Economic Benefits

CLIEC provides several major economic benefits toil and to the communities surrounding the project:

• Because CLIEC is so efficient, the plant will save LIPA over $2 billion dollars in fuel expenditures over its lifetime as compared to what LIPA would have spent to generate the same amount of electricity in older baseload plants.
• Over the life of the project, CLIEC will pay over $189 Million in local property taxes. Roughly two-thirds of that will go to the local school district.
• CLIEC is located in a New York State empire zone. As a qualified empire zone enterprise it receives a refund from New York State covering the local property taxes that it pays for the first ten years. CLIEC does not retain this tax credit. Instead it turns it over to LIPA. As a consequence, LIPA’s ratepayers will receive about $80 million which will help mitigate electric rates.