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2 years after NJ passed its environmental justice law, plans for gas-fired power plants advance
By
Karen Yi
Published Feb 22, 2023
Modified Feb 22, 2023
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Karen Yi/Gothamist
By
Karen Yi
Published Feb 22, 2023
Modified Feb 22, 2023
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It’s been nearly two-and-a-half years since New Jersey passed a landmark environmental justice law – designed to better protect communities of color and people classified as low-income from pollution. New Jersey officials say they’re finally poised to put it into effect this spring.
But environmental advocates say the implementation has already taken far too long. And development plans — including those for proposed power plants — are moving ahead without the scrutiny the law is meant to ensure.
“Our communities have been waiting for justice for decades,” said Maria Lopez Nunez, deputy director of organizing and advocacy at the Ironbound Community Corporation in Newark.
Among the projects moving forward is the Passaic Valley Sewerage Commission’s proposal to build a gas-fired power plant in Newark — the fourth power plant in the city’s Ironbound section.
“When you're not protecting us and you're kind of seemingly dragging your feet on a law, it doesn't show that you really care about environmental justice communities. You just like to say the words,” Lopez said.
Gov. Phil Murphy signed the environmental justice law in September 2020, describing it as the “nation’s strongest measure to protect overburdened communities from pollutants.”
It lets the state Department of Environmental Protection reject permits for certain types of development — like recycling facilities, sewage plants and gas-fired power plants — in places where groups that the law identifies as “overburdened” by pollution live.
Those are communities where at least 35% of households qualify as low-income according to the U.S. Census; where 40% of residents identify as either members of minority groups or as members of a state-recognized tribal community; or where at least 40% of households have limited English proficiency. About three-fifths of New Jersey’s municipalities include areas that qualify.
The law allows the state to consider the cumulative environmental effect on overburdened communities when evaluating projects, and impose additional requirements when granting permit renewals. But first, the state had to propose and adopt detailed administrative rules for how projects would be evaluated — like identifying environmental stressors, setting criteria for public health hazards and providing definitions for the sorts of facilities subject to the law’s authority.
A 153-page draft of the rules was proposed in June 2022, and Gov. Phil Murphy said during a climate address last week that they’d be adopted this April. According to the state Department of Environmental Protection, New Jersey had one year from the point when the rules were proposed to finalize them.
“We have had reams of input — and I mean 400 pages, single-spaced. This is a really hard one to put together,” Murphy said on WNYC’s "Ask Governor Murphy" this month.
DEP spokesman Larry Hajna said the rules are now in the final stages of review, which includes reviewing and responding to public comments.
But environmental advocates said the administration needs to act with urgency.
“We need to act today, not just plan for tomorrow,” Amy Goldsmith, Clean Water Action’s New Jersey state director, said in a statement responding to Murphy’s climate change address. “To get ahead of the pack, Gov. Murphy needs to stop advancing fossil fuel projects and move even faster towards comprehensive rule adoptions and a truly equitable green economy future.”
The Passaic Valley Sewerage Commission wants to build a gas-fired power plant to create a backup power source during emergencies. Photo taken on Jan. 11, 2022.
Karen Yi/Gothamist
Newark residents, meanwhile, have been fighting the Passaic Valley Sewerage Commission for more than a year over its plan to build a new power plant in Newark. The area sits between Port Newark and Newark Liberty Airport and is saturated by several manufacturing facilities, a fat rendering plant and a waste incinerator.
The PVSC serves 1 in 6 New Jersey residents and additionally treats waste from other states along the East Coast, including New York. PVSC spokesman Doug Scancarella said the plant would provide backup power during storms.
During Hurricane Sandy, the PVSC’s Newark Bay Treatment Plant lost power for 72 hours and 840 million gallons of raw sewage seeped into the Passaic River and Newark Bay.
The natural gas facility would also include solar and battery power, and over time PVSC would look to transition more of its power generation to low-carbon and zero-carbon energy sources, Scancarella said. He said PVSC is working with the manufacturer of the plant’s turbines to transition from natural gas to a mixture of natural gas and hydrogen, and then eventually all-hydrogen.
“PVSC is continuing to fully explore clean energy alternatives for the facility and has included stakeholder groups in that process, including issuing a request for proposals at the request of local environmental stakeholders to more than 300 industry consultants to explore possible feasible alternatives for the facility,” Scancarella said.
Hajna said the Newark project wouldn’t fall under the environmental justice law, because its air quality permit application was deemed “administratively complete” while the rules weren’t yet adopted. But the PVSC instead is required to comply with a DEP administrative order meant to meet the “legislative intent” of the law while those regulations are still pending, using powers the state already had.
Hajna said specifically, the PVSC would have to ensure “meaningful public engagement” and the “implementation of feasible conditions” to avoid or reduce public health and environmental stressors on overburdened communities.
Murphy, when on WNYC earlier this month, stressed that as a backup power plant, the PVSC facility would only be powered up occasionally — “and it would be there only in an emergency to avert the disaster that beheld the East Ward in superstorm Sandy.”
The DEP is still reviewing the Newark project’s air permit, but without the new environmental justice law’s rules in full effect, it can’t consider the cumulative effects of pollution on Newark and how greenlighting another power plant would affect residents.
Environmental advocates say the Newark project would only be subject to the environmental justice law if, after the law goes into effect, PVSC resubmits its permit application to reflect changes it recently announced to its proposal — something advocates are pushing for. The PVSC said last year that it would run the plant less often – using it only for emergencies, and not additionally as a “peaker” plant for times when there’s high demand, as originally planned.
“They can continue to talk about it as if they're placing a power plant into a vacuum instead of having to acknowledge that they're placing a power plant — regardless of if they think it's a big or small project — into a neighborhood that already has three power plants and a garbage incinerator and the largest choice treatment facility in the state,” said Lopez, from the Ironbound Community Corporation.
Last week, more than a dozen state lawmakers and Newark Mayor Ras Baraka sent Murphy a letter opposing the power plant, and called on PVSC to withdraw its permit application. They also criticized the plan to incorporate hydrogen fuels, saying it wasn’t commercially feasible and would still “add to the burden of health harming air pollution.”
Murphy slowed plans for the power plant last year, asking the PVSC to hold more public meetings and to conduct more thorough environmental review before voting on a construction contract — both of which PVSC says it completed. But he has not asked PVSC to scrap its plans.
In Woodbridge, Competitive Power Ventures is proposing to build a 657 megawatt gas-fired power plant next to one it already operates. Matthew Litchfield, a spokesman for the company, said the project would be one of the lowest-emitting facilities in the state and help New Jersey transition away from “older, high-emitting generation sources.” The existing, 725 megawatt plant produces enough power for about 700,000 homes.
Litchfield said the project is open to public comments through the end of March as required by the administrative order, and a public information session will be held Feb. 28.
The local NAACP and residents have mobilized opposition to the project, which would be the third power plant in Woodbridge.
Environmentalists have also raised concerns about NJ Transit’s proposal to provide uninterrupted power to its rail system through a power-generation facility in Kearny — a town located a few miles north of Newark’s Ironbound neighborhood, which is also considered an overburdened community. But an NJ Transit spokesperson said the agency has ”reimagined this project to promote maximized renewables and clean energy components” and is soliciting proposals.
This story has been updated to include further comment from the state Department of Environmental Protection.
Tagged
environment
new jersey
Politics
Karen Yi
Karen Yi covers homelessness and poverty. She joined the WNYC and Gothamist newsroom in 2020. Before that, Karen covered Newark for the Star-Ledger and spent almost a decade working for newspapers in New Jersey and Florida. She grew up in Miami and has a dog named Cashew. Got a tip? Email [email protected] or Signal 917-589-1460.
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