The Fossil Fuel End Game: A Frontline Vision to Retire New York City’s Peaker Plants by 2030

This report is the first detailed strategic and policy road map to retire and replace an entire city’s fossil-fuel peaker power plants. It lays out a community-led strategy to replace about half of New York City’s existing fleet of polluting peaker plants with a combination of offshore wind, distributed solar, energy efficiency, and battery storage by 2025. The remaining peaker plants could be reliably and cost-effectively replaced with the same mix of resources by 2030.

The report lays out a plan for New York City focused on local, distributed solutions. This decentralized approach creates a more resilient power system than the current grid, which depends on centralized fossil-fuel power plants. The report also highlights the alarming economic, environmental, and social costs of New York City’s existing peaker plants, expanding on the findings of the PEAK Coalition’s previous report, Dirty Energy, Big Money.

This report was prepared by Strategen Consulting on behalf of the PEAK Coalition: New York City Environmental Justice Alliance (NYC-EJA), UPROSE, THE POINT CDC, New York Lawyers for the Public Interest (NYLPI), and Clean Energy Group.