Will Gov. Phil Murphy approve proposed Meadowlands power plant?

The cornerstone of Gov. Phil Murphy's environmental agenda is to reduce greenhouse gases with an aggressive push to get all of New Jersey's power generated via wind turbines, solar panels and other renewable methods by 2050.

But a proposal to build a new gas-fired power plant in the Meadowlands that would send electricity to New York could hamper those goals by sending millions of tons of carbon dioxide and other global warming gases into the atmosphere.

On Wednesday, a gathering of labor, business and local political leaders said the benefits of having the power plant built along a creek in an industrial section of North Bergen outweigh those concerns.

"The key opportunity here is jobs," Patrick Kehller, president of the Hudson County Building and Construction Trades, said at a news conference supporting the North Bergen Liberty Generating plant. "We need this. It's an important day for building and trades."

The plant's developers, Diamond Generating Corp. of Los Angeles, have applied for key permits from the Department of Environmental Protection that the Murphy administration will determine whether to approve or not. A spokesman for Murphy did not return a request for comment Wednesday.

North Bergen Liberty would be built to compensate some of the power lost when the Indian Point Nuclear Power Plant in Westchester County, New York, is scheduled to close in 2021.

Electricity would be transported via underground cable to Con Edison's plant on Manhattan's west side where it would go into the local grid and be available to power suppliers in New York, but not New Jersey, which uses a different electric grid.

David Deutsch, vice president of development for the plant, said North Bergen Liberty would be "the cleanest, most efficient power plant in the region" when it's scheduled to go online in 2022.

But Deutsch did not know how much carbon dioxide and other global warming gases would be released from the new plant when asked Wednesday.

The new plant would generate 1,200 megawatts of electricity — the same amount produced by PSEG's Bergen Generating Station in nearby Ridgefield. The PSEG power plant emitted more than 2 million metric tons of greenhouse gases into the atmosphere in 2016, ranking it fifth in New Jersey, the latest federal data shows.

"If you look at the amount of electricity that this plant would put out and you try to do it with renewable sources like solar and wind, you would need a land mass of Hudson and Bergen Counties to do that," Deutsch said. "We feel pretty strongly that this is the only viable option in the region."

The proposed plant has generated opposition from a number of environmental groups including the Sierra Club, Hackensack Riverkeeper and Bergen Audubon who say New Jersey doesn't need another major contributor to global warming. They also say they don't want another power plant along the waterways of the recovering Meadowlands.

At a news conference on the 94th Street property where the plant would be built, North Bergen Mayor Nick Sacco called it a "once in a generation chance" to add a large source of revenue to the town coffers - an amount that still needs to be negotiated between the town and plant owners.

Phillip Beachem, president of the business-coalition NJ Alliance for Action, said the plant is the "perfect example of how we should invest in vital new infrastructure."

The project would employ 2,146 construction workers temporarily to build the plant and 33 permanent workers to run it, the company said in a filing last year with New York authorities,

North Bergen Liberty would be situated in an ideal spot for efficiency, Deutsch said. It would connect to both the nearby Transco pipeline for natural gas and the Bergen County Utilities Authority in Little Ferry for treated wastewater to cool the facility.

A 6.5-mile underground cable would go from the plant through North Bergen, Fairview, Cliffside Park and Edgewater before crossing the Hudson River to Con Edison's 49th Street substation.

Although it is in an industrial area off Tonnelle Avenue, the property is less than half a mile from residential neighborhoods in Fairview, Ridgefield and about 3,000 feet to the nearest cluster of homes in North Bergen, according to a review of maps.