Sustainable New York...by 2030?
Posted by Glenn on December 17, 2006 - 11:48am in The Oil Drum: Local
There are many very good and far reaching proposals, such as reducing NYC's greenhouse gas emissions by 30%, increasing parkland, upgrading NYC's aging infrastructure and building new housing on brownfields near transit. He was also downright dour about the consequences of inaction, saying that we risk a breakdown in basic systems that keep the city functioning and a deteriorating quality of life for its residents if we don't act NOW.
This is exactly what I and many other people have dreamed about for quite some time. It's a little overwhelming to consider how well this could be done and worry greatly about how badly this could be botched.
Bloomberg also says that he will be engaging in a serious period of listening to what the people recommend on making the city more sustainable. So what advice would us Oil Drummers give to Mayor?
One major issue that the mayor will quickly run into is that many of the easy proposed fixes to infrastructure, improving mass transit, building thousands of Green Building, etc will cost Billions of dollars that the city does not have. Our public debt has already increased dramatically under Bloomberg's tenure and there is little additional money available from the MTA or Port Authority. However, changing the patterns of current and future expenditures will have an impact over time. Moreover, changing tax incentives can leverage much larger resources in the private sector.
But perhaps the largest source of power to make New York more sustainable is political will to stand up to special interests that will fight major reform efforts toward sustainability. They will either try to defeat or seriously compromise the efforts that would make New York more sustainable. By bundling many of the easy wins like "More parkland and playgrounds" with something more controversial, like "less free on-street parking" on the many diverse issues that impact sustainability, the Mayor might be able to enact the plan within the three years he has left in office.
The City Council is very "green minded" at this point too. Many of them want to have something concrete accomplished before the next election or to use as a platform to run for higher office after term. The two councilmembers in my area have very strong pro-environment views that are probably a bit ahead of their constituency in many ways. The mayor's sustainability initiative will give councilmembers a chance to educate their constituency and bring them up to speed.
If ever there was a moment to put together the political will to serious address environmental sustainability, it is now. And I believe the way to do it is to engage in a series of neighborhood experiments to spur innovation in public policy to try solve a set of issues in different ways and see if they work. For instance, the "Green a Block" initiative is a wonderful experiment to see how to renovate existing housing stock, educate apartment dwellers and local businesses and see how much impact there is on energy efficiency. Other experiments are needed to start building truly bike friendly neighborhoods with grade separated bike lanes and secure indoor bike parking.
One set of conservative institutions that will need serious education and horizon widening are the city's 59 community boards. These local boards have typically been very parochial, NIMBY oriented and tend to defend the status quo on most issues. While this served a useful counterpoint during the days of heavy handed Robert Moses behavior by City Hall, they now seem more concerned about protecting every last parking spot in the city - hardly a plank in the sustainability platform. It is incumbent on every city council member and borough president to review who they nominate to the local community boards and ask one simple question: "Is this person open-minded and shows a willingness to experiment?" If not, they will be an obstacle to experimentation and innovation in public policy rather than a positive partner for community input into city policy.
I've written for the last year and a half on what I think should be included in making NYC more sustainable. In many cases I have found policy ideas that would be fairly cheap to implement and I believe are truly win-win-win, like more greenmarkets, more sidewalk space and bike lanes. The main obstacle to implementation are unfounded local fears of change and that continues to be the main reason they remain undone. In addition to the many specific proposals that many people will offer, I think creating a culture of local community experimentation offers the best bang for the buck in building a more sustainable city.
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Local governments tend to be dominated by NIMBYism. For example, many outer suburbs of NYC have lobbied to be zoned exclusively for single family dwellings.
Metro governments may be for economic growth, but local forces are dead set against it.
For NYC this is OK. Moving more people into NYC is a huge environmental win regardless of anything else. NYCers don't (in general) have cars, and don't drive them much if they do. They have small to medium sized apartments surrounded on 5 sides by other apartments at roughly the same temperature.
Moving people into dense cities will do more for the environment than any sort of "green" work done on the suburbs.
In any case, realistically, just force all cabs (and busses) to be hybrids, ease zoning restrictions to get more housing built in the city, and try hard to expand the subways. That would be an excellent start.
-G
It's by far the most energy efficient way of housing millions of people. It's much easier for a farmer to send one truck (or train) to NYC where they have a huge market, rather than sending trucks in every direction.
It used to also be where most of the nation's manufacturing occurred. And it can return if fuel prices continue to increase and transportation becomes more expensive.
And we may have a flat to declining budget in real dollars as inflation runs away. Just because the dollars are going up doesn't mean they are worth the same amount.
This is why I'm advocating for low cost community based solutions that simply require political will to implement. The cost of installing bike lanes, greenmarkets, separated Bus/HOV lanes, closing off streets and roads is fairly little compared to the Second Avenue Subway, but politically requires more trade-offs that politicians hate. They would rather just add than trade-off...
And I think this is the most important point - we need to make sure that as little sewage makes it out into the surrounding waterways. On this point he did speak directly:
He then later sets the goal of
Still, our rates of asthma and lung disease are incredibly high and the air needs to be cleaned up quite a bit.
I have photos of myself in my last year in the city with dark circles and a pastey face. After five years in California, I can actually think more clearly and feel ten years younger. All my NY friends couldn't believe the change when I went back.
I loved New York and I left because of a family emergency. I had no idea how hard it was on my health and I would encourage all New Yorkers to demand better mass transit and a 80% reduction in cars. Life in the city would be awesome. In the meantime, enjoy the rat race!
Pollution could very well be a part of the problems you were experiencing, but at the same time LA is not renowned for its clear blue skies.
Remove all on-street parking. If you have a car, you can afford a garage. It would discourage people from driving in the city, and do away with most of the traffic congestion that causes the pollution. The few things that do need to drive in the city (busses, delivery trucks) would be moving along quickly rather than being stuck idling in traffic.
Also, ban diesel anything, or at least require better emissions standards. I made the mistake of sitting near a bus route outside a cafe once. Every time a diesel bus rolled by, my water was full of black specks. Hybrid busses, nothing.
HOV lanes on every anvenue. Make life for solo drivers a living hell. Make people share cabs as well to enjoy the lanes. If they fill up, then make 2 HOV lanes.
Imagine your express bus loading up at anyplace convenient, driving to the rail siding, catching up to a train of similar buses going by and cruising into town at 70 MPH. Once there, the buses pull up their rail wheels and, with batteries fully-charged, head to their destinations over the pavement. This would allow non-stop service between any two points within several miles of a rail siding, and it could be up to 100% electric.
Oh, and if you want an electric bus, the way to do it is not batteries. Those are rather inefficient, take a long time to charge, and are made of things like lead, which are both really heavy and not at all good for the environment. Instead you can just string up overhead wires along the route of the bus, and have the bus run directly off the power grid, at which point it gets called a trolleybus. These things exist in Boston, Philadelphia, Dayton, Seattle, and San Francisco, and by all accounts work pretty well.
It takes lots of money and time to extend rail to new areas. If you can achieve door-to-door service with a dual-mode vehicle, even if it only goes a mile or two off the rail network, it's a huge advantage.
Tacking on a "train" of 20 buses following a commuter train wouldn't increase traffic much, but when you consider the buses' ability to fragment "car" by "car" in a way that trains can't, it would greatly increase the effective capacity of the system. Express buses using rail to bypass road congestion would increase their lure; if they were powered by electricity, they would be better on every measure of efficiency I can think of.
And all that is assuming the technology even works, and works cost effectively. Oh yes, and if you're talking about peak oil, electric rail is about 20 times more energy efficient than diesel road vehicles, of which a factor of about 8 is the difference between rubber tires and steel wheels.
Extending the reach of rail networks with dual-mode buses creates economies of scale and fosters further growth of the system. By moving the loading and unloading process off the rails, it increases the throughput. We're going to need these advances, especially if cities get a lot more dense.
The big advantage is the elimination of transfers. This isn't just the difficulty of synchronizing the arrival of a bus and allowing enough time to switch, but the train's loading time and the exposure of passengers to weather conditions. Getting on a bus a short distance from home and not having to get off until in front of the office would eliminate all that and make the rail-bus far more convenient than a car and perhaps even more comfortable (no walk from parking to the office).
You're thinking about problems, and nothing but. Can't you think of any ways around difficulties, or reasons to try?
Which the conventional trains have too. Everything slows down under those conditions.
But they can't provide the kind of service or efficiency I'm talking about. However, hard-coupling the buses to the trains after docking isn't a bad idea.
Thus my mystification at your refusal to consider a method of increasing the available "rolling stock". ;-)
Anyway, rather than arguing that your system won't work, how about I explain the basic safety principle of railroads: that trains must always be a minimum braking distance apart. This ensures that no matter what, a train will be able to stop before hitting the train in front of it. Yes, it decreases througput compared to highway-style operation, but it also greatly decreases the chances of collisions, which is important, since trains, unlike cars and buses, are confined to their linear track.
Now, this safety criterion is normally enforced using some manner of block signal system, where the track is divided into sections called blocks, and the rule is that only one train can be in a block at a time. Thus, when a train enters a block, its wheels complete a circuit through the rails, and the signal behind it turns red. So that the train behind has time to stop, there is a yellow signal before the red one. The LIRR and Metro North use a variant of this system where instead of (or in addition to) little colored lights next to the track, the signals are transmitted by coded electrical signals through the rail. There is equipment on the train to decode the signal, display it to the driver, and to ensure that the train is going at the appropriate speed. Some very modern systems have tried to do away with blocks entirely and have the train communicate its position to some central computer, which then tells the train how fast it can go. This can either be done via induction loops along the track, which seems to work, or via radio transmission, which seems to not work, at least in the case of the L train and BART, both of which seem to have given up on the system.
Electrify transportation.
Sustainability is not something that can be done locally only - not when GHGs are continuing to rise at accelerating rates.
So what would TODder's tell New Yorkers? This TOD reader tells them to move away.
What about all the other coastal cities? Are you really suggesting abandoning hope now?
New York City is worth fighting for. So is the planet. I'm not ready to surrender.
20,000 people per square mile is less than the density of Manhattan or Hong Kong, but is pretty comparable with, say, Toronto (downtown).
Looking at what happened to New Orleans, perhaps they will move to Houston ;-).
5 feet is around consensus, I think.
But the speed of degradation of the Greenland Ice Cap has picked up, there is some thought it could be 10 feet by mid century ie 2050.
The latest indicators are all pointing in the wrong direction-- things are worse than we thought. Quite a bit worse, potentially. It's the radicals (ie the pessimists) who have so far been proven right.
(sitting in the warmest English year since records began in 1659... ;-).
(6MB file!)
p26 gives a feel for the extent of flooding possible by century end.
Oceans may rise over 4 1/2 feet by 2100
Oceans could rise by nearly 5 feet by 2100
Note that the IPCC forecast has a low forecast of 9cm and a high forecast of 88 cm. This new forecast has a low of 50 cm and a high of 140cm. That 50cm is about 20 inches (1 foot 8 inches). That 140cm is 55 inches (4 feet 7 inches).
Something sustainable should last more than a few decades. New York is going to undergo catastrophic change over the next several decades no matter what New York itself does because of the rest of the world's emission of GHGs.
Sustainability for coastal cities requires global cooperation on the GHG problem. Good luck on that.
http://www007.upp.so-net.ne.jp/tikyuu/images/IPCC_ASPO.gif
In any case, from memory, 2/3rds of the CO2 waiting to be emitted comes from coal?
If oil and gas run low, we will burn more coal (and more tar sands oil, synthetic oil etc.). So Peak Oil (and worse, Peak Gas) compounds the Global Warming problem, not lessens it.
I look at it like this. Oil is so valuable it will all be taken out of the ground and consumed, no matter what. The same is probably true for gas.
My easy and cheap solution for global warming is just banning new construction of coal, oil, and gas fueled power plants and industries. Those things are entirely optional. Just look at Sweden where I happen to live. No coal or gas. Oil is almost exclusively used for tranpsortation.
If we cut fossil burning for power and industry we could afford to increase CO2 emissions from tar sands, liquid coal etc.
But as this is such a cheap and reasonable idea, it will of course not be implemented.
Sweden also has ample biomass for energy: most countries don't have that ratio of usable trees to human beings.
Sweden is from memory 50% nuclear, but there is no political consensus (or even a hope) behind building a new generation of nuclear resources-- that gap will have to be filled, somehow.
Without international cooperation, banning fossil fueled industry will simply move it to another country (5-10% of world greenhouse gas emissions come from cement plants).
I agree Sweden is an exemplar to the rest of us, but I don't think the Swedes have 'cracked' the CO2 problem any more than the rest of us. And Swedes like to go on vacations to warm places, taking the plane, too.
Plenty of biomass to, mainly used in the energy system for district heating. The same effect could be had by utilising the waste heat from a few nuclear power plants. Hot water can be piped in well insulated pipes a lot longer than most people think without major energy loss.
Nuclear power is nowhere as popular as in Sweden. More than 80 % support the current fleet, and while support for new construction is lower (30-60 %, depending on how you count) the support for new nukes will increase strongly in the event of an energy crisis. The opposition to nukes is mainly in the elite, but democracy will deal with that.
A decision on new nuclear construction will likely be taken some time in the 2010-2014 period.
International cooperation is not at all needed as industry will not move. Why? Because nuclear power is cheap. Sweden has a very big energy intensive industry and they recently said they'd like to spend €7-10 billion on new nukes. They aren't going anywhere as long as the nukes stay.
Swedish (and French and Swiss) per capita CO2 emissions are around 6 tons, compared to 9 tons in Denmark and Germany and 20 tons in the US. If people did what I told them the industrialised world could cut emissions to 6 tons per capita and year. And it wouldn't cost a thing.
But oh no, Kyoto will destroy the economy blah blah blah.
The Dutch have been setting the standard for walling out the ocean for hundreds of years (meaning they have a leg up on anybody this side of the Atlantic), and the most likely net result will be that before their current generation of pre-schoolers reaches middle age, most of them will be involuntary refugees in other countries. NYC and a whole host of other seaside cities and towns all over the world are history.
Dude, new york is above sea level. In fact, the vast majority of the city is more than several feet above sea level, often 10 feet or more.
This is not New Orleans, which is 10 feet BELOW sea level, and sinking at 1 inch a year. Even if you can fix that city, in 100 years it'll be 20 feet below sea level. Not really a sustainable solution. NYC is going the other way, as construction debris actually adds land, and adds height to existing land. :-)
I agree Harlem should be OK (the Blockhouse in Central Park is on a promontory-- an old fort there to secure the northern half of the Island).
But when the sea comes in, Lower Manhattan, Rockaway, Brighton Beach and a few other places will probably have serious flooding.
This I'll grant. Probably 10% of the city is in danger of serious flooding in case of a major hurricane. That's what the emergency maps say at least. However, to fix this it just takes a little bit of work. When construction goes on, try to back fill and raise street level a few feet, then make sure that the shoreline is fully shored up, pun of course intended. Manhattan's shoreline is all concrete anyway, and the paths and parks are about 5-10 feet above the level of the water, making that 10-15 over the course of the next 100 years is not entirely unreasonable.
NYC is going to need nuclear power, but good luck finding anywhere on Long Island, Connecticut, or New Jersey to allow new plants to be built. And remember, no matter how bad things might get in NYC, it is going to be much worse on Long Island and New Jersey.
There is such a thing as power lines.
- I've heard that Donald Trump's father made millions providing cheap, Federally-funded housing to returning vets after WWII in Queens. I totally agree that NYC is much more energy efficient than any other part of the country owing to density. So shouldn't publicly-funded housing (and more money for schools) be part of a sustainability agenda?
- NYC used to have an excellent trolley system. How about replacing buses with one lane of light rail on all big avenues, each way, and on big cross-streets, starting in Manhattan?
- NYC had the first electrical system in the world (Edison's on Pearl street), how about the world's first municipal wind and solar energy system? Subsidize solar on most if not all buildings, a la some towns in Germany? Wind farms, maybe outside NYC -- water comes from far, why not wind? And with an upgraded electrical grid?
- How about closing down some streets to traffic, I believe Norman Mailer ran on this platform for mayor in the 1960s, but more to the point, this may be a great way to make the city more sustainable.
- And within car-free areas, how about trying some serious urban farming?
I've never understood the antipathy toward the big city, in general, in terms of its environmental footprint. If all of America lived in about 30 NYC's, we'd have no problem overcoming both Peak Oil and global warming. OK, enough with Utopias, but I thought I'd put it all out there.Thanks for the post!
There has been a lot of work done on this. Until 1970 or so, America by and large generated enough new housing that real housing prices rose more or less in line with incomes.
So New York was always expensive, but people could find a place to live.
What has happened since 1970 is that local neighbourhoods have gained control of their zoning. And they fight to keep new buildings of a size and scale commensurate with existing ones.
If that had not happened, in the case of Manhattan for example, then the townhouses which were replaced in 20s by apartment blocks on the Upper East and West, would have been replaced by 50-80 story buildings in the 90s and 00s-- think modern Hong Kong.
Similarly the single, detached house suburbs would now be covered in 12 story apartment blocks.
But in coastal American cities in particular, that has not been allowed to occur.
Real housing prices in the coastal zones (Southern California, the Bay Area, Portland, Seattle, Boston, Washington DC, metropolitan New York) have therefore tended to rise much faster than real incomes.
The schools problem has been going on for a long time, and is a key factor in 'white flight' ie the flight to the suburbs (same thing has happened in predominantly black suburbs of Washington DC).
Edward Gleaser at Harvard University has published a lot of excellent work on this. See his webpage.
(there is a neighbourhood in Toronto, St. James Town, which has a density of 100,000+ per square mile (18k people in total on the site). Despite all the best intentions when it was built, it is a slum (a vibrant aspirant immigrant slum, as well as the 'left behinds' but a slum).
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/St._Jamestown
I think the pre 1950 'streetcar suburb' model of houses mixed with low rise apartment buildings, duplexes etc. has a lot going for it. You can get population densities of up to 20,000 per square mile, at which point public transit is competitive with private vehicles.
Much of Brooklyn, I think, conforms to that model, ex-ing out the 1960s horrors of urban redevelopment (Bushwick).
Most New Yorkers don't travel by car anyway, so the car would not be missed. One could still retain some public vehicles for emergencies and police vehicles. Because streets would be car free, this would actually enhance emergency response times.
In addition to expanding the subway, provide free shuttles every five minutes up and down all major thoroughfares.
Or, alternatively, just continue to poison yourself to death. It's your call.
The city could be a truly wonderful place. It is the auto which makes it so unpleasant, noisy, polluted, and wasteful.
Is this utopian? Probably. But one must start with the ideal. This ideal could be scaled back here and there depending upon the circumstances.
And then there's the issue of trucks: we need them to make deliveries and pick up our garbage and so on, but at the same time they're loud and polluting and have a tendency to run over people. You need some alternative to trucks before you can abolish all motor traffic from Manhattan. Perhaps a combination of regular freight rail and freight trolleys will do the trick, but a lot of infrastructure needs to get built before such a system is feasible.
So I think the real goal is not "we want Manhattan without cars", but rather, "how do we minimize the number of cars in Manhattan and their impact on our daily lives?"
The concept here is that there is a defined geographic area without private vehicles that still allows emergency vehicles such as ambulances and police vehicles. People are free to keep their car outside that area, in New Jersey, for example. The government could even assist in constructing multi level parking lots outside of the car free area so that people could take transit to the lots and then take their cars to the hinterlands. Alternatively, they could engage in some kind of car sharing scheme outside the city or rent vehicles if their needs were occassional.
Eventually, you could find a way to minimize or eliminate the need for trucks as you could expand the underground or surface rail system to accomodate local freight. A system of depots could be created throughout the city that would serve different local areas. Hand trucks or small electric trucks could then be used to deliver goods to their final destination. This is a crude summary of such an approach, but you kind find a more detailed explanation of the solution to the problem in the book that I have referenced above.
Elimination of private passenger vehicles could be phase one. Phase 2 could be the virtual elmination of commercial vehicles. Perhaps even after phase 2, one could retain some electric commercial vehicles for some local delivery.
Yes, this will require a lot of infrastructure, but this could be implemented over a couple of decades.
One problem I have with plans to minimize the number of cars is that the rich get to continue to drive their cars regardless of schemes like congestion taxes. Create a system where cars are not an option and then one eliminates the problem of social inequity.
I think we can continue to take a so called "moderate" and "reasonable" approach to all these energy related problems. I also think that these so called moderate and reasonable approaches will fix absolutely nothing.
I will admit, however, that part of this is based upon my own personal experience. I spent a lot of time in downtown Frankfurt during the 80s, which was largely carfree. It was the most pleasant part and entertaining part of the city, full of life, activity, and largely free of the noise and pollution that you typically get in the city center. Even if I had had a car, it would never have occurred to me to actually drive down to that area.
So it's very hard to get a meaningful reduction in traffic. In London, traffic is down 10-15% but by much less than that during rush hours.
In Third World cities, they have jitney taxis: effectively minivans. If the licensing issues could be resolved, then I would think that could make a significant difference to New York-- a fleet of rolling, 7-8 passenger vehicles running between Midtown and downtown. Never wait more than 2 or 3 minutes for one-- pay maybe $6 for a ride downtown.
However given the price of a New York cab license, I would expect the New York cab owners to fight and make the introduction of such a system impossible.
It would seem to me, if you could license them, you could enforce the minimum quality standards. It might be as simple as allowing existing taxis to take multiple occupants-- they would then convert to minivans.
I have taken such a beast: $13 from the airport to midtown, it seemed easier (for one person) than catching a cab (JFK).
I'm looking for solutions that don't involve a big expansion of the government sector, because I don't think that is either feasible, nor would it be acceptable.
People need cars, but they don't need them all the time.
You would still need delivery vehicles, taxis, etc. but a permitting system could enable that. Say you pay $30 a day to drive in Manhattan, when you drive. Certain avenues could be reserved for cross town traffic (bridge to bridge etc.).
The key is to increase the average speed and frequency of the buses. Subways are inflexible and have decades long gestation periods, buses are highly flexible and scalable.
http://www.goingreen.co.uk/store/content/gwiz/
whether they could be made to work in NYC, where having working AirCon and heating is important, I don't know.
100 mile range on a full charge, 40mph max speed (downhill with a tail wind!).
But there is the ultimate car of the future-- no internal combustion engine, low noise, small, low impact.
Early days, but in that, I think, we have seen the future of the automobile, at least in cities.
You cannot eliminate the car completely, but you can minimize its use.
*Robotic parking garages with many times the volumetric density of a normal parking garage. ESPECIALLY at suburban mass transit used by commuters - where your goal is to stop as many suburbanites at the city's border as possible.
*Elimination of long and medium duration streetside parking: this restricts parking use primarily to taxi/bus/streetcar/bikes (with the appropriate monthly permit).
*Reclaim many of those parking lanes as bike/bus/streetcar lanes, treed sidewalk.
*Free(emphasis on conveniance) electric streetcars and/or trolleybusses. With dedicated lanes on avenues.
*Congestion pricing ONLY on routes with alternative means of transport
Water is a precious commodity:
*Mandate that all new-construction bathrooms contain toilets using only runoff from a green roof and/or greywater. No more fouling potable water.
Insulation is one of the cheapest energy efficiency measures available:
More of it. On all new construction. And consider subsidizing retrofits.
Walkability is a good thing:
*Mixed use zoning. Everywhere. Streetlevel shops under apartments should be the norm.
Air pollution is a bad thing:
*Petrodiesel contains particulates that are abusive to an urban environment. Biodiesel doesn't. Encourage gas stations to pump high-% biodiesel rather than petrodiesel when the weather allows.
*Explore whether photocatalytic paint on directly sunlit areas produces significantly better air quality
Nuclear is necessary:
*Plan on revamping Indian Point by replacing its 30 year old reactors with newer (and much, much safer) 3G+/4G units by 2015.
Density is a good thing near transit:
*Don't you dare build a parking lot or suburban-style housing on an accessible brownfield.
Global warming is scary:
*Frame new large building fronts for potential renovation of the second level in case the first goes underwater, or simply very high ceilings on the first level. Galveston rebuilt after a Katrina-like event by ratchetting their buildings into the air and infilling with dredged sediment, lifting the town many feet. You can't do that with a skyscraper. But you can raise the road surface a bit. Seawalls will be built, but they don't last forever. Minimize open below-sealevel structures.
Less fans, more people:
*No more tunnels that require elaborate active ventillation systems so that people can breath alongside internal combustion engines. Deep tunnels are for electric vehicles - especially trains.
There is another plant, up on Lake Ontario? Possibly you could expand that.
Even better would be to jointly build new hydro plant with Quebec Hydro. However I believe lobbying by Native Canadian groups led to Gov Cuomo pulling out of that. Also Hydro is seasonal power, in the sense that if you have a lack of snowfall, you have a lack of power in the summer months.
"the plant would be one of the first of its type in the country. It would produce enough natural gas to supply 16 percent of all residential use in New York."
http://groovygreen.com/groove/?p=764
There are several nuclear plants at Lake Ontario. FitzPatrick, Ginna and Nine Mile Point (two reactors) on the American side, the four reactor Darlington plant and the eight(!) reactor Pickering plant on the Canadian side.
Well, as I wrote in 2001, greenroof with recycled materials would be a damn good start. There's an awful lot of heat island effect, energy usage, biodiversity, particulate matter levels, and waste management costs that this would address.
And it could be very cheap.