Driven by climate justice and labor organizers, Renewable Ravenswood is turning New York’s largest oil and gas power plant into a clean energy juggernaut.
For more than 60 years, New York’s largest oil and gas power plant has loomed over the nation’s largest public housing project, churning out pollution that has fueled the climate crisis and given the surrounding neighborhoods the nickname “Asthma Alley.”
Its conspicuous location amid predominantly Black, Indigenous, and People of Color (BIPOC) communities in Western Queens is no coincidence, a textbook example of environmental racism in energy infrastructure that is still rampant today. Breathing the plant’s fumes was simply the price neighboring families had to pay for “Big Allis,” the name given the plant, to keep the lights on in one out of five New York City households.
It’s a price that local climate justice groups like the NYC-Environmental Justice Alliance (NYC-EJA), a longtime grantee of The Solutions Project, would not accept. After years of fighting for a course correction, NYC-EJA and a coalition of climate justice, community, and labor organizers are now pointing the way toward a clean energy future by successfully advocating to convert the Ravenswood Generating Station from an oil and gas dinosaur to a first-of-its-kind hub for renewable energy distribution.
Clearing key checkpoints in the development process last year, Renewable Ravenswood is on track to provide clean energy to more than 2 million homes and improve the health of over a million people living nearby, while serving as a beacon in the global transition to renewable energy. It’s a particularly striking example among the dozens of climate justice wins highlighted in three new research reports commissioned by The Solutions Project—53 climate policy and campaign wins to be exact, which will benefit over 100 million people and make a significant dent in carbon emissions.
In addition to building up a much needed body of data on the cumulative human and climate impacts of the climate justice movement, the research debunks a common misconception that grassroots, local climate action is limited in scale and impact. On the contrary, Renewable Ravenswood powerfully distills the fact that the strength of climate justice work, and its formidable capacity to reduce emissions, is rooted in community. That community rootedness is precisely what enables enduring, even global change.
Renewable Ravenswood
The 27-acre Ravenswood Generating Station has provided more than 20% of New York City’s energy needs for the past six decades. For most of its lifetime, the plant combined massive oil- and gas-powered steam turbines that generated the bulk of its output, with so-called “peakers,” small turbines that burned gas hot, quick, and dirty to create surges in power.
The result was a 2.5GW behemoth of planet-roasting energy production, and its retirement is long, long overdue. But the plant will not simply be shut down—it will be the first station of its size to make the switch from fossil fuels to renewables, through a multi-faceted plan combining new offshore wind development, renewable energy from upstate, modern transmission lines, and large-scale battery storage at the Ravenswood site.
When all is said and done, the conversion will eliminate nearly 1 million tons of carbon emissions every year, the equivalent of taking about 200,000 cars off the road, according to a recent report from research institute Physicians, Scientists, and Engineers (PSE) for Health Energy, commissioned by TSP. Millions of New Yorkers will tap into reliable, renewable power as a result, which will provide a big leap forward for the state’s ambitious energy goals.
As you might imagine, such a project takes a long time, and involves many approvals and investments, but strong community backing in Western Queens—from a network including climate justice organizations, several neighborhood groups, and local unions—has powered a steady push instead of a flash in the pan campaign. Since 2017, TSP has provided unrestricted funding to NYC-EJA, supporting it to anchor a 14-member alliance across the five boroughs, advance its own campaigns like Renewable Ravenswood, and provide pivotal leadership to the statewide frontline alliance, New York Renews.
Elected officials, state agencies, developers, and investors are each playing a role in making Renewable Ravenswood a reality, but at its core, this is a story of a community taking control of its future and the health of its people.
For New Yorkers in Western Queens, including the 96% BIPOC residents of the Queensbridge public housing project across the street from the plant, the red and white smokestacks towering nearby are the reason their children have a harder time breathing than kids in the rest of the city. As a result of the fossil fuel-burning pollution that spills into their neighborhoods, child asthma rates in surrounding Astoria and Long Island City are higher than in the rest of Queens.
Renewable Ravenswood will provide relief. According to an analysis of climate policy achievements conducted by Just Solutions and commissioned by The Solutions Project, it offers a powerful example of a local climate justice win that results in significant human impacts. In total, more than 2 million people will benefit from the plant’s overhaul. That includes the 1.2 million people who live within three miles of the station and currently have to breathe its exhaust every day, and the 13,000 residents of public housing within a mile and a half.
The project will also help mitigate the climate impacts fueled by Ravenswood’s GHG emissions. An analysis of National Hurricane Center data flagged Long Island City as facing “severe threats from storm surge and sea level rise.” And like many lower-income neighborhoods, the heat island effect makes surface temperatures hotter than other parts of the city during the summer. Switching to wind power will make it easier for residents to breathe, but will also curb climate suffering in the surrounding community and others like it.
A third category of human impact is the labor victory. Rise Light & Power, the private owner of the plant, plans to train workers from Local 1-2 Utility Workers Union of America (UWUA), upskilling the 100 employees who currently run the plant—many of them for decades. This was fought for and won by NYC-EJA and is an example of just transition, ensuring workers are not left behind in the new energy economy.
These human impacts should be celebrated on their own, but also are the foundation for the political power necessary to make a massive change like Renewable Ravenswood possible in the first place. When frontline communities shut down dirty power plants and pipelines, clean energy projects enjoy a growth effect—ground-level buy-in that makes a better future inevitable, no matter how heavy the lift.
The impact of Ravenswood’s transition to clean energy on communities and the planet when
The Promise of Transformative Change
Just as important as the substantial direct impacts of Renewable Ravenswood are the pathways to larger change that it foregrounds in the global transition to renewables.
That’s a key consideration in the carbon dioxide impact analysis conducted by PSE Healthy Energy. Focusing on three grantee wins, including Ravenswood, the report identified huge potential to scale up carbon emissions reduction achieved through hyper-local wins. In addition to slashing almost a million metric tons of CO2 a year, the project will also advance New York’s broader goals for transition to renewable energy.
For example, the state is looking to develop 9GW of offshore wind power by 2035, and Ravenswood will provide transmission and storage for a portion of that power. PSE found that the goal will be “easily achievable by 2035,” which would eliminate emissions equivalent to taking 2.5 million cars off the road annually. Ravenswood also helps enable the state’s goal of shutting down all gas generation in the state, which would eliminate emissions equivalent to 5.6 million cars each year. And the project will serve as a huge proof of concept for the national shift from gas to wind, as the first repowering of a plant of its size. Multiply that shift from gas to wind at scale, and we’re talking about 738 million metric tons of CO2 reductions, the tailpipe emissions of more than half of America’s cars.
Just how important is the example that Renewable Ravenswoord is setting? It’s game changing. A perpetual obstacle to adopting and deploying renewables at scale is challenges to its feasibility. This mega-project is proof of concept not only of viability, but of the public health benefits, labor gains and protections, and committed local support that can come along with it. Ravenswood is also a clear case study of private industry successfully joining forces with community and labor unions to modernize energy infrastructure. As Rise CEO Clint Plummer told Popular Science:
“Our hope is that we can create a globally significant example of how to make this transition happen at a very practical, roll-up-your-sleeves, hands-in-the-mud, turning-wrenches perspective.”