southeast Queens while enabling the provision of clean energy to homes, businesses, and major transportation hubs including JFK Airport and Port Authority EV bus fleet charging. It also adds additional points of interconnection for clean energy resources while increasing reliability.

Utility Thermal Energy Network Pilots

In response to a PSC order, we are developing four utility-owned Thermal Energy Network (UTEN) pilot projects. Each lasting five years, the projects listed below will explore new ways to decarbonize buildings in our service territory and inform potential future opportunities to operate and maintain UTENs.

• In Chelsea, a New York City neighborhood, we will use waste heat from a data center to both heat and cool three public housing buildings.
• In Mount Vernon, a city in Westchester County New York, we will create a geothermal network to provide heating and cooling to residential, commercial, and multifamily buildings.
• At Rockefeller Center, a nexus of retail commerce in New York City, we will test the buying and selling of thermal energy in partnership with some of our large commercial customers.
• In the Village of Haverstraw, a disadvantaged community in Rockland County, New York, we will create two separate geothermal networks. Both will serve commercial and municipal buildings, as well as a new mixed-use real estate development that includes low-income tenants.

As currently proposed, our four UTEN pilots will reduce an estimated 437,600 metric tons of GHG equivalent. Ultimately, the outcomes of these four pilots will help New York State determine UTEN’s role in achieving its goals for providing efficient, electrification within our service territory.

Clean Energy Transition

• As an anchor sponsor of the joint Electric Power Resource Institute – Gas Technology Institute Low Carbon Resources Initiative (LCRI), we benefit from influencing and selecting the low carbon fuel demonstration projects that address hard-to-electrify cases and support electric grid resilience. In 2024, the LCRI approved funding for two of our projects:
  • Using methane pyrolysis to produce clean hydrogen without carbon emissions directly from low pressure natural gas, and
  • Using e-methanol produced from renewable energy as a drop-in fuel for boilers and combustion turbines.

Benefits of using methane pyrolysis and e-methanol over green hydrogen include energy and cost savings as well as increased safety.

We are part of the Stony Brook University led team, funded by a New York State Energy Research and Development Authority (NYSERDA) grant, that will assess the viability of storing green hydrogen gas as a metal hydride solid. The stored energy can be used by a fuel cell to generate electricity for on-site supplemental power, as well as to power direct current (DC) fast chargers for EVs.

Enhancing Safety and Operational Excellence

• In collaboration with Prysmian Group, PA Consulting, and Exelon Corporation, we were awarded a grant from the US Department of Energy’s Advanced Research Projects Agency-Energy (ARPA-E) to develop a medium voltage cable splicing machine. The machine will reduce the time workers spend in underground enclosed spaces, an environment with inherent risks, and consistently produce better quality splices that will result in an increase in reliability.
• Building upon the success of our game changing AMI-enabled natural gas detector program, we are working with a new vendor to develop the first of its kind AMI capable NGD unit with an optic sensor. We plan on piloting these devices in 2025.
• We built and demonstrated a Digital Twin of our steam system as part of our Steam Digital Optimization Solution (SDOS) project. Using AI and machine learning, SDOS can help us reduce steam costs, increase electric customer savings, identify GHG emissions and fuel cost savings, and meet regulatory requirements.

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