Amongst the debris that washed up from Hurricane Sandy in 2012 was an NJ Transit plan to build a gas-fired backup power plant in Kearny to keep its rail lines operating during emergencies. After all, Sandy caused power outages affecting some 2.7 million residents for up to two weeks.
In January 2024, NJ Transit announced it was abandoning that plan for lack of “financial feasibility.” Environmental groups throughout New Jersey had contended it lacked much more than monetary workability—namely, a clean energy component, as opposed to gas, a fossil fuel whose emissions would set us well back in the struggle for a stable climate.
The 104 MW plant and its associated microgrid would have added to the air pollution woes of innumerable state residents, particularly those in already overburdened neighborhoods.
“The NJ Chapter of the Sierra Club is pleased to see that NJ Transit has pulled this harmful project,” said Chapter Director Anjuli Ramos-Busot. “Gas is not the future for New Jersey and we hope to continue to move in the right direction toward renewable energy alternatives, battery storage, and incorporating climate resilience into everything we do.”
The Sierra Club and other environmentalists did try to get NJ Transit to incorporate renewable energy into the project, but there was much resistance and NJ Transit never disclosed whether the bids it received contained any renewable energy components at all.
Bids for the backup power plant were received over the past year and an award decision had been expected in 2024. A $409.7 million grant for the project had been promised through the Federal Transit Administration (FTA) emergency response program, but by October 2023 the project was expected to cost no less than $577 million.
In its January announcement, NJ Transit said roughly $500 million in funding for the Kearny plant would be reassigned to cover several other Hurricane Sandy–related resiliency projects. This is something of a surprise development because, in May 2023, Diane Gutierrez Scaccetti, the outgoing state transportation commissioner and NJ Transit board chair, argued that the FTA would take the grant money back if it weren’t spent on the backup plan and microgrid.
How is NJ Transit able to live without the half-billion dollar backup gas-fired generating plant it insisted it needed to build in Kearny? The publicly run transportation service explained it’s no longer necessary because, in the wake of Sandy, PSEG has spent billions to improve the storm resiliency of its power supply system.
The chief takeaway is that New Jersey is not going to have the burden of a new, 104 megawatt gas-fired generating plant in Kearny.