There are more than a dozen options in the Jamestown Board of Public Utilities’ study of options to retool its district heating system.

Three options make the most sense – exiting the district heating business altogether and letting 70 downtown building owners install their own boilers, extending the district heating loop to the BPU’s wastewater treatment plant to Kennedy so it can use heated and treated wastewater as the heat source for district heating or, if test wells are successful, using geothermal wells drilled on BPU property to provide the heat source for district heating.

All are costly in their own way.

A third option would have cost money, too, but we have a feeling it would have been less expensive than the type of retooling options that are on the table – but the source is out of favor with the New York intelligentsia.

We’re talking, of course, about natural gas. Keeping the existing loop the same, powering the system with natural gas, even if that meant an updated natural gas turbine, and updating the existing system would have cost money, but it would have been a smaller, less ambitious project than the options the BPU is considering now.

As we said in this space recently, both the BPU and city residents don’t have all the information they need to make decisions yet on the future of the district heating system. The BPU needs to see how many customers it can add along the proposed new route, business owners need to determine if it’s cheaper for them to install their own heating sources or sign on to district heat, and the BPU needs to see which heat source makes the most sense.

No one knows the true cost of the state’s conversion from fossil fuels like natural gas to green energy, though the Empire Center for New York State Policy has pegged the costs in the hundreds of billions of dollars. Last March, the center pegged household spending on Climate Leadership and Community Protection Act spending at about $110 a year per household already in increased utility rates. That same September 2023 Empire Center report states the cost for some commercial utility customers can be as much as $16,000 per month more for CLCPA costs. That’s close to $200,000 annually in additional operating costs for large businesses. Those are the increased costs for the status quo. Now imagine what those numbers look like as you undertake local projects that have to meet the CLCPA mandates.

It’s safe to say the state taking natural gas off the table makes the district heat system update a more complicated, more expensive project. Get used to it – you ain’t seen nothing yet.