Woodbridge Natural Gas Plants Would Back Up Wind Energy, Company Says

WOODBRIDGE, NJ — As Gov. Phil Murphy aggressively pushes offshore wind development, a proposed natural gas power plant in Woodbridge Township would be a back-up for wind power once it comes ashore.

This is according to the energy company that seeks to open the plant.

"Facilities like CPV Woodbridge and the proposed CPV Keasbey will certainly help facilitate the state as it brings offshore wind online," Matt Litchfield, a spokesman for Competitive Power Ventures (CPV), said Thursday.

"Even the most advanced offshore wind technology only operates roughly 50 percent of the time — the wind simply is not always blowing," Litchfield continued.

"Heat waves and winter storms are lasting days, not hours, as extreme weather becomes more of a norm," said Tom Rumsey, CPV senior vice president of external & regulatory affairs. "Having assets that can run for those durations when renewables don’t perform as well as other times is critical. In essence, they act as the back-up or storage."

Since 2016, CPV has operated an existing natural gas power plant in the Keasbey section of Woodbridge. Now, they seek to open a second plant. Nearly 150 people spoke against the second plant at this Feb. 28 public hearing. On March 1, the NJ Sierra Club published this press release, calling on Gov. Murphy to reject the second plant outright.

“The proposed Keasbey fossil fuel plant would go directly against Gov. Murphy’s goal for New Jersey to achieve 100 percent clean electricity by 2035” said Tiziana Bottino, senior representative for the Sierra Club's Beyond Coal Campaign.

Both the existing CPV plant and the new one would use natural gas obtained by fracking methods.

When Patch asked Gov. Murphy's office if New Jersey needs the fossil fuel plants as back-up for wind, Murphy spokesman Bailey Lawrence said the state's shift to carbon-free energy will be "gradual."

"The governor continues to recognize the necessity of maintaining a reliable energy mix and understands that the shift to 100 percent clean energy by 2035 must be achieved intentionally and gradually — it will not be accomplished at the flip of a switch," said Murphy's spokesman.

"The spirit of the environmental justice law will be applied to the (proposed Keasbey) project through its adherence to Administrative Order 25," he added.

He also said a governor cannot just kill or reject a proposal from a private company unless that proposal violates the law. CPV cannot begin construction on the second plant until the NJ Department of Environmental Protection approves a key air pollution permit they applied for. The energy company has been waiting more than five years for approval, having applied in 2017.

Mike Makarski, a spokesman for Affordable Energy for New Jersey, which seeks lower energy prices for consumers, said he was not surprised in the least that natural gas plants plan to be back-up for wind and solar.

"Unfortunately for Gov. Murphy's Energy Master Plan, you need to expand natural gas infrastructure before you can build renewable energy," he said. "The myth of renewable energy is that it's ready for prime time. It's not. As we start to add wind and solar — which don't work on command — we have to start planning that they inevitably might not create enough energy every day. That's why we need the traditional gas plants. And this is not me saying renewable energy is bad — we should be making these investments. But oil and natural gas are not going away anytime soon."

But Doug O'Malley of Environment New Jersey said fossil fuel companies were making an insidious — it means "crafty" — argument that they are needed to "help" green energy.

"This is an insidious argument from CPV that building offshore wind means we need to build another new gas power plant in Woodbridge," said O'Malley Friday. "New Jersey has an oversupply of fossil gas infrastructure ... The Woodbridge gas plant would be another fossil fuel plant in an overburdened community that would be a public health and climate menace, which is why the Murphy administration should reject this proposal. We need to build offshore wind so we can move off fossil fuels — not to build more power plants."

Murphy has set an unprecedented goal of 11 gigawatts of offshore wind energy in New Jersey by 2040, which he says will be enough to power 3.2 million homes. Murphy calls the development of offshore wind a "crucial component of our journey to 100 percent clean energy by 2035."

Three wind farms have already been approved off Barnegat Light and Atlantic City (see how they'll look from the beaches). And just this past Monday, the New Jersey Board of Public Utilities opened a third offshore wind solicitation, allowing a whole new round of companies to submit bids to build wind turbines. According to the National Marine Fisheries Service, there will be a total of 3,400 wind turbines built on 2.4 million leased acres in the Atlantic Ocean off New York/New Jersey, with 10,000 miles of undersea cables.

The turbines will connect to New Jersey's power grid using high-voltage electrical connections that run under the ocean floor. According to NJ Spotlight, the state has already determined three landing points where the wind energy will be brought ashore: Substation Deans, near New Brunswick; a former PSEG fossil plant in the Sewaren section of Woodbridge and a Jersey Central Power & Light substation in Larrabee, near Howell.

Separately, a Queen-based energy company called Rise Light & Power said in 2021 they plan to turn the former Werner coal plant in South Amboy into a hub to receive and process wind energy once it comes ashore.

NJ Fines Existing Woodbridge Power Plant For Pollution Violations (March 9)

Stop Woodbridge's 2nd Natural Gas Power Plant, NJ Residents Beg Murphy (March 7)

Massive Offshore Wind Farms Coming To The Jersey Shore (Sept. 2021)

Both Murphy and President Joe Biden are aggressively pushing wind turbine construction: The Biden administration is working on "a pathway to deploy 110 GW or more of offshore wind energy in the United States by 2050," according to this report released by the U.S. Department of Energy last year.

The federal Bureau of Ocean Energy Management plans to lease offshore wind turbine lots in New York Bight, Carolina Long Bay, Central Atlantic, Gulf of Maine, California, Oregon and the Gulf of Mexico by 2025. This comes at a time when New Jersey is seeing an unusually high number of whale deaths, but no link has been found between whale deaths and wind turbine construction.