The Long Island Power Authority’s (LIPA) board of trustees voted last Wednesday to approve staff recommendations to move forward on a plan that will add over 1,000 MW of new energy to LIPA’s portfolio over the next several years.

With the board’s approval, LIPA staff can begin negotiating power purchase agreements (PPA) with selected developers.

LIPA’s comprehensive energy resource plan contains five key elements: 1) energy efficiency and demand reduction; 2) renewable offshore wind; 3) on-Island power supply for summer 2005; 4) New on- and off-Island baseload resources including on-island generation plant and a new transmission cable to Long Island; and 5) risk mitigation to increase fuel and energy diversity.

“I am very pleased by the board’s action today,” said LIPA Chairman Richard Kessel. “Over the last six years, Long Island’s appetite for electricity has continued to grow. We have been making gains with energy conservation and efficiency programs, while adding more than 600 MW of new on-island generation over the last three years. Nevertheless, consumption continues to grow at an unprecedented pace of more than 100 MW per year. LIPA’s Board of Trustees has taken an important step towards helping secure Long Island’s energy future,” he said.

“While we’ve kept pace with demand, we need efficient resources to meet the anticipated growth over the next eight to ten years,” said Kessel. “The comprehensive energy resource plan, when fully implemented, will provide Long Island with the resources it will need to meet customer demand while providing a prudent margin for contingencies.”

Kessel indicated that, as a matter of routine, all of the proposed project contracts will be submitted to the offices of the New York State Comptroller and the state Attorney General for review and approval.

He also said that the state comptroller’s office has agreed to undertake a complete review of LIPA’s entire RFP evaluation process to ensure that it was fair, impartial, and competitive.

The selection of preferred projects culminated nearly 18 months of review and analysis by an interdisciplinary team of engineering, financial, fuel, environmental and legal professionals who served as the Selection Committee.

The team evaluated all of the individual responses to four different LIPA Requests for Proposals (RFP) between January 2003 and February 2004. The team then reviewed and evaluated the top contenders that responded to each RFP to ensure that the overall selections conform with LIPA’s planning criteria as contained in its energy master plan while complimenting the multi-faceted state and federal planning and regulatory requirements.

The objective of the LIPA team’s resource analysis design was to ensure that a thorough and fair evaluation of each proposal was made so that the best projects were chosen for Long Island’s diverse, long-term energy needs.

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