NEW YORK, New York, US, May 9, 2007.
The city of New York will foster the market for renewable energy by creating a property tax abatement for solar panel installations.
The measure was one of 127 separate initiatives announced on Earth Day by mayor Michael Bloomberg in ‘PlaNYC: a Greener, Greater New York.’ The policy is the culmination of public meetings on the sustainability goals which include additional reliable power sources and reducing the city’s GHG emissions by 30%.
Early last month, Bloomberg released New York’s first comprehensive inventory of GHG emissions.
The city will also study the cost-effectiveness of solar electricity when evaluated on a Real Time Pricing scenario, support construction of the city's first carbon neutral building that will be powered primarily by solar electricity, increase the use of solar energy in municipal buildings through financing mechanisms, and work with the state to eliminate barriers to increasing the use of solar energy in the city.
“We need to increase open space, expand housing, deal with our congested roadways, create better mass transit options, increase our energy sources and stabilise our water supply or we simply won’t be able to continue the high quality of life we now enjoy,” he explains. “If we act now, we’ll have a better future, a better quality of life, and more importantly, our children and their children will too.”
“As we grow, and if summers continue to get warmer, the strain will increase, resulting in more breakdowns, more polluted air, and rising energy bills,” he adds. “If we do nothing, the city’s total energy bill will increase by $3 billion by 2015. We can’t afford to wait and we can’t afford to continue to be held hostage to heat waves. That’s why we are proposing ways to provide cleaner, more reliable power and ways to use it more efficiently.”
The plan includes expanding Clean Distributed Generation by 800 MW and promoting opportunities to develop district energy at appropriate sites in the city, establishment of a New York City Energy Planning Board to centralize planning for the city's supply and demand initiatives, commit 10% of the city's annual energy bill to fund energy-saving investments in city operations, strengthen its energy and building codes to support energy efficiency strategies and other environmental goals, create an energy efficiency authority for New York City responsible for reaching the city's demand reduction targets, use a series of mandates and incentives to reduce demand among the largest energy consumers, expand participation in Peak Load Management Programs through smart meters to increase real-time pricing across the city, increase the impact of energy efficiency efforts through a coordinated energy awareness and training campaign, facilitate construction of 3,000 MW of supply capacity by repowering old plants and building dedicated transmission lines, support critical expansions to the city’s natural gas infrastructure, pilot technologies for producing energy from solid waste, eliminate methane emissions from sewage treatment plants and expand the productive use of digester gas, and study the expansion of gas capture and energy production from existing landfills.
“Climate change is a national challenge and meeting it requires strong and united national leadership,” he says. “The emerging consensus among scientists is that, to avoid serious harm, we must reduce our emissions by 60 to 80% by 2050.”
“We can’t afford to wait and we can’t afford to continue to be held hostage to heat waves,” he explains. “That’s why we are proposing ways to provide cleaner, more reliable power and ways to use it more efficiently.”
“To do it, we will both expand our sources of clean energy and keep our demand constant even as we grow, a feat that no city has ever accomplished,” he adds. “To increase supply, we will build new clean burning power plants through guaranteed contracts, promote upgrades of existing plants, and create a market for renewable energy.”
