2 steam power plants to be closed

The Long Island Power Authority said Thursday it has reached an agreement with National Grid to shut down antiquated steam-generating power plants at Far Rockaway and Glenwood Landing, saving ratepayers $76 million through 2015.

The plan, which will be enacted next year, will take offline the region's oldest, least efficient and least-used plants. The move, telegraphed by LIPA in its 10-year plan, will be felt in local school districts -- LIPA pays about $20 million in annual taxes for the Glenwood units and about $4 million for Far Rockaway.

The phasedown of property tax payments is structured to be less of a burden on school districts, a LIPA official said. LIPA will continue to pay the taxes on Glenwood Landing until May 2013.

The generating plants have been operating since the 1950s, but now provide less than 2 percent of Long Island's power.

Paul DeCotis, vice president of power markets for LIPA, said the decision was LIPA's, and was taken because it gave the authority more flexibility and potential cost savings than if LIPA waited until after its power supply contract for the plants expired in May 2013. LIPA pays for the plants' availability whether it uses them or not, under long-term multimillion-dollar agreements.

"The timing here is critical," DeCotis said. National Grid, a British company, owns the plants and the land.

Because the plants are in pockets of concentrated electrical use, LIPA must make transmission upgrades over the next year to supplement capacity needs, DeCotis said.

The plants would be demolished and the sites remediated for possible future sale or use, National Grid said. Cleanup and demolition costs will be borne by National Grid, officials said.

National Grid power plant operations director James Flannery said the plants were primarily gas-fired, so concern about environmental problems at the site may have been minimized. In the past, however, both burned oil and coal.

Matthew Cordaro, who was responsible for the Glenwood plant as a former Long Island Lighting Co. executive in the 1970s, said he suspected there could be contamination around the plant. "There's a lot of stuff that went on at Glenwood between the gas and electric plants," said Cordaro, co-chair of the Suffolk County Legislature's LIPA oversight committee. "There is tremendous possibility of finding pockets of pollution."

Environmentalist Adrienne Esposito of Citizen's Campaign for the Environment applauded the closures. "We are hopeful that these antiquated fossil fuel plants can be replaced with clean energy including wind and solar," she said.

The combined Far Rockaway and Glenwood plants' 330 megawatts of capacity are a small portion of the 4,000 megawatts that National Grid provides to LIPA under contract.