NJ Transit scraps plan for gas-fired backup power plant, cheering environmental justice advocates
New Jersey’s public transportation agency said Friday it is scrapping plans for a backup power plant that would have been fueled by natural gas, and applauded environmental justice advocates who targeted it and several other power plants in largely minority areas.
NJ Transit said it is redirecting $503 million in federal funding that would have been used to build the backup system, called the TransitGrid Microgrid Central Facility, to other resiliency projects across northern and central New Jersey.
The emergency plant would be built in Kearny, a low-income community near Newark, the state’s largest city and home to another hotly contested plan for a similar emergency sewage treatment plant power project.
“An intensive review of industry proposals for the MCF revealed that the project was not financially viable,” NJ Transit said in a statement. “Additionally, since this project was originally designed, multiple improvements have been made to the affected electrical grid that have made the MCF, as envisioned at the time, much less functionally necessary than other critical resiliency projects.”
The agency said a utility company, PSE&G has made significant investments in the resilience of the electricity grid across the region, significantly increasing the reliability of energy supply.
The move was praised by opponents who said it would have added yet another polluting project to communities already overburdened with it — despite a state law signed by Democratic Gov. Phil Murphy in 2020 that is supposed to prevent that from happening.
“This is a victory for the grassroots activists who never stopped pushing the Murphy administration to reject a plan to place a new fossil fuel project near communities that have suffered decades of of industrial pollution,” said Matt Smith, executive director of the New Jersey environmental group. Food & Water guard. “They did not accept the false idea that a fracked gas plant could be a sustainability solution in the midst of a climate crisis.”
Paula Rogovin of the Don’t Gas the Meadowlands Coalition said continued, widespread pressure on the transportation agency contributed to the project’s cancellation.
“Today’s victory belongs to the thousands of people who marched and rallied, spoke out at NJ Transit Board of Commissioners meetings, signed petitions, made phone calls, attended forums, lobbied in twenty towns and cities to pass resolutions, and more than 70 officials got a statement against the polluting gas power plant,” she said.
NJ Transit said the money will instead be spent on replacing a bridge over the Raritan River, as well as upgrades to the Hoboken Rail Terminal and the expansion of a rail depot in New Brunswick, where 120 rail cars can be stored in a storage area. area that is considered to be outside the risk of flooding.
The transportation company’s rail equipment suffered serious damage at low-lying storage locations in 2012 due to Superstorm Sandy. The emergency power plant was part of a response to that damage.
The cancellation of the Kearny project immediately led to renewed calls from the same advocates to cancel a similar plan at the Passaic Valley Sewerage Commission in Newark. That plan is still pending.
“If NJ Transit will acknowledge that their backup power system is no longer needed, we call on Governor Murphy to direct PVSC to do the same,” said Maria Lopez-Nunez, deputy director of the Ironbound Community Corporation, named for the section of Newark, which includes the sewage treatment plant.
___
Follow Wayne Parry on X, formerly Twitter, at www.twiter.com/WayneParryAC