Cruise Ships in Brooklyn to Plug In on Shore

By LIZ ROBBINS ( from the NYTIMES.COM)

Michelle V. Agins/The New York Times The Queen Mary 2, docked at Red Hook in 2009, before the plug.

Updated, 1:06 p.m. | The mighty Queen Mary 2 will no longer be belching diesel fumes over Red Hook when it docks at the Brooklyn Cruise Terminal next year. Instead, the cruise ship will shut its engines and plug into a giant electrical outlet built especially for the port.
After about two years of negotiations, the Bloomberg administration is set to announce today a multiagency agreement to supply cruise ships with “shore power,” according to several officials briefed on the agreement.
The Brooklyn terminal will become the first on the East Coast to adopt the cleaner technology, the officials said.
Red Hook residents and advocates for the environment, who have staged protests and lobbied politicians since 2006 on the issue, hope the pending agreement will rid the waterfront community of a veil of haze and what they contend are associated health risks.
“Here you have a community that’s growing, that’s traditionally left behind or that’s too often ignored, and it raised its voice,” said State Senator Daniel L. Squadron, a Democrat representing parts of Brooklyn, including the waterfront, and Lower Manhattan. “We said we’ll take the cruise terminal, but we need to protect our air, our families.”
He added: “The community got this started, and the community pushed it over the top.”
There has been little controversy about the merits of reducing pollution, mostly sulphuric gases, from cruise ships idling in port. Some environmental experts have said the contaminants cause asthma and may raise cancer risks.
The debate raged, however, over who should foot the bill. Electricity for a 3,000-passenger cruise ship the size of four football fields was not exactly on the rate card for the New York Power Authority, which provides power for the cruise terminal.
But ultimately, the city, state and private sector came to a tentative agreement. The state’s Public Service Commission negotiated the competitive rate, and the Economic Development Corporation, which manages the city’s cruise terminals, agreed to subsidize some of the cost of the power, as did the power authority.
Under the five-year agreement, the Carnival Corporation, which owns Cunard, the operator of the Queen Mary 2, will pay 12 cents per kilowatt hour, while the city economic agency and the power authority will divide the remaining 16 cents, according to one official with knowledge of the deal.
Carnival will also have to pay $4 million to retrofit its two ships that use the port — the Queen Mary 2 and the Caribbean Princess. The two ships dock in Brooklyn a total of 40 times a year.
For the cruise line, the deal may cost about $1.7 million more than using the diesel generators that now operate at the port. But the company has already embraced the technology, introducing it 10 years ago in Juneau, Alaska.
Though commonly known as shore power, the process of shutting down diesel power and relying on the local electrical grid to power a ship is known in the maritime industry as “cold ironing.”
Electrical power is now used at cruise terminals in Vancouver, Seattle, San Francisco and San Diego and Los Angeles. The Brooklyn Cruise Terminal is smaller than most of these ports, but if shore power works there, officials might consider introducing it at the larger Manhattan Cruise Terminal.
The Port Authority of New York and New Jersey spent $12 million to upgrade the infrastructure at the Brooklyn port, which it owns. The project also received a $2.9 million grant from the federal Environmental Protection Agency, as part of federal stimulus funds.
Opponents to the idling diesel engines have been complaining of the noxious fumes and health risks since the ships began docking in Red Hook six years ago. A large cruise ship burning diesel emits more than 1,600 tons of air pollutants annually, according to an environmental impact study conducted as part of the project to switch from diesel to electricity.
Plugging in to an alternative hydroelectric source at the Red Hook port would eliminate nearly 1,500 tons of carbon dioxide, 95 tons of nitrous oxide and 6.5 tons of diesel particulate matter annually.
“It will represent significant improvement in air quality,” Seth W. Pinsky, president of the city development corporation, said in an interview. “Just from the shore powering of these two ships, it will be the equivalent of removing 5,000 cars per year from the road.”
Re-posted from the NYTIMES