Can NYC ditch the gas generator?

Food carts are a New York institution, a ubiquitous part of our streetscape. They're a fast, affordable way to get a snack or a meal and they provide thousands of people—often immigrants—with a pathway to economic stability and upward mobility.

Today, New York City has around 5,100 licensed food carts and trucks, with roughly 4,000 actively operating. Nearly all rely on gas-powered generators, each creating about nine metric tons of CO2 alongside noise and air pollution—similar to a fleet of 4,000 diesel-powered delivery trucks. When you stop to consider this for a moment, it just doesn't make any sense: Unlike a moving vehicle, these carts often sit just a few feet away from streetlights, traffic signals and other electrical infrastructure.

Greenmarkets, holiday markets, street fairs, and the like face the same problem: If they need electricity, they have to bring their own. The simplest—and cheapest—solution is often a gas generator.

How could it be that we've invested billions of dollars in a sophisticated, predominantly low-carbon power grid while simultaneously requiring vendors to operate these generators in the nation's most densely populated areas?

The most straightforward answer would be to install "power taps"—for example, outdoor electric outlets at the base of light poles—that allow vendors to plug directly into the grid. This approach is commonly used in other U.S. cities and is also used in Europe. France, for example, has twice-weekly farmers' markets all over the country, including in Paris, where you can see that vendors have plugged refrigerated cases and other appliances into outlets hidden in the ground.

The obvious question, of course, is how do we charge the vendors for the cost of the electricity they use? While this could have been a challenge ten or twenty years ago, measuring use and controlling access isn't a technology problem: QR codes, RFID cards, cellular data, and 3-inch-cubed electric meters are widely available today.

So why haven't we done this? Well, we've tried. In 2013, New York set up a power tap pilot for food carts in Union Square: a partnership between a startup named Simply Grid, ConEd, and the city. The pilot never got off the ground beacuse, in large part, ConEd concluded that it was too difficult and costly to coordinate with different city agencies. It was bureaucracy, not technology or a shortage of ideas, that prevented this from taking off.

More recently, the Street Vendor Project has begun helping food carts switch to battery power as part of a larger initiative. While laudable—and, unfortunately, more practical given our bureaucracy—battery systems are more expensive, less durable, and come with substantial environmental and humanitarian costs. If you thought of energy like water, this would be like filling up a few very expensive buckets in Queens every morning and then driving them into Manhattan, rather than attaching a hose to a pipe. (Cleaner, but structurally similar to the gas generator.)

With a power tap, the city pays once. With a battery, vendors pay over and over again—or don't, since a gas generator is cheaper to buy and operate. But we all pay for the gas generator in the form of air pollution, noise pollution, and carbon emissions. If we thought about this as a collective problem, we could come up with a more efficient solution for everyone.

In light of New York City's commitment to be carbon neutral by 2050, this is an area where we could become a healthier, more livable and more sustainable city by installing small, metered power taps in our public spaces.

What's holding us back?

• Coordination between city agencies, the power utility and the technology vendor—the nearly universal obstacle for any improvement to the city.
• Upfront installation costs—while this could be recovered over time by selling metered electricity, it wouldn't happen overnight.
• Liability concerns about safety—another often-encountered roadblock in public investment and improvement in our litigious society.

With today's available technology and the challenge of rapid climate change, there's no reason to delay. Coordination, financing, and risk management challenges are “business as usual” for public and private institutions worldwide. Let's make clean energy—and a cleaner city—business as usual for New Yorkers.