Caithness Awards $25,000 in Scholarships to 28 Area Long Island High School Students

— Now in its 12^th Year, the Caithness Long Island Energy Center Scholarship has awarded more than $351,000 to 307 students graduating from Bellport, Longwood, and Patchogue-Medford High Schools —

YAPHANK, NY — June 18, 2019 —  Caithness Long Island, LLC, recently awarded $25,000 in scholarships to 28 seniors graduating from Bellport, Longwood and Patchogue-Medford high schools who will be furthering their studies at the college level in either science, engineering, or the environment. Now in its 12^th year, the Caithness Long Island Energy Center Scholarship has provided more than $351,000 in financial assistance to 307 students at three high schools, which are in proximity to the Caithness Long Island Energy Center, a 350-megawatt (MW) combined-cycle, natural gas-fired power generating station in Yaphank.

The scholarships are to be presented at the annual seniors’ award ceremonies held at the three high schools. Students qualifying for the scholarships were chosen by their schools based on their academic achievements, and intent to study science, engineering or environmental studies at the college level.

“We at Caithness are pleased to once again provide scholarship assistance to local high school students who have demonstrated their desire and academic achievement to further their post-high school studies in science engineering, or the environment,” said Ross D. Ain, President, Caithness Long Island, LLC. “We wish the graduates of the Classes of 2019 continued academic and personal success as they continue their educational pursuits this fall.”

The recipients of the 2019 Caithness Long Island Energy Center Scholarships from Bellport High School’s Class of 2019 are Finn Rauch, Henry Chillogallo, Michael Foley, Ivelisse Diaz, Marvina Baslious, Daniel Roach, Anneqa Majid, and Gabrielle Tims.

Longwood High School graduating students receiving the 2019 Caithness Long Island Energy Center Scholarships are Atilla Osan, Alexander Miller, Annisha Wazed, Jacob Dannenberg, Patricia Angela Pasana, Riley Dilger, Charles Pierre III, Jeremy Wilder, and Brendan Allen.

Graduating seniors receiving this year’s Caithness Long Island Energy Center Scholarships from Patchogue-Medford High School are Elizabeth De Martini, Madisen Downs, Ethan Franco, Ryan Harper, Brooke Hauptman, Taylor McNamee, Taylor Moran, Christopher Pierse, Amber Ringle, Luke Thompson, and Justin Zhou.

Caithness’s commitment to education not only includes the annual scholarship program, but the company also offers internships, job-shadowing programs, and plant tours to teach local students about the newest in power-generation technology, allowing them to consider careers in energy, and related fields. Caithness supports numerous environmental organizations, nonprofit groups, and community-based activities throughout the Town of Brookhaven, and across Long Island.

Since commencing operations in 2009, the Caithness Long Island Energy Center remains the region’s cleanest, most energy-efficient and water-conserving plant, and has substantially helped to decrease the region’s carbon footprint. Utilizing state-of-the-art generating technology, and operating primarily on natural gas, it produces energy in a highly efficient manner and burns cleaner than the older, inefficient power-generating units currently installed on Long Island, generating more than 20 percent of Long Island’s power. As a result, Caithness is helping to achieve Governor Cuomo’s goals of a 40 percent reduction of greenhouse gas emissions from 1990 levels by 2030.

About Caithness Long Island, LLC
Caithness Long Island, LLC, is a subsidiary of Caithness Energy, LLC, a privately held,
New York-based independent power producer. For over 30 years, Caithness has been a pioneer in the development of clean, reliable energy. More information can be found at www.caithnesslongisland.com.

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Contact: Don Miller
West End Strategies, Ltd.
516-330-1647

don@westendstrategiespr.com

SOURCE: Newsday

AUTHOR: Carl MacGowan

DATE: July 13, 2018

Caithness Long Island can continue pursuing a plan to build a 600-megawatt power plant in Yaphank after the Brookhaven Town Board on Thursday lifted restrictions on the project. Click here to read more »

The Caithness Long Island Energy Center Scholarship has awarded more than $326,000 to 275 graduates from Bellport, Longwood, and Patchogue-Medford High Schools since 2007 

YAPHANK, NY  June 28, 2018    Caithness Long Island, LLC, recently awarded $25,000 in scholarships to 26 seniors graduating from Bellport, Longwood and Patchogue-Medford high schools who are planning to further their studies in science, engineering, or the environment. Since establishing the Caithness Long Island Energy Center Scholarship in 2007, Caithness has granted a total more than $326,000 to 275 students at the three high schools, which are near the Caithness Long Island Energy Center, a 350-megawatt combined-cycle, natural gas-fired power station in Yaphank. Click here to read more »

The Caithness Long Island Energy Center Scholarship has awarded $25,000 to 22 graduating seniors from Bellport, Longwood and Patchogue-Medford High Schools for their continued education in science, engineering or environmental studies

YAPHANK, NY  June 16, 2017    Caithness Long Island, LLC, today announced that it has awarded $25,000 in scholarships to 22 seniors graduating from Bellport, Longwood and Patchogue-Medford high schools. Since its establishment in 2007, the Caithness Long Island Energy Center Scholarship program has granted a total of $300,000 in financial assistance to 253 students at the three high schools, which are near the Caithness Long Island Energy Center, a 350-megawatt (MW) combined-cycle, natural gas-fired power station in Yaphank. Click here to read more »

DATED: September 7, 2016

SOURCE: Innovateli.com

Future fossil: The natural gas-fired Caithness II power plant proposed for Yaphank may be Long Island’s best renewable-energy hope.

As renewable programs struggle to set a new national energy tone, the Long Island-based subsidiary of a major independent power producer is lauding a new international study calling for greater collaborations between renewable sources and fast-reacting fossil-fueled generation.

The idea, according to a white paper recently released by the Massachusetts-based National Bureau of Economic Research, is that intermittent and non-dispatchable renewable energy resources like solar and wind aren’t reliable enough to meet growing energy demands by themselves, based on current technologies and energy from good, old-fashioned fossil-fuel sources is needed to plug the power gap during natural drop-offs in solar and wind production.

Renewable and fast-reacting fossil technologies appear as highly complementary, the white paper notes, adding such tech should be jointly installed to meet the goals of cutting emissions and ensuring a stable supply.

Ross D. Ain, Executive Vice President

The study Bridging the Gap: Do Fast Reacting Fossil Technologies Facilitate Renewable Energy Diffusion? A study was conducted by the Euro-Mediterranean Center on Climate Change and the Fondazione Eni Enrico Mattei in Italy, in collaboration with the French Economic Observatory (bring your dictionnaire to the website) and Syracuse University. It considered wind, solar and other renewable-energy plants in 26 countries over 13 years before concluding there are important synergies between renewable generators and natural-gas plants.

That sounds about right to Caithness Long Island II, a subsidiary of New York City-based Caithness Energy and the entity behind Caithness II, a 750-megawatt natural gas-fired power plant proposed for Yaphank. The Caithness II project would supplement Caithness Long Island, a 350-megawatt gas-fired generator that in 2009 became the first major baseload power plant to open on Long Island in three decades, and currently provides roughly 10 percent of the Island’s electricity.

Caithness II is also designed specifically to ramp up and down quickly, as dictated by customer demand and fluctuating energy supplies. According to Caithness Energy, the proposed plant can go from producing zero megawatts to 620 MW in just 45 minutes and requires only 32 minutes to go from full load to shutdown.

That’s generations better than slowpoke steam plants in Port Jefferson and Northport, disqualifying those old-school generators as on-demand suppliers. And it’s exactly the kind of rapid-response, fossil-fuel stopgap championed in the NBER white paper, notes Caithness II President Ross Ain, who believes the proposed plant is perfectly suited to support the integration of substantial renewable-generated electricity into the Long Island grid.

What the study concluded is that renewable energy won’t work without adding modern, fast-reacting, natural gas plants to provide power when the sun isn’t shining or the wind isn’t blowing, Ain said in a statement.

Caithness II remains in a holding pattern while regional lawmakers, utilities and investors continue to review market conditions and gauge future Long Island energy needs but there’s no doubt, Ain added, that this is what the NBER’s researchers had in mind when they penned Bridging the Gap.

Natural gas continues to be an essential bridge fuel that represents the best support in attaining aggressive greenhouse-gas reduction goals, the Caithness II President said. “And gas-fired, combined-cycle plants such as the Caithness II project do so in an economical and environmentally beneficial manner.”

Click here to read more »

White paper says renewable energy won’t work without fast-ramping natural gas plants to provide backup to meet demand when renewable resources are not available 

YAPHANK, NY  September 7, 2016  Massachusetts-based National Bureau of Economic Research (NBER), a leading nonprofit economic research organization, concluded, in a recently released white paper, that when intermittent and non-dispatchable renewable energy resources such as solar and wind resources are added to electric utility systems, the systems require additional, fast-reacting fossil-fueled generation that can respond quickly to rapid changes that occur in the output of the solar and wind resources. The NEBR white paper further concluded that renewables and fast-reacting fossil technologies appear as highly complementary and that they should be jointly installed to meet the goals of cutting emissions and ensuring a stable supply. Click here to read more »

Yaphank power plant is the region’s cleanest, most energy-efficient plant,
eliminates as much CO2 emissions as 500 megawatts of solar 

YAPHANK, NY  August 24, 2016  Caithness I, the first power plant at the Caithness Long Island Energy Center in Yaphank, has substantially decreased the region’s carbon footprint and has been more effective in this regard than any other single action the Long Island Power Authority (LIPA) has undertaken. Click here to read more »

Second time a NY Court rules against Port Jefferson’s efforts to block Caithness II 

YAPHANK, NY  August 11, 2016  A New York State Supreme Court judge has once again ruled against the Village of Port Jefferson in its efforts to block the Caithness II power plant project in Yaphank. Justice Jerry Garguilo dismissed Port Jefferson’s lawsuit seeking to annul the Town of Brookhaven’s Industrial Development Agency’s (IDA) approval of a 25-year agreement under which the IDA and Caithness II agreed upon payments that would be made by the project to the Town.

For several years, the Village and the Port Jefferson School District have sought to block Caithness II out of a concern that if the plant were built, the Port Jefferson power plant might no longer be needed. In 2015, the Long Island Power Authority’s (LIPA) ratepayers paid $27.6 million in property taxes on the now obsolete Port Jefferson plant, built in the 1950s, a substantial portion of which went to the Village of Port Jefferson and the Port Jefferson School District. Tax assessments on the plant are among the very highest in the country per megawatt of capacity and the extraordinarily high tax assessments for the Port Jefferson plant and other similar plants on Long Island have long been identified as one of the major reasons why Long Island’s electric rates are among the highest in the nation. In contrast, the IDA agreement with Caithness II that Port Jefferson sought to annul calls for payments averaging $19 million per year for a plant that is brand new; one- third more efficient, and twice the size of the Port Jefferson plant.

In its July 14, 2016, ruling, the Court held that the Village lacked legal standing to bring the case and that its allegation that the IDA failed to have a quorum present at the subject public hearing was invalid. The Court noted that the Village failed to prove that the Caithness II project would cause any environmental or economic injury, beyond mere speculation or conjecture. In May 2015, the Court similarly dismissed another lawsuit brought by the Village of Port Jefferson challenging the Town of Brookhaven’s environmental review and approval of the Caithness II project. In that ruling, the Court also held that the Village failed to show its claims that Caithness II would harm the Village were without merit and based solely on speculation and conjecture.

It is ironic that the Village challenged the environmental review of the 750 MW Caithness II project. The Port Jefferson plant, which the Village is seeking to protect, emits 50% more greenhouse gasses, 50 times more nitrogen oxides, and ten times more carbon monoxide per megawatt hour of power generated than would Caithness II. Furthermore, the Port Jefferson plant uses water from the Long Island Sound for cooling, a system that is no longer permitted to be installed on new plants because it kills substantial numbers of fish and fish larvae.

Although the Village would like to have a new plant constructed at the site of the Port Jefferson plant so that it can continue receiving tax payments, no proposal for such a plant was submitted when LIPA last requested proposals for new generation despite LIPA’s extending the time period for responses specifically so that such proposals could be prepared. The Port Jefferson plant site is highly constrained, necessitating design modifications that would complicate the permitting of a facility there and add significantly to the cost of constructing a new plant at that location, considerations that may have dissuaded the plant’s owner from submitting a bid for a new plant.

Caithness is pleased with the State Supreme Court’s ruling that the Village of Port Jefferson lacked the legal standing to challenge the legitimate actions of the Brookhaven Industrial Agency on the Caithness Long Island II project, said Ross D. Ain, President of Caithness Long Island II, LLC. Over the 25-year life of the project, Caithness will pay more than $446 million in lieu of taxes to local municipalities, and save LIPA ratepayers hundreds of millions of dollars in fuel costs, among other significant economic and environmental benefits.

The Caithness II project has received many of the required environmental and municipal approvals to begin construction, which is expected to take 30-months to build while creating 500 local construction jobs. Caithness is awaiting the PSEG-LI integrated resource plan review to see how it values the significant contribution the new plant can make to saving ratepayers significant fuel charges, improving the air and significantly lowering CO2 emissions which contributes to climate change, and allowing for the successful integration of renewable energy by having a state-of-the-art plant that can cycle quickly and efficiently to back up the intermittency of renewable power production.

About Caithness Long Island II, LLC
Caithness Long Island II, LLC, is a subsidiary of Caithness Energy, LLC, a privately held,
New York-based independent power producer. For over 25 years, Caithness has been a
pioneer in the development of clean, reliable energy. More information can be found at www.caithnesslongisland.com.

Contact: Don Miller
West End Strategies, Ltd.
516-330-1647
don@westendstrategiespr.com

Caithness Long Island Energy Center Scholarship Benefits Students from Bellport, Longwood, and Patchogue-Medford High Schools 

YAPHANK, NY  June 13, 2016  Caithness Long Island, LLC, has awarded $25,000 in scholarships to 25 graduating seniors from Bellport, Longwood, and Patchogue-Medford high schools who will be pursuing college studies in science, engineering or the environment. Click here to read more »

 FERC rejects PSEG-LI’s latest obstacle to clean, low-cost power, and economic development on Long Island when it denied its request for a rehearing killing an attempt to stick an additional billion dollars in project costs onto Caithness II 

YAPHANK, NY  March 18, 2016  Amidst Governor Cuomo’s unprecedented efforts to improve New York’s infrastructure, the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission (FERC) removed an obstacle to fulfilling modernization of the Long Island electric grid. Yesterday, FERC rejected PSEG-LI’s request for rehearing FERC’s September 30th decision that rejected PSEG-LI’s criteria for determining the electric transmission upgrades required to reliably and safely interconnect new, clean, and efficient generation facilities on Long Island. FERC found PSEG-LI’s guidelines violate FERC’s Orders and the New York Independent System Operator’s (NYISO) tariffs (Caithness Long Island II, LLC v. New York Independent System Operator, Inc.). FERC’s most recent decision is a further repudiation of the special transmission interconnection requirements that PSEG-LI added onto the standard NYISO criteria for determining the upgrades required to connect power plants and undermines PSEG LI’s invalid and unsupported claims that Caithness II would increase electric rates on Long Island. Click here to read more »