Many town and county residents attended the Advanced Power (AP) presentation at the Dover High School Wednesday night, May 20th during a special meeting convened for that purpose by the Dover Town Board. The company proposes to construct and operate a 1000 megawatt power plant, Cricket Valley Energy (CVE,) in Dover, NY, west of Rt 22 and along the Great Swamp River.
We have only recently learned of the proposal but the application process is proceeding quickly; AP has an option on the property and intends to file its application and begin the scoping process in June. The benefits to the town and region are economic. The company estimates 500 local construction jobs and, once complete, revenues of $4mm a year, to be split with the County. The drawbacks thus far appear to be environmental, with negative impacts potentially reaching far and wide.
While most of the cooling of the plant would rely on air condensers, the company estimates that between 250-275,000 gallons of water could be used daily. Whether drawn from the Aquifer or from the bedrock below as AP proposes, this level of water consumption poses a great concern to residents who rely on the area’s water resources.
The chemical composition and direction of emissions from the three, 250-290 foot stacks will be of concern not only to residents of the Harlem Valley, but to those who live in the paths of the carrying winds. Comparing the resultant air pollution of the proposed natural gas power plant favorably to that of a coal-fired electric power plant as AP did during the meeting seems to us to set up the wrong argument; the better comparison would be to our air quality as it is now. A coal-fired plant would never have been proposed in the first place.
The 25-30 permanent jobs are estimated to last for about 30-40 years, as the estimated useful life of the plant is about 60 years. “It will be either re-used or torn down,” one of the members of the CVE team responded to a resident’s question.
“Any major project creates both economic benefits and environmental impacts, Town Supervisor Ryan Courtien said during the meeting. The benefits include construction and post-construction jobs, increased tax revenues for the town, county and schools and increased local spending. The impacts include pollution, noise, change in landscape, traffic and more impervious surfaces.”
This impacts of this project should be considered in conjunction with the impacts of Dover Knolls and within the contexts of our Master Plan and the constraints of our water supply. One PoJo blogger suggested constructing windmills on our farmland: A low-impact power generation alternative that preserves open space and agriculture, our Greenway and wildlife corridor, without water or air pollution.
– Poughkeepsie Journal Article May 11th, 2009
– Poughkeepsie Journal Article May 1, 2009