Riverhead officials eye gas-fired power plant for EPCAL

The Calverton Enterprise Park may be the perfect place for an electric generating facility to meet demands on the East End during peak summer months, according to Riverhead officials who said they’ve been discussing the idea with LIPA and energy industry executives.

The L.I. Power Authority in October issued a request for proposals to replace its aging peaking generation facilities with more efficient, modern, and cleaner peaking units.

LIPA is looking for 250-megawatts of total peaking capacity to meet the East End’s needs, according to its RFP. The deadline for responses to the RFP is March 31.

Councilman George Gabrielsen said he thinks the EPCAL site is an “ideal location” for meeting the East End’s peak needs, not only because of its proximity to both forks and the available vacant land at the park, but because the site has access to a 10-inch high-pressure natural gas main to supply the power facility, as well as a 69-kV electric transmission line.

“Gas is a clean-burning fuel,” Gabrielsen said.

With the Metro Fuels facility already operating at EPCAL, the gas-fired generation facilities would also have ready access to a backup fuel source, something the utility insists on.

“We’re looking at land by the south end of the 7,000-foot runway,” Gabrielsen said. The generation facility would require 10 acres or less, he said, but he’d like to see the town reserve 30-40 acres in that area as an “energy park,” where other facilities could be sited in the future.

Supervisor Sean Walter said he’d like to see LIPA designate the EPCAL site as a prime location for the facility to be built by a company selected by LIPA.

“Then Riverhead Town would negotiate with whoever they selected,” Walter said. “That would take the uncertainty out,” he said.

“Short of that, we’d be issuing an RFP for a lease or sale of land for the construction of the generation facility, for a company like Caithness to answer,” Walter said, adding that the town board could be issuing the RFP in early January.

Caithness is an energy company that operates a 350-megawatt natural gas-fired base load power plant in Yaphank and wants to develop a new 706-megawatt base load plant at that site.

Gabrielsen said he’s also met with representatives of energy company J-Power USA, which had proposed building a 377-megawatt plant in Shoreham.

Caithness is interested in building a 100-megawatt peaking plant in Calverton, Gabrielsen said. It would comprise four 25-megawatt units that would be switched on as needed to meet peak demand, he said.

“If we’re in the running, that would be wonderful,” Walter said. He estimated tax revenues or PILOT payments could exceed $1 million a year, but Gabrielsen said revenue to the town would more likely be in excess of $2 million annually.

“This would be a home run for Riverhead,” Gabrielsen said.

But additional fossil-fuel generating capacity is not what Long Island needs, according to Adrienne Esposito, executive director of Citizens Campaign for the Environment.

“If we had more solar and renewable energy we’d need less peaking fossil-fuel capacity,” Esposito said in a phone interview today.

“Unfortunately, the very concept of installing more peaking plants is moving in the wrong direction,” Esposito said. “We already have plenty of fossil fuel capacity. What we don’t have are the renewables and the diversity of renewables,” she said.

Riverhead’s move to install solar energy systems at the town landfill and at municipal parking lots is a move in the right direction, Esposito said. Carports are “a solar success story,” she said. “The more the better. The opposite is true of fossil-fuel plants. The more we build the more we’re tied to the albatross of fossil fuels around our necks.”