The Corridor Journal of Strategic Alliances Sustainable Energy & The Environment | Page 12

CORNERSTONE INTERVIEW

Neal Lewis
Vivian Leber

Sustainability Institute at
Molloy College

“It’s not acceptable for Long Island to have only 3% renewables, while
California has 35%.”
Long Island is endowed with a number of
savvy environmental advocacy groups.
Neal Lewis, Executive Director of the
Sustainability Institute at Molloy College,
is surely an advocate who walks the
walk (he drives a Prius and follows a
vegan diet). But he also defies certain
expectations.
First, he was at odds with other Long
Island environmentalists in being the
sole supporter of building the proposed
new and sizable Caithness II facility in
Yaphank. The super-efficient primarily
natural gas-run electricity generation plant
based on advanced German technology

was meant to ensure meeting the region’s
power demand needs even on the hottest
summer days, thus eliminating the need
to employ dirty, fuel-guzzling older plants.
(Nonetheless, Caithness II was shelved
by LIPA in 2014, when PSEG determined
that the additional power capacity would
be costly and redundant, though the
project yet may be revived after a new
comprehensive Integrated Resource Plan
(IRP) is completed.)
Let’s Get to 50/50
Second, Lewis believes that Long Island
should realistically strive to reach the
level of 50% renewable energy use by
2025, with the other 50% from new highly
efficient fossil-fuel generation, which
would quickly result in steep greenhouse
gas reductions. Many renewables
advocates want to shoot for 100%, and
during the conversion shun all efforts to
replace or modernize the old dirty plants
in order to get more bang for the buck
from burning fossil-fuels more efficiently.
“Should we wait decades on modernizing
the system unil we get to 100%, or
simultaneously move up from the
current level of about 3% renewables,
while immediately reducing emissions
dramatically with new modern natural gas
plants as part of an integrated plan?” He
explains that such a combined-cycle plant
as Caithness II, which captures energy
twice, would reduce carbon dioxide
emissions by 40% over single-cycle old
plants. If Caithness is not built then there
will be an additional 1.1 metric tons of
CO2 released annually, which is equal to
the CO2 reductions from 467 Megawatts
(about 77 turbines) of offsh