To The Reader’s Forum:

Governor Cuomo says the state is broke, yet he intends to tax New Yorkers $33 Billion to address ‘global warming’.

The NRG power plant in Dunkirk produced 635 MW of electricity — was set to convert to gas turbines by 2020 with the potential to nearly double that electricity output, reliably 24/7. Compare that with perhaps 30 to 50 MW that might be produced intermittently at great expense by the three combined wind projects for Chautauqua County with 100 industrial wind turbines impacting tens of thousands of acres and rural residents’ quality of life.

NRG idled operations in 2016. “We were informed that these [grid connection] costs could rise to nearly $114 million,” David Gaier, NRG spokesman, told Power Magazine in July 2018. This was in the form of a “fine” imposed arbitrarily by Governor Cuomo to kill the dual cycle gas turbine option for the region.

Two years later there is a large facility — a point of interconnection (POI) to the grid being built down the road from NRG on Route 60. It could have been built at the Dunkirk NRG site using existing facility components without purchase of land and forest clearing/wetland destruction. This POI will do nothing to address a major statewide power bottleneck on the entire grid.

At what unnecessary cost was this new construction undertaken?

The Federal Energy Regulatory Commission (FERC) has recently said New York State’s financial favoritism to big wind does not comply with federal regulations. FERC says New York State subsidizes wind unfairly thereby undermining all reliable, inexpensive forms of power, jeopardizing grid stability.

Wind, solar and biomass energy is shown as a wasteful scam in the Michael Moore-Jeff Gibbs film “Planet of the Humans”. Our own electricity bills show more of this scam – the SBC item on all bills — amounts to a Cuomo slush fund outside the required purview of the legislative branch — amounting to millions per year.

Cuomo’s energy policy — if put to a cost benefit analysis will be seen as a policy of unethical conduct, malfeasance, hypocrisy, and state fraud at the expense of New York citizens.

Karen Engstrom,

Mayville