FOREWORD
In 1879, the remarkable thing about Edison’s
new lightbulb was that it didn’t burst into flames
as soon as it was lit. That disposed of the first
key problem of the electrical age: how to confine
and tame electricity to the point where it could be
usefully integrated into offices, homes, and every
corner of daily life. Edison then designed and built
six twenty-seven-ton, hundred-kilowatt “Jumbo”
Engine-Driven Dynamos, deployed them in lower Manhattan,
and the rest is history. “We will make electric
light so cheap,” Edison promised, “that
only the rich will be able to burn candles.”
There was more taming to come first, however. An electrical
fire caused by faulty wiring seriously damaged the
library at one of Edison’s early installations—J.
P. Morgan’s Madison Avenue brownstone.
Fast-forward to the massive blackout of August 2003.
Batteries and standby generators kicked in to keep
trading alive on the New York Stock Exchange and the
NASDAQ. But the Amex failed to open—it had backup
generators for the trading-floor computers but depended
on Consolidated Edison to cool them, so that they
wouldn’t melt into puddles of silicon. Banks
kept their ATM-control computers running at their
central offices, but most of the ATMs themselves went
dead. Cell-phone service deteriorated fast, because
soaring call volumes quickly drained the cell-tower
backup batteries. Traffic lights went dark. The dedicated
fiber line that links City Hall to the city’s
broadcast media went out when a Time Warner hub lost
power. The radio communications system for police,
fire, and other emergency services progressively lost
capacity as the backup batteries for many radio repeaters
ran down. Elevator mechanics who happened to be attending
a seminar at the New Yorker Hotel in Midtown helped
extract guests trapped in the hotel’s elevators.
Releasing a group stuck in the middle of a twenty-story
blind shaft required breaking a hole through a wall
on the fifteenth floor.
But enough already on what New York endures when
its power occasionally fails. The rest of the story
is one of steady economic growth and improving quality
of life, made possible by the continuous development
of the city’s electrical infrastructure. Electricity
occupies a uniquely important role in the infrastructure
of all of modern society, but nowhere more so than
in the heart of the metropolis. It powers all the
communications and emergency response networks, hospital
emergency rooms, air-traffic control, and street lights,
as well as the electrically actuated valves and pumps
that move water, oil, and gas. More broadly, electricity
energizes every factory, office, or building that
depends on computers, communications systems, pumps,
motors, and cooling systems.
Over the course of the last century, electricity
progressively superseded other forms of energy at
the front end of life, where people turn energy into
enterprise, information, entertainment, health care,
and hot coffee. This happened because electricity,
like a great city, does more, faster, better, in less
space. Other energy transmission systems operate at
the speed of sound; electricity moves at the speed
of light. It is by far the fastest, densest form of
power that has been tamed for ubiquitous use.
Year by year, innovation has also allowed increasingly
compact transformers, switches, and wires to handle
and deliver power more efficiently, quietly, and safely.
In power plants, huge, noisy piston engines gave way
to compact turbines. The vast spiderweb of overhead
electric wires that once canopied the streets of Manhattan
went underground. For most city dwellers, electrical
infrastructure has gone the way of the Cheshire Cat—everything
has disappeared but the smile, the magical outlet
that keeps life lit.
And that, ironically, now threatens to make electricity
the victim of its own success. Because electricity
can so unobtrusively power so much of the city’s
economy, demand grows in lockstep with the city itself.
But because the hardware that supplies the electricity
keeps so well out of sight, City Hall tends to keep
it out of mind, and city residents reflexively oppose
deployment of new electrical infrastructure anywhere
near their own lights, toasters, and computers.
As Hope Cohen lucidly discusses in this very important
paper, New York can have it all—the power it
needs to remain the most vibrant city on the planet,
delivered ubiquitously, silently, and invisibly through
substations harmoniously integrated into the cityscape.
Designed by architects and incorporating modern technology,
electrical substations can now have more in common
with a telephone exchange or a Web server farm than
with a conventional factory or power plant. New York
is unusual in having a zoning code so out of touch
with the modern realities of electricity. Developers
and Con Edison should be allowed to work together
to integrate electrical infrastructure into new industrial,
commercial, and residential projects. And as other
cities have already done, New York should explore
possibilities for deploying substations beneath public
open spaces.
Such policies would lead to much more efficient,
profitable use of immensely valuable land—while
maintaining supplies of secure, reliable power, provided
by an electrical infrastructure that continues to
recede from public sight. Ms. Cohen has it exactly
right: “People don’t like ugly, scary substations
near them. But substations don’t have to be ugly
and scary. And they do need to be nearby.” This
paper explains how to turn those three, indubitable
facts into practical public policy. New York will
grow richer, brighter, and more beautiful when it
does.
Peter W. Huber
December 2008
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ABOUT AUTHORS
HOPE COHEN is deputy
director of the Center for Rethinking Development
(CRD). Since coming to CRD in 2006, she has focused
principally on issues of New York City’s environment
and infrastructure, publishing Rethinking
Environmental Review: A Handbook on What Can Be Done
and serving as the Manhattan Institute’s voice
in the debate over congestion pricing.
Prior to joining CRD, Cohen worked for many years
in the city’s public sector, in areas ranging
from urban planning to capital budgeting to strategic
information technology. She was at MTA New York City
Transit for over a decade, working for much of that
time with power and telecommunications engineers to
bring the technology used for New York’s subway
and bus systems into the twenty-first century. Since
1995, she has supplemented her professional work with
voluntary public service as a member of Manhattan’s
Community Board 7 (Upper West Side), where she has
served as land-use cochairperson and board chairperson.
Cohen holds a B.A. from Harvard and an M.A. from
the University of Chicago.
PETER W. HUBER is
a senior fellow at the Manhattan Institute and a columnist
for Forbes magazine. He is the author of numerous
books and articles on energy, the environment, science
and technology, legal policy, scientific evidence,
and telecommunications. He taught mechanical engineering
at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, and
he clerked for Judge Ruth Bader Ginsburg of the D.C.
Circuit U.S. Court of Appeals and for Justice Sandra
Day O’Connor of the U.S. Supreme Court.
Huber holds a Ph.D. from MIT and a J.D. from Harvard
Law School. His most recent book, coauthored with
Mark P. Mills, is The Bottomless Well (Basic Books,
2005).
This project was made possible by a generous
grant from the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation.
----------------------
POWER
TO THE OUTLET!
New York City lives on electricity. The neon lights
of Times Square, the subway’s third rail, the
compact fluorescent bulb in the kitchen of a Bronx
apartment, the computers housed in great office buildings—the
flow of electrons makes them all possible. Since Thomas
Edison turned on the world’s first electrical
distribution system in 1882, powered by a generating
station on lower Manhattan’s Pearl Street, the
network has expanded outward, upward, and downward,
along with the city it powers.
But the hometown of electrical distribution faces
obstacles to the further growth of its nervous system.
There are serious issues of supply, whether it is
generated locally or transmitted from afar. PlaNYC,
Mayor Bloomberg’s strategy for creating a “greener,
greater” New York City by the year 2030, takes
on those issues. It proposes building clean generating
capacity, providing incentives for exploiting renewable
energy sources, and relying more heavily on peak-load
management. It goes on to recognize the need to “modernize
electricity delivery infrastructure” but does
no more than note that “finding locations to
site substations in growing neighborhoods is a difficult
challenge.”[1]
The challenge is difficult because it is multifaceted.
The city’s zoning regulations prevent optimal
siting. And neighbors often object to substations
built near them. They fear health consequences and
have concerns about noise. Perhaps most important,
they object to an ugly, forbidding structure in their
midst, deadening street life and reducing property
values.
It doesn’t have to be that way. Substations
are not bad for neighbors’ health and do not
need to be loud and unattractive. And they ought not
use up the city’s limited supply of land in the
way that they have for the past half-century.
The purpose of this paper is to propose a realistic
solution to the problems inherent in substation siting—one
that addresses the needs of individual communities,
the city’s demand for electricity, and the responsibility
of Con Edison, the local utility, to deliver power
to New Yorkers.
SO WHAT
ARE THESE SUBSTATIONS, ANYWAY?
An electrical substation houses equipment (“transformers”)
that “step down” electricity from the high
voltages needed for efficient long-distance transmission
to the lower voltages appropriate for shorter-distance
transmission and for distribution to residential and
commercial end users. The other key component of a
substation is “switchgear” (sophisticated
circuit breakers and switches) to cut power when necessary.
These features are supplemented by relays, capacitor
banks, and battery backup arrays. There can be several
levels of substations stepping down electricity on
its trip from generation station to a home or business
(see Figure 1, “Power Path”). Ordinary operation
of a substation does not require personnel to be on
site. Staff manage the equipment in real time from
other locations, as substations feature automated
systems for fault detection, fire suppression, and
remote monitoring and control.
The principal focus of this paper is electric power’s
last major stop. In New York, it is called an “area
substation,” and it is where, for service in
Manhattan and the Bronx, Con Edison steps 138 kilovolt
(kV) electricity down to 13.8kV. For historical/legacy
reasons, Con Edison follows a slightly different standard
in Brooklyn and Queens and yet a third standard on
Staten Island. There is no universal standard for
the different voltage levels. Other utilities in other
places have still other standards for the different
levels of substations, but the general order of magnitude
for each analogous level is similar. For example,
EDF Energy in London now transforms 132kV into 11kV
at what it terms “primary” or “main”
substations.
Basically, the area substation is the neighborhood-level
distribution hub—and more and more New York neighborhoods
need one of their own.
What neighborhoods don’t need is the typical
exterior of New York substation tradition—an
unattractive and alienating brick or concrete building
surrounded by a chain-link fence and razor wire. Even
worse, in less developed areas, is the unenclosed
substation—electrical equipment completely naked
to the elements. Fortunately, many other design solutions
are possible.
After electricity leaves the area substation at 13.8kV,
the final step down to usable (120/208) voltage occurs
in New York’s street network—transformers
under sidewalks in Manhattan and on utility poles
throughout much of the rest of the city. (With the
United Kingdom’s very different end-user voltage,
London’s electricity is reduced from 11kV to
415V at “secondary” substations before its
final cable distribution.)
The step before the area substation is the “transmission
substation,” where Con Edison transforms 345kV
into 138kV.[2] These substations
intermediate between high-tension transmission lines
from outside the five boroughs and the city’s
electrical distribution system. A transmission substation
generally feeds three to six area substations. Utilities
try to site at least one of those area substations
very near (ideally collocated with or adjacent to)
the transmission substation. In principle, the zoning
and urban-design solutions proposed in this paper
are applicable to transmission substations as well
as to area substations—transmission substations
can be designed to fit into their host neighborhood,
as Con Edison’s new Mott Haven substation, in
the Bronx, does.[3] But the most
urgent task is to outfit neighborhoods with the friendly
area substations they need to power homes and businesses.
THE ZONING
CONUNDRUM: WHERE SUBSTATIONS ARE NOW AND WHY
At present, New York City’s Zoning Resolution
(ZR) serves as an obstacle to building neighborhood
substations. Electrical substations are allowed “as-of-right”
on industrially (M or “manufacturing”)
zoned land; with few exceptions, siting them anywhere
else means going through a difficult and time-consuming
process to obtain discretionary approval from the
city government. And, more and more, “anywhere
else” in the city means the residential and commercial
neighborhoods they need to serve.
The purpose of zoning is to regulate uses and density,
and the ZR does so down to the lot level by means
of a comprehensive set of maps keyed to twenty-one
basic zoning designations and their many sub-designations
(see sidebar, “Zoning Categories in New York’s
Zoning Resolution”). The ZR was adopted in 1961,
and although its text and associated maps have been
amended many times and in many ways over the intervening
decades, its fundamental structure has been left unchanged
for nearly fifty years. It does not account for how
the world has evolved in the interim, especially technologically.
|
ZONING CATEGORIES IN
NEW YORK'S ZONING RESOLUTION
There are three major
categories[4] of zoning
district in New York’s Zoning Resolution.[5]
“Residential”
(R) zones, accounting for approximately
three-quarters of the city’s zoned land
area,[6] range from neighborhoods
of single-family, detached houses (R1, R2) to
dense high-rise areas (R10). Besides housing,
the uses permitted as-of-right in R
zones include “community facilities”
such as health-care facilities, schools, libraries,
and houses of worship.
“Commercial”
(C) zones range from local retail
and service districts (C1, C2) that serve adjacent
residential neighborhoods to the high-rise central
business districts of Midtown, lower Manhattan,
and downtown Brooklyn (C5 and C6). There are
also several districts dedicated to specialized
businesses. For example, C8 allows automotive
repair shops as well as common commercial uses,
from hotels to local retail, along with community
facilities.
“Manufacturing”
(M) zones allow a range of manufacturing
and industrial uses, basically increasing in
noxiousness from M1 to M3. (For example, stockyards
and sugar refining are permitted only in M3.)
M1 allows a range of activity similar to C8’s,
but non-R uses that are quasi-residential
(hotels, dormitories) are banned from M2 and
M3.
|
In addition to the zoning designations, the ZR features
eighteen “use groups,” listing in great
detail the various purposes and activities for which
buildings are designed and occupied and land employed.
For every zoning designation, some use groups are
permitted as-of-right, some by special dispensation,
and others not at all.
Most electrical substations are assigned to Use Group
17. Broadly speaking, Group 17 includes the second-most
noxious use collection of the eighteen groups. Along
with substations of any size, Use Group 17 includes
manufacturing facilities for aircraft, automobiles,
electrical equipment, ink, and pharmaceuticals. A
use is assigned to this group (as opposed to Group
18) on the basis of its capacity to control “objectionable
influences” and thereby “limit their impact
on adjacent residential areas.” Group 17 uses
also “normally generate a great deal of traffic,
both pedestrian and freight.”[7]
They are as-of-right in all M districts
but not in residential or commercial zones.
Very small substations, fitting on a site of no more
than 10,000 square feet, are assigned to Use Group
6 and may be built as-of-right on most commercially
zoned land in the city (as well as in all M
zones). If these are to be constructed in a residential
(R) zone, however, they must undergo
a special approval process. Use Group 6 mostly comprises
retail stores and service businesses serving local
consumer needs, but its “public service establishment”
subgroup (“D”) includes these small electrical
substations and all telephone exchanges (containing
equipment for switching phone signals), along with
courthouses, fire stations, and pumping facilities.
Of all the 6D uses, only substations are subject to
a limit on footprint size.[8]
For most area substations, a lot of 10,000–40,000
square feet is required.[9] To
occupy a footprint of that size, Con Edison[10]
must get a special permit from the Board of Standards
and Appeals (BSA), an independent board that can grant
“relief” from the zoning code. For an even
larger substation to be built in a residential or
commercial zone, the utility company needs the City
Planning Commission (CPC) to issue a special permit.
The BSA and CPC special-permit processes are described
in Figure 3 and Figure 4, respectively. The CPC process
is more demanding, requiring full compliance with
the city’s Uniform Land Use Review Procedure
(ULURP) before approval. But the BSA process is also
a significant obstacle, not least because its requirements
and timeline are less transparent than those of ULURP.
Organized opposition to a proposed substation often
grows during these multi-month or even multiyear approval
processes. Delays add expense to the project—and
pressure to construct the substation quickly, once
it is approved, in order to maintain reliable distribution.
It is not unheard of for the permit to be denied in
the end. Small wonder that Con Edison prefers to build
substations in M zones.
 |
|
IT WASN'T ALWAYS THIS
WAY
Thomas Edison’s (and therefore New York’s)
original electrical distribution system used
“direct current” (DC) rather than
the “alternating current” (AC), which
was later found to be more efficient at transmission
and transformation and therefore widely adopted
for distribution beginning in the early twentieth
century. The DC system required substations
to be very near utility customers. Thus, substations
could be found in every neighborhood.
Even after the transition to AC for most users,
railroads (including New York’s subways)
continued to operate “third rail”
power on DC—as they do to this very day.
The substations built for the Interborough Rapid
Transit (IRT), Brooklyn-Manhattan Transit (BMT),
and Independent (IND) subway systems were handsome
examples of civic architecture, many with exteriors
of the finest materials.[11]
Transit substations require not only transformers
but also equipment to convert power from the
AC used for transmission to the DC required
for the third rail, which electrifies the trains.
Compact automatic rectifiers now perform the
conversion, but originally the substations needed
space for huge, manually operated rotary converters.
Many of these substations predate the city’s
1916 zoning resolution; all predate the current
code (adopted in 1961), which lists them separately
from utility substations but treats them the
same.
Before 1916, utility and transit substations
could be built anywhere in the city. After that,
New York’s first zoning code excluded new
ones from residential districts but allowed
them to be built in business districts as well
as the “unrestricted” districts that
prefigured the M districts of the 1961 zoning.[12]
As a result, the city is pockmarked with grandfathered
substations—in residential (pre-1916) and
commercial (pre-1961) areas. Only since 1961
have these public service facilities been forced
to serve the public from afar.
|
THE ZONING
UPSHOT: WASTED LAND
Because it is difficult, time-consuming, and expensive
to obtain a special permit for locating a substation
on R or C land, Con Edison
tries wherever possible to use M land.
But there is a problem with M land:
as New York has changed and grown, the amount of it
has declined. The Bloomberg administration, recognizing
that permissible uses of land had not been developing
in step with the city’s evolution from manufacturing
center to service economy, has rezoned more than one-sixth
of New York’s landmass, much of it from industrial
to some combination of residential and commercial.
It will be harder and harder for Con Edison to find
M land to buy as time goes on.
Which is why the utility holds on to the M
land it already has and resists attempts to rezone
neighborhoods where it owns such land. A spectacular
example of this phenomenon is northern Manhattan’s
Sherman Creek neighborhood, where Con Edison is now
constructing a new transmission substation next to
acres of long-standing open-air facilities (see sidebar,
“The Case of Sherman Creek”).
If the zoning resolution allowed substations in commercial
and residential districts as-of-right, Con Edison
would have no reason to object to rezoning of M
land. In fact, like other landowners, it could benefit
from higher land values when its M land
is reclassified. It would be free to site substations
on the basis of engineering and not land-use realpolitik.
And just imagine the possibilities if zoning and other
considerations encouraged Con Edison to consolidate
and stack facilities for efficient use of valuable
land (see below, “Putting the Sub in Substation”).
|
THE CASE OF SHERMAN
CREEK
Con Edison is the Sherman
Creek peninsula’s largest landowner (followed
by the city itself), controlling over three
full city blocks and a significant segment of
the water’s edge. Bordered on the west
by Inwood, which is bursting at the seams, and
on the east by the dramatic Harlem River, the
peninsula is underdeveloped, neglected, and
polluted, even though its waterfront could be
a stunning site for mixed-use development. For
a couple of years in the middle of this decade,
there was a major push, involving public planning
workshops and significant community participation,
to rezone and develop Sherman Creek. Now, two
to three years later, the Department of City
Planning’s website classifies the effort
as “inactive,” even as Con Edison
constructs a much-needed transmission substation
alongside the Sherman Creek waterfront to supplement
the open-air transmission-level and area-level
substations already there.
 The
new Academy Substation’s siting results
from capturing a moment of technological history
in regulation. Academy is to sit on land once
occupied by a power-generating station. In the
old days, generating stations needed to be close
to water. The unenclosed substations still in
place were originally installed to be near the
generating station. These and other industrial-type
facts on the ground led to M zoning
for Sherman Creek. Proximity to water is no
longer necessary for power facilities, but the
zoning and existing facilities serve to keep—or,
in the case of Academy Substation, entice—them
there, cutting off the waterfront from active,
people-friendly uses. The new substation will
be enclosed (and by materials more attractive
than concrete and chain link), but the existing
open-air facilities will continue to occupy
acres of the peninsula, discouraging redevelopment
of nearby properties, even if the zoning designation
is changed to R or C.
If Academy’s lot
had lost its M zoning, the utility
would have needed a CPC special permit to put
a substation on the 2.3-acre site. Generally
a transmission substation can fit on a 80,000-square-foot
site (i.e., less than two acres), but when Con
Edison has space in hand, it tends to use it
all rather than find ways to conserve it or
combine uses. With its existing substations
in place and with plans to build another on
property it already owned, the utility resisted
the Sherman Creek rezoning efforts. There was
(and is) no incentive for Con Edison to undertake
the difficult and expensive task of moving or
concealing the extant equipment. As a result,
the southern chunk of the Sherman Creek peninsula
will remain unavailable for the foreseeable
future.
|
FITTING
IN
The one piece of good news in the case of Sherman
Creek is that the new Academy Substation’s façade
will be designed and the grounds landscaped to blend
with marinas to the peninsula’s south.[13]
Increasingly, Con Edison has been employing this approach—at
Astor in Manhattan and Mott Haven in the Bronx, for
example. The most common features are false windows
and exteriors of brick and stone. One substation even
was given a polished granite façade and monumental
doors to respond to a major Manhattan landmark nearby.
And there are plenty of examples of neighborly exteriors
in other cities. London’s Devonshire Square and
Osaka’s Dotonburi were both built decades ago.
With centrally located, unenclosed substations reaching
the end of their useful lives in Anaheim, California,
and Edinburgh, Scotland, Anaheim Public Utilities
and ScottishPower, respectively, are constructing
historically respectful structures to enclose the
replacement equipment.
But
an above-ground, stand-alone substation structure
is far from the only answer for cities where land
is especially precious.
PUTTING
THE SUB IN SUBSTATION
The laundromat that rents videos and mailboxes. The
shoemaker and the locksmith who subdivide a 20-foot
storefront. The five college grads rooming together.
What’s more New York than sharing space?
Substations can bunk with others, too. Let’s
put the “sub” back into “substation”
by placing substations underneath buildings and parks
and plazas, where they are out of public view and
can’t elbow aside more urbane uses of scarce
land.
Sub buildings
The gleaming 7 World Trade Center (7WTC), opened
in 2006, is a stunning example of just such an approach.
An area substation forms its base, making the office
space above it that much more valuable for starting
at the equivalent of the eleventh floor rather than
the second. In fact, the new 7WTC’s predecessor
and namesake, destroyed as a consequence of the attack
of September 11, 2001,[14] also
sat atop a substation. Con Edison’s facility
already occupied that site, so Silverstein Properties
constructed the original 7WTC over it.
Disappointingly, Trade Center Substation is the sole
case so far in New York of stacking unrelated uses
above a substation. It is a very impressive case,
of course: built to house ten transformers eventually
(three are currently in place), the facility occupies
a high-profile location and has as an exterior a piece
of environmental art, with changing patterns of colored
light that flash through its cladding of prismatic
stainless-steel bars.[15] But
just as a stand-alone substation doesn’t have
to be squat and windowless, a stacked substation doesn’t
have to be crowned by a gold-plated office tower.
All that is needed is the right zoning and a big enough
corner lot to permit easy installation and removal
of equipment.
Land-starved
cities such as London and Tokyo have been combining
substations with other uses for decades. Kingsway
Substation has rested beneath an office building in
the heart of London’s theater district since
1967. The new Tooley Street Substation, opened in
2002, anchors the city’s up-and-coming Southwark
neighborhood; both a main (132kV/11kV) and two distribution
(11kV/415V) substations are built into the garage
of a commercial complex abutting the Hilton Tower
Bridge hotel. This past summer, demand for office
space near Liverpool Station was so great that EDF
Energy faced pressure to replace its 66kV/11kV open-air
Finsbury Market Substation, dating to the 1940s, with
a facility (ideally 132kV/11kV) that would be built
beneath new office space constructed on the substation’s
present site. And no one is proposing to move a main
substation now located in the basement of an EDF Energy
district office after the district office is displaced
by a new commercial building.
Similarly, all around Tokyo, many building types—from
modern office towers near the Ginza to schools to
traditional Buddhist temples—have housed transmission-level
and area-level substations for decades. The Tokyo
Electric Power Company (TEPCO) has scores of area-level
“distribution” (66kV/6.6kV) and “intermediate”
(66kV/22kV, to serve large customers) substations
underground.
TEPCO placed a substation under a modern satellite
to its headquarters that it constructed in central
Tokyo—one of more than a dozen underground transmission-level
“primary” (275kV/66kV) substations. Higashi-Uchisaiwai-cho
Substation’s gas-insulated transformers (GIT)[16]
are installed five levels (nearly 100 feet) below
street level and lie beneath three stories of underground
parking, a below-ground retail level, and twenty-two
above-ground floors. It extends below most of an entire
square block on which sit the building’s landscaped
forecourt and driveway and a public plaza that is
the site of open-air concerts.
Sub
parks and plazas
Turning the roof of
a substation into a public space is another alternative
preferable to low-rise, stand-alone utility structures.
Tokyo’s Higashi-Uchisaiwai-cho Substation provides
two such lovely, small-scale amenities in a congested
area across a narrow street from the viaduct of the
main Japan Rail line through Tokyo.
Japan’s fourth-largest city, Nagoya, offers
a much more dramatic example. Chubu Electric Company’s
Meijo Substation lies beneath a parking lot serving
Nagoya’s most famous landmark, the remains of
Meijo, a castle built by Shogun Tokugawa Ieyasu in
1612. The parking lot today is smaller than it once
was because in the early 1990s the city decided to
build a Noh theater and a large landscaped plaza with
public amenities on a portion of it, placing the lost
parking spaces below ground. An area-level (154kV/33kV)
substation already existed underneath city parkland
on the far side of a street bordering the parking
lot. In tandem with the city’s redevelopment
of the site, Chubu Electric constructed a new transmission-level
(275kV/154kV) substation extending under the plaza,
the parking garage, and the parking lot, where it
could feed the area-level substation across the street,
as well as others farther away. As with Tokyo’s
Higashi-Uchisaiwai-cho, Meijo Substation’s transformers
are located approximately a hundred feet below street
level. One floor above them is the cable room, and
one floor above that is the switch room. Above that
is the underground parking garage.
Chubu Electric employs an unusual gas/fluid hybrid
technology for cooling its transformers.[17]
The equipment can be toured by local school groups
and other interested parties and accordingly carries
explanatory labels in Japanese and English. Theatergoers
and castle visitors, however, have no way of knowing
that huge electrical transformers lie below their
feet. After taking an elevator from the underground
parking garage, which sits beneath the substation’s
handsome and low-slung ventilation building, they
cross a footbridge over a moat, across from which
sits the theater. A large plaza surrounds the stone-faced
ventilation building, several equally attractive ancillary
structures, and the theater. High above loom the castle
and its grounds. Because Meijo Substation is situated
in a public park, within view of a unique historical
and cultural landmark, Chubu Electric had to obtain
special design approvals from the city. The result
is distinguished architecture encasing a technological
showplace.
In
London, too, reconstruction of a key public space
provided a utility an opportunity to install a major
new substation. In 1989, London Electricity (now EDF
Energy) obtained planning consent from the Westminster
City Council and a 999-year lease for land underneath
Leicester Square, the hub of the city’s West
End, for a primary (132kV/11kV) substation to provide
new capacity. The facility is so fully integrated
into the park that the control panel for providing
access to the substation by means of a hatch in the
pavement is built into Leicester Square’s signature
discount-theater-ticket kiosk. The substation is completely
invisible and inaudible to the hordes of park users
above it. On a normal day, thousands of pedestrians
stroll several feet above the substation’s roof.
When the Leicester Square Odeon hosts a film premiere,
thousands more congregate above the transformers and
switchgear, whose existence is unknown to them.
The United States is far behind Europe and Asia when
it comes to burying substations beneath public parks.
It was only two years ago that Anaheim Public Utilities
opened this country’s first such facility, in
the California city’s East Hills neighborhood.
Park Substation is one of a dozen area-level “distribution”
(69kV/12kV) substations; the distribution system is
fed by two 230kV/69kV transmission-level substations.
As a department of the City of Anaheim, the utility
builds its facilities on city-owned land. Exempt from
most local zoning rules, it solicits community input
on design questions.
To build Park Substation, Anaheim Public Utilities
cut into the side of a sloping lot in a hilly area
of eastern Anaheim. Just to the west, immediately
adjacent to the site, expensive single-family residences
overlook Roosevelt Park, the well-maintained passive-recreation
space atop the substation’s roof. The sides sloping
up from the street are terraced and planted. A garage
door fitted into the north side of the hill is the
sole indication of something going on beneath the
quiet community park. Not just an unobtrusive neighbor,
Park Substation turned out to be a benevolent one.
|
POWER UNDER A NEW PARK?
In 2007, the Riverside
South Planning Corporation (RSPC), a venture
of seven civic organizations[18]
instrumental in the planning and approval of
Riverside South—a mixed-use development,
including waterfront park, stretching from 59th
Street to 72nd Street along the Hudson River
and originally approved in 1992—assembled
an expert planning panel to consider options
in the public interest for the southernmost
portion of the development. RSPC took this action
following Extell Development Company’s
announcement of its intent to reopen Riverside
South’s approval agreements for the area
from 59th to 61st Streets.
The panel recommended
reorienting the park planned for this area and
constructing “community utilities”
beneath it. These public service uses could
include: a rail station (serving MetroNorth
Railroad’s Hudson Line and/or the Amtrak
Empire Connection that already operates on rail
in situ); a tipping floor for solid-waste compaction;
and a cogeneration plant to provide electricity,
cooling, and heating for the new development
of approximately 2,000 apartments. RSPC’s
panel further suggested that such a cogeneration
plant be constructed with sufficient steam capacity
to allow the retirement, landmarking, and adaptive
reuse of Con Edison’s underutilized steam
plant, which occupies the full block bounded
by 58th and 59th Streets and 11th and 12th Avenues.
RSPC’s proposed
cogeneration plant would be the first power
facility under a New York park. But other types
of infrastructure pave the way for this kind
of land efficiency. The city’s most glorious
subway station has lain below City Hall Park
since 1904, albeit closed to the public for
far too long. A stupendous valve chamber built
to manage New York’s Third Water Tunnel
sits 250 feet under Van Cortlandt Park in the
Bronx. Elsewhere beneath Van Cortlandt, a water-filtration
plant is now under construction, eventually
to be topped off by a golf driving range. And
New York State’s Riverbank Park sits atop
North River Wastewater Treatment plant on the
Hudson from 137th to 145th Streets.
|
THE ZONING
SOLUTION: THE NEIGHBORLY SUBSTATION
These examples from three continents demonstrate
the variety of ways that a substation can be designed
to fit into its particular context. It may have a
façade that complements its surroundings—a
response particularly suited to low-rise, urban neighborhoods.
It could, whether from ground level or below, carry
a commercial structure or community facility on its
shoulders—an approach appropriate to districts
of taller buildings. Or its roof could provide open
space—an amenity sought by virtually every neighborhood
in New York City. It is time to amend New York’s
zoning resolution to encourage these urban-design
solutions, even in districts currently reserved for
manufacturing.
Assuming that these areas are reclassified, Con Edison
should build substations within them that are just
as friendly as those that fit unnoticeably into established
neighborhoods. Doing so would eliminate the risk that
such infrastructure development would abort the natural
evolution of these districts into places fit for habitation
and commerce.
The most straightforward way to make this land available
is to amend the zoning text, replacing the Use Group
designation for substations of normal size (i.e.,
located on a site of up to 40,000 square feet)—now
a “miscellaneous” (C) listing
in Use Group 17—with either a new “miscellaneous”
or a new “public service establishment”
(C) category in Use Group 4.[19]
(See Figure 5 for a summary of the changes proposed
and Figure 6 for the text-change process.) A more
cumbersome and somewhat less productive alternative
would be to update Use Group 6D, the current home
for public service establishments—including unusually
small utility substations—so that unobtrusive
substations of normal size could be built as-of-right
in all manufacturing and most commercial zones.
According to the Zoning Resolution, Use Group 4 “consists
primarily of community facilities which may appropriately
be located in residential areas to provide recreational,
religious, health, and other essential services for
the residents” and “do not create significant
objectionable influences in residential areas.”
It also includes “open uses” such as parks,
playgrounds, and transit rights of way.[20]
Electricity is certainly an essential service, and
enclosed substations should not be the cause of protests
(see below, “A Substation as My Neighbor?!”).
To qualify as a Group 4 use, a substation would have
to be underground or enclosed. If the latter, the
structure must meet the bulk, height, and setback
requirements of the zoning designation of the lot
in question. In low-density zones (R1–R5), it
makes perfect sense to build a low-rise substation.[21]
But why do so in high-density zones (e.g., C4-7, C5,
C6-9), where a substation could be fitted either below
or into the base of a quite tall building, which could
then generate rents that more than offset the
additional cost for Con Edison of acquiring and building
on such valuable land? The zoning resolution should
be explicit in allowing other uses above the substation.
In addition, the zoning text regulating “location
[of a particular function] within buildings”
(ZR 32-42) and “ground floor use in certain locations”
(ZR 32-43) would have to be amended.[26]
Purely for reasons of size—not function—unusually
large substations (i.e., those located on sites of
40,000 square feet to 10 acres) should obtain a special
permit not, as they have been, from the City Planning
Commission but rather from the Board of Standards
and Appeals. At present, BSA must make three “findings”
before it awards a special permit for a substation
on a site of up to 40,000 square feet. Such substations
should be built as-of-right, with the permitting process
reserved for facilities on sites exceeding 40,000
square feet. The three elements BSA must find are
that:
It would be especially easy to satisfy these findings
with an underground substation.
Without a special approval process, there is no obvious
way to impose design criteria on Use Group 4 stand-alone
substations—although tossing “blend harmoniously”
language into the use listing cannot hurt. One approach
is to educate communities about the range of design
solutions that they can demand from Con Edison. Another
is to offer utilities a package of zoning changes
beneficial to siting, provided that they agree to
follow design guidelines.
Nothing in the zoning resolution precludes building
a park on top of a substation. Indeed, parks are themselves
covered by Use Group 4, so it should not be too much
of a stretch to add some text encouraging the development
of substations modeled on Leicester Square and Meijo.
Finally, to be neighborly, a substation must be enclosed
or subterranean. It is difficult to imagine a new,
unenclosed substation as appropriate anywhere in twenty-first-century
New York, but this proposal allows for their construction
on very large sites in M districts by
BSA special permit.
A SUBSTATION
AS MY NEIGHBOR?!
Utility companies often encounter resistance when
proposing a site for a new substation. Neighbors fear
that the facility will bring increased risk of fire
or explosion. Some have concerns about noise made
by operating machinery or the long-term health effects
of exposure to high voltage. They certainly worry
about the disruption, dirt, and decibels of the construction
period. But the biggest questions are about design:
What will this substation look like, and what will
it do to the visual and social fabric of the neighborhood?
At its most fundamental level, a substation houses
high-voltage electrical equipment. Transformers and
high-tension cables can be deadly—which is why
the building encasing them has to be highly secure.
The electrical equipment inside the facility is dangerous,
but it cannot reach through the substation wall and
electrocute a passerby.
In addition to its capacity to shock, high-voltage
electrical equipment can indeed catch fire and even
explode. A substation, however, has switchgear to
break the circuit and interrupt the arc of electricity
created and thus minimize the damage from a short
circuit. Once again, these dangers are far greater
in unenclosed substations. Burying the equipment or
encasing it in a building contains the risk, and utilities
including Con Edison have high civil engineering standards
governing the strength of the structure. A buried
or enclosed substation’s real fire hazard is
destruction of the equipment inside it, not immolation
of its neighbors.
High voltages are also associated with strong electromagnetic
fields (EMF). In recent decades, several research
studies have attributed disease to EMF exposure—most
notably, childhood leukemia—but methodological
questions cast doubt on the findings. In response
to public concerns, the World Health Organization
(WHO) established the International EMF Project in
1996 to assess the scientific evidence of the possible
health effects of EMF. Based on a thorough review
of thirty years of scientific literature, WHO recently
concluded that “current evidence does not confirm
the existence of any health consequences from exposure
to low level electromagnetic fields.”[28]
The intensity of EMF decreases dramatically with distance
from the voltage source; thus a strong field directly
below a (naked) power line falls to a “normal”
background level beyond 200 feet. Moreover, building
walls interrupt the field, and metal shields it very
effectively. So once again, simply burying or enclosing
the substation mitigates any risk that may exist.
Transformers and their cooling equipment do emit
a low buzz or hum. Often audible from an adjacent
sidewalk, the sound is generally masked by ambient
street noise. However, substations operate 24/7, so
the noise can be a significant imposition on an adjacent
residence or a business establishment during the quieter
evening hours. Acoustical shielding is adequate to
solve the problem. Anaheim Public Utilities installed
noise-abatement materials at Park Substation, and
Con Edison is using them to allay the concerns of
neighbors of the new Astor Substation in Manhattan.
Although most concerns about the size and functioning
of substations are groundless or easily addressed,
New York City adheres to restrictions on their placement
dating back half a century. In Japan, by contrast,
substations are not excluded from any of the twelve
district classifications used for city planning. And
when Londoners raise objections to a new substation,
they are actually objecting to the size of the development
surrounding it, not to the substation itself.
There is no reason to relegate substations to a community’s
outskirts, since they can always be made as safe,
quiet, and otherwise unobtrusive as any other kind
of new development.
LAND AND
POWER
People don’t like ugly, scary substations near
them. But substations don’t have to be ugly and
scary. And they do need to be nearby. The people of
East Hills, Anaheim, chose a substation for a neighbor
over a library—once they were told that they
would also get a park on its roof. Thousands walk
across Leicester Square each day, unfazed by the transformers
beneath their feet. The presence of a substation downstairs
does not dissuade tenants of 7 World Trade Center
from paying top dollar for office space.
New York needs power, and it needs land. Changing
the zoning rules governing electrical substations
would help the city get more of both. By allowing
electrical substations as-of-right in residential
and commercial zones, the city would facilitate the
most efficient system of distribution—as other
cities have done, and as it did itself before 1961.[29]
Freed of the delays and doubts posed by the land-use
approval process, Con Edison could cut years from
its facilities planning and the task of getting them
on line.
In making available the most suitable properties
for locating vital distribution hubs, the city would
be removing Con Edison’s incentive to hold on
to industrial land. Land now locked in an M
designation would be available for rezoning and site-appropriate
development.
Encouraging Con Edison to stack other uses on top
of substations is a way of making available even more
land, which could be devoted to both commerce and
recreation. The rents paid by an office building above
a substation—and one with a higher than usual
rentable first floor—should be able to offset
over time any additional land-acquisition, engineering,
and construction costs involved. If a utility builds
a substation under a city-owned park or plaza, which
it then rehabilitates (as utilities have done in Europe
and Asia), it wouldn’t have to incur the cost
of acquiring land.
In the earliest days of electricity, substations
operated in neighborhoods throughout the city without
stirring protest. A century later, with an array of
new technologies available, new ones can be better
neighbors than ever, while delivering the power that
the city needs to grow and thrive. It is time to get
obsolete zoning regulations out of their way.
