“The US electric system is a duck-billed platy-
pus,” Plummer explains between sips of Muscle
Milk during a videoconference call from his
home office, where he is working during pan-
demic lockdown. “It is a highly evolved creature
that involves a variety of very odd things coming
together in one organism that is designed to do
one thing really, really well: take fossil-fired gen-
eration and ensure reliability at the lowest cost.”
How and when that happens at Ravens wood
is organized on a spreadsheet, seven rows tall by
24 columns wide, Plummer says. Each day, staff-
ers send its data to the New York Independent
System Operator (NYISO), the not-for-profit or-
ganization responsible for running the state’s
grid. The columns indicate the hours of the day;
the rows refer to the seven generating units on
the site—the individual machines that make
electricity, each of which has its own defining
characteristics. The most famous among them
is “Big Allis,” a 1,000-megawatt steam-powered
plant named for Allis-Chalmers, the company
that built it. Commissioned in 1965, it was for
a time the largest steam turbine in the world.
Alongside Big Allis, a smaller matched pair of
steam generators also date from the 1960s, each
producing approximately 400 megawatts, and
a 2004 plant generates 250 megawatts using a
state-of-the-art, relatively clean combined gas
and steam system. The final three units are the
peakers, active 50- somethings. Along with their
already-decommissioned siblings, the peak-
ers line up on the asphalt like mobile homes in
a trailer park, each topped with a squat rectan-
gular ventilation tower—a stovepipe hat. Rust
peeks through their baby blue paint, while steam-
punk dials and old-fashioned corporate marques
show their Apollo-era origins.
On Ravenswood’s spreadsheet, each box gets a
dollar value: the bid to operate that one machine
for that one hour, derived from the price of fuel
and other calculations Plummer and his staff make
to ensure their profit. The captains of the grid at
NYISO then submit their order for the following
day, working to carefully balance expected sup-
ply and demand for the 20 million people of the
Empire State. The contract is crystal clear. The
NYISO expects power plants to produce energy
when the system operator calls on them, and we
expect juice from the socket whenever we want it.
For it all to work, though, the grid needs peak-
ers. To make sure it has them, Ravens wood and
other New York stations collect “capacity pay-
ments” just for keeping their turbines on standby,as a kind of insurance policy for the days of highest demand. Be-
tween 2010 and 2019, those payments totaled nearly $1.2 billion to
Ravens wood alone, according to an estimate by PEAK Coalition, a
group of social justice and environmental organizations advocating
to close the city’s peaker plants well ahead of the state’s 2040 dead-
line. That money, they say, could be better spent on clean technology.
“It certainly doesn’t make sense that these ancient clunkers are get-
ting paid these vast sums just to sit there,” says Rachel Spector,
an environmental justice lawyer who worked on Dirty Energy, Big
Money, the PEAK Coalition’s 2020 advocacy report.
Ravens wood is their poster child for what similar sites around
the city must do. It won’t replace its last remaining peakers. In-
stead, the battery units proposed for the site will step into their
role, topping off the city’s energy supply, but without the emis-
sions. “So much of our electricity system is built for literally the
worst possible hour of the hottest day of the decade—because you
have to keep the lights on,” explains Ray Hohenstein, a director at
Fluence, a battery technology company that was formed as a joint
venture between infrastructure giants Siemens and AES. Fluence
is the sort of company that might compete for Ravens wood’s proj-84 WINTER 2020 / POPSCI.COM