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Timesunion.com ∙ Sunday, January 11, 2015 ∙ Albany, New York ∙ $2.00 Final ∙ $2.50 in Outlying Areas
lEgIslATURE
ENERgy
A train
is their
kind of
motion
Ups, downs of oil’s fall
Shift to larger
vehicles, cheaper
home heating
bills pressures
clean energy
By Eric Anderson,
Larry Rulison
and Brian Nearing
Downstate lawmakers
using rails like the pace,
potential for more work
By Matthew Hamilton
Rensselaer
Bill Perkins’ legislative life
fits neatly around an Amtrak
schedule.
The state senator from Harlem starts his week by getting up
at 6 a.m. to catch the 7:15 train
from Penn Station. As it speeds
north along the east bank of the
Hudson, the Democrat preps for
session, catches up with fellow
lawmakers and staffers, and has
been known to catch a few extra
minutes of shut-eye before a
busy week.
“If by chance you need to
take a nap, then you don’t have
to worry about traffic,” he said.
“You can fall asleep unwillingly
and not put anybody in danger.”
Perkins is one of a small but
loyal contingent of downstate
lawmakers who swear by their
weekly rail trips to Rensselaer.
Some say it’s best for getting
extra work done. Others cite
its ease: The station in Midtown Manhattan is just a taxi,
subway or bus ride away from
their homes or district offices;
upon arrival upstate, and it’s a
quick skip across the river to the
Capitol.
What’s undeniable is the
train’s overall popularity — even
if many upstate legislators still
choose to travel the Thruway
instead.
While Amtrak doesn’t meaPlease see AMTRAK A10 ▶
John Carl D’Annibale / Times Union
Michael P. Farrell / Times Union
At top, Armory Garage President and CEO Don Metzner steps up into a 5.7-liter, V8-equipped 2015 RAM 1500 on
his showroom floor. Above is a field of solar panels in the 2.6-megawatt solar farm on Route 32 near the Owens
Corning insulation plant. Cheap fossil fuel prices help sales of big vehicles but hurt clean-energy enterprises.
chAritAble giving
By Kenneth C. Crowe II
Lori Van Buren / Times Union
Construction is almost complete on the final houses at
the Fox Hollow Habitat for Humanity project built on
property originally owned by Seymour Fox.
Troy
A Swiss bank account linked to hundreds of pounds of gold bars sounds
like a plot twist in a James Bond movie.
It’s actually the source of riches for
The Seymour Fox Memorial Foundation, the Capital Region’s newest and
seventh-wealthiest charitable foundation.
Please see oIl A6 ▶
INDEX
Foundation goes for the gold
An estate based on precious
metals helps fund a variety
of Capital Region causes
Albany
Don Metzner marvels
at how quickly drivers
change gears, so to speak.
“There’s much less
interest in our most fuelefficient cars,” he said last
week as gasoline prices
continued a downward spiral that started just a few
weeks ago.
Instead, the owner of
Armory Garage in Albany
is seeing a lot more interest
in SUVs and trucks.
Cheap energy is changing consumers’ habits,
putting more money in
their pocketbooks and
luring them back to larger
vehicles.
“Gas prices could go up
in the next six months,”
Metzner said. “But people
make decisions based on
today.”
Consumers, retailers
and manufacturers all are
benefiting from the glut of
oil and natural gas. When
temperatures plunged
below zero last week, many
of us barely flinched as we
cranked up the thermostats.
At the same time, the
cheap fossil fuel energy is
creating headwinds for the
Capital Region’s growing clean energy sector
and raising concerns that
consumers will lose interest in the environment and
climate change.
The Capital Region,
Seymour Fox, a prominent Troy personal injury attorney, established the
foundation in a 2008 will that he had
drafted in Schenectady after attending an estate seminar. He died on Jan.
13, 2010, at 84 years of age. The Fox
Foundation aims to perpetuate Fox’s
interests and name.
Those who knew Fox describe
him as “exotic,” “quirky” and “a real
character” who loved cats and flying
aircraft.
He was a World War II U.S. Army
veteran who graduated from Siena
College and Albany Law School. His
Times Union obituary read, in part,
Please see FOX A8 ▶
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EXCLUSIVE: Stories with this
logo in today’s Times Union
can be found only in the
Times Union’s print edition,
e-edition, and iPad app.
A6 ∙ Sunday, January 11, 2015
FROM THE COVER
albany, new york
∙ TIMeS unIon
oil
▼ Continued from a1
which according to one
Brookings Institution
study has nearly 30,000
clean-energy jobs, has
much at stake.
Economic developers
hope that the low prices
won’t harm growth in that
sector.
“I know we all tend to
be shortsighted,” observed
Jeff Lawrence of the
Albany-based Center for
Economic Growth, “and
I hope this doesn’t derail
some of the long-term
initiatives under way.
“I don’t think it will,”
he added. “I hope our consciousness has evolved.”
Mark Eagan, president
of the Albany-Colonie
Regional Chamber of
Commerce, took comfort
in the fact that CDTA
ridership, which initially
spiked when gasoline
prices jumped in 2008,
has continued to rise in
the last two years even as
gasoline prices retreated.
“People are much more
concerned with the environment,” he said. “They
want clean energy.”
But Patrick DeHaan,
senior petroleum analyst
at GasBuddy.com, points
out that the average fuel
efficiency of newly purchased vehicles has fallen
sharply since its peak last
August.
“You’re going to have
the vehicle for seven or
eight years,” he said. He
doubts prices will stay low
through that period.
“The Saudis won’t be
able to stomach $48 per
barrel oil,” DeHaan said.
Gov. Andrew Cuomo
has centered much of
his energy policy around
promoting the use of clean
technologies such as solar
electric systems, fuel cells
and new battery systems.
His high-tech strategy also has embraced
research and development
Lori Van Buren / times union
Attendant dave Williams fills a truck’s tank with diesel fuel at the Wilton travel plaza. Gasoline and other motor fuel prices have been plunging.
partnerships between
SUNY Polytechnic Institute in Albany and companies like SolarCity, which
is planning a massive
$900 million solar panel
factory in Buffalo.
And it has helped to
elevate companies like
General Electric Co.,
which has its renewable
energy headquarters in
Schenectady and the GE
Global Research Center in
Niskayuna.
SUNY Poly’s new $190
million ZEN building
is a monument to next
generation clean-tech
construction that will be
“zero-energy,” meaning
it will generate as much
electricity as it consumes.
Regulators at the state
Public Service Commission in Albany are also
dramatically altering how
utilities operate in the
state through a program
called REV, or reforming
the energy vision, that is
pushing the use of more
small-scale electric generation such as solar panels and fuel cells at homes
and businesses to help
drive down utility bills
because they are cheaper
than building large power
plants and massive transmission line towers.
Richard Kauffman,
head of energy policy for
Cuomo, says cheap oil
and natural gas prices
are great for consumers
because they drive down
utility bills and prices at
the pump.
But that is only part
of the story, and cheaper
fuel prices won’t solve the
larger issue of rising utility costs, Kauffman told
the Times Union, which is
why the state is pursuing
REV.
“This is not the first
time we’ve enjoyed low oil
and gas prices,” Kauff-
man said. “History tells
you that these prices are
volatile.”
In fact, when it comes
to electric bills specifically, wholesale electric
supply costs account for
only half the bill. The rest
is the price of building and
maintaining the electric
grid, the so-called “delivery” charges.
“The other half of the
customer’s bill is unaffected by low energy costs,”
Kauffman said. “The
transmission and distribution costs on the other
half of the bill continue to
go up.”
REV, once its fully
implemented, is expected
to provide huge new
revenue sources for the
state’s clean-tech economy, in addition to lowering
utility bills as people, not
utilities, generate more
electricity. Kauffman
added that cheap natural
gas will help technologies such as fuel cells and
combined heat and power
machines, both of which
can run on natural gas.
Alain Kaloyeros, CEO
of SUNY Poly, says that
the state’s ambitious solar
development program,
which includes research in
Albany and manufacturing sites planned for both
Buffalo and Rochester, is
not affected by cheap oil
and natural gas.
That is because solar’s
main competitors are coal
and nuclear, which make
up 60 percent of the electric generation in the U.S.
Also, Kaloyeros notes,
solar farms are selling
electricity that in some
cases is cheaper than even
natural gas-fired power
plants. One example,
although extreme, is Ted
Turner’s New Mexico
solar farm, which is selling power at 5.7 cents per
kilowatt-hour, which is
less than what power generated by coal and natural
gas plants is expected
to cost five years from
now, according to federal
energy forecasts.
Some of those costs of
fossil-fuel power plants
will be driven up by new
carbon regulations proposed by the Obama administration, something
Kaloyeros says cannot be
forgotten in the euphoria
of cheap oil and gas.
Comfortex
Kaloyeros said Cuomo’s
renewable energy strategy
is “sound and competitive,” and cheap oil won’t
derail it.
“It provides all the comprehensive environmental, financial, business
and manufacturing advantages of solar energy,”
Kaloyeros said.
GE, which is working with SUNY Poly on
new power-electronics
semiconductor chips that
could be used in everything from electric cars to
wind turbines, has more
than 6,000 employees
in the Capital Region.
It recently launched its
promising new GE Fuel
Cells business in Malta,
where roughly 25 people
work.
“We can’t comment on
the impact of oil prices
on the local businesses
up there in upstate New
York,” GE spokesman
Dominic McMullan told
the Times Union.
He did note CEO Jeffrey Immelt told analysts
that although the gas and
oil business at GE may be
facing cuts, the “rest of
the company looks fine,”
and the company overall
will benefit with the rest
of America from cheap oil
and gas.
And of course, GE is in
the business of making
turbines and generators
used in power plants
and large wind turbines
used in wind farms. And
demand is growing worldwide for more electricity.
“So if people need electricity, they are going to
still invest in power projects,” Immelt said during
the Dec. 16 meeting.
As natural gas prices
fell in recent years, because of the gas hydofracking boom in Pennsylvania and other states,
more electric power plant
owners switched to gas
as their primary fuel.
But about half the state’s
electrical supply comes
from plants that can burn
either natural gas or oil,
and with oil prices now
plummeting, some plant
owners may be considering a switch to oil.
That was the prediction
in a January report by
the financial analyst firm
Morniningstar, which
predicted cheap oil could
help prevent a repeat of
last year’s natural gasfueled electrical price
spikes that hit much of
the Northeast. Cheap oil
will allow the price of the
most-expensive power
— which normally sets
the market price under
regional power grids — to
be “much lower than last
year,” according to the
report by Morningstar
Commodities Research.
“I am hearing that some
plant owners, mainly in
the New York City area,
are on the verge of switching to oil,” said Gavin
Donohue, president and
CEO of the Independent
Please see oil a7 ▶
TIMES UNION ∙ AlbANy, NEw yOrk
oil
▼ Continued from a6
Power Producers of New
York, which represents
about 80 companies
involved in generating
electricity.
Such power plants allow
owners to use either fuel
in cases when one fuel is in
short supply or markedly
more expensive. Owners
of such plants do not have
to inform the state if they
switch from one fuel to
another, but they must
continue to operate within
the limits of state air pollution permits, according
to Pete Constantakes, a
spokesman for the state
Department of Environmental Conservation.
The New York State
Independent System
Operator, a not-for-profit
group that manages the
state electrical grid, had no
public information about
any potential shift to oil
by plant operators, said
spokesman Dave Flanagan. He said bids submitted by plant owners to
supply power specify fuel
type used, but that such
bid information is confidential.
The portion of the
state’s electricity produced
by dual-fuel plants increased from 47 percent in
2000 to 55 percent in 2012,
according to a 2013 NYISO
report. The greatest concentration of such plants is
in the New York City area,
where more than 80 percent of the potential power
supply is dual-fueled.
If more electricity is
generated using oil, which
has greater pollution emissions than natural gas, air
quality in the state could
be worsened, said Peter
Iwanowicz, executive
director of Environmental
Advocates of New York,
an Albany-based environmental group. “It could
make things more challenging for people who like
to breathe air.”
And plants that do
switch to more carbonintensive oil will have to
pay for it, by buying more
greenhouse gas credits
under the state Regional
Greenhouse Gas Initiative,
which used credit proceeds to fund alternative
energy and conservation
programs. But Iwanowicz
also said any such pollution blip will likely be
temporary. “Cheap oil is
not a long-term thing,” he
said.
The state’s wind and
solar energy industry will
be challenged by cheap oil,
but a larger threat comes
from the pending expiration at the end of the year
of the state’s Renewable
Portfolio Standard, which
sets a goal for renewable
energy production that
can receive state subsidies, said Anne Reynolds,
executive director of Alliance for Clean Energy New
York.
Oil prices may go up
or down, but uncertainty
over the RPS is discouraging developers of wind
and solar from starting
projects in New York, she
said. She said alternative
energy producers also
need longer-term contracts to encourage more
investments in projects
regardless of any trend in
fossil fuel prices.
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SUNdAy, JANUAry 11, 2015 ∙ a7
Officials: Petraeus to face felony counts
Ex-general accused of
revealing classified data
New York Times
Washington
The FBI and Justice Department
prosecutors have recommended
bringing felony charges against
David H. Petraeus, contending he
provided classified information to
a lover while he was director of the
CIA, officials said, leaving Attorney
General Eric Holder Jr. to decide
whether to seek an indictment
that could send the pre-eminent
military officer of his generation to
prison.
The Justice Department investigation stems from an affair Petraeus
had with Paula Broadwell, an Army
Reserve officer who was writing his
biography, and focuses on whether
he gave her access to his CIA email
account and classified information.
FBI agents discovered classified
documents on her computer after
Petraeus resigned from the CIA in
2012 when the affair became public.
Petraeus, a retired four-star
general who served as commander
of U.S. forces in both Iraq and
Afghanistan, has said he never
provided classified information to
Broadwell and has indicated to the
Justice Department he has no interest in a plea deal that would spare
him an embarrassing trial. A lawyer
for Petraeus, Robert B. Barnett, said
Friday that he had no comment.
The officials who said that
charges had been recommended
asked for anonymity.
Holder was expected to decide
by the end of last year whether to
bring charges against Petraeus,
but he has not indicated how he
plans to proceed. The delay has
frustrated some Justice Department and FBI officials and
investigators who have questioned
whether Petraeus has received
special treatment at a time Holder
has led a crackdown on government officials who reveal secrets
to journalists.