The Changing Winds of New York Energy Priorities

Over the electric hum of Niagara’s transformers, Hochul said in simple terms: “Harnessing the power of the atom is the best way to generate steady zero-emission electricity.” The significance of that statement from the governor of New York is hard to overstate.

Half a century has gone by since New York last kicked off construction of nuclear plants in the 1960s and ’70s, back when the state government had an Atomic and Space Development Authority. Various leaders, including Gov. Nelson Rockefeller, had wanted the state to benefit from the nascent technology of nuclear fission, especially since New York lacked abundant fossil fuels.

Today the three surviving plants in the state’s nuclear fleet are all upstate. As detailed in Jacobin, a fourth plant downstate, Indian Point, was shut down in 2021 by Gov. Andrew Cuomo after a decades-long lawfare campaign from elite environmental groups, including one whose legal division was headed by current US secretary of Health and Human Services (and former brother-in-law to Cuomo) Robert F. Kennedy Jr. The closure dismantled a quarter of New York City’s power supply, increased air pollution citywide, increased reliance on natural gas and its volatile prices, devastated a local economy, and destroyed hundreds of union jobs.

Though it still expressed no interest in new nuclear, state policy in 2016 recognized the importance of the existing nuclear fleet upstate with a new subsidy collected from utility bills, called zero-emissions credits. (Because of his campaign to shut down Indian Point, Gov. Cuomo only allowed the upstate plants to receive the subsidy.) The justification was that the state’s deregulated electricity market made these plants unprofitable and vulnerable to closure without the subsidy.

Last year, the three plants upstate produced almost twice as much clean energy as all of the state’s wind turbines and solar panels. If Indian Point were still running, the fleet’s production would have surpassed all the wind and solar in New York and in New England put together. (New England broadly shares New York’s energy priorities and has attracted more wind and solar power.) Unlike those renewable sources, the nuclear fleet produces power around the clock, regardless of weather or season, and without necessitating extensive transmission and distribution system upgrades that quietly raise utility costs.

The three plants are located at only two different sites too — a reminder that despite the nuclear fleet’s lasting strength, New York has spent two decades incentivizing new renewables instead. The state has also prioritized competitive developers over its own regulated utilities when deciding who should invest.  But policy hasn’t exactly been entirely laissez-faire; Albany has been deeply involved in the design and operation of byzantine competitive processes and financial instruments to make investment in renewables more attractive.

Since 2004, the state has mandated that a certain percentage of electricity sold by its utilities come from renewable sources like solar, wind, and small hydroelectric facilities generators. The percentage target has marched upward with new legislation every several years, from 25 percent to 30 percent to 50 percent and then finally to 70 percent. All along, these targets are implemented with the establishment of “renewable energy certificates” that are generated alongside the electricity itself and traded as a separate commodity, acting as an additional subsidy for project developers. The New York State Energy Research and Development Authority (NYSERDA), is the state entity that manages these processes by, for example, collecting those subsidies on top of everyone’s utility bills to send back to the developers. NYSERDA itself is concrete evidence of the shift in state priorities: until 1975 it was the Atomic and Space Development Authority.

That last increase in renewables targets was a key part of the Climate Leadership and Community Protection Act (CLCPA) signed by Gov. Cuomo in 2019, a huge victory for the state’s environmental groups. That law set various mandates around emissions reductions and deadlines for designing programs to implement them, including mandates for specific amounts of distributed solar (i.e., small-scale solar on rooftops and otherwise in local utility systems, not the larger grid), battery storage, and offshore wind.

Like its 70 percent renewable target, the CLCPA also set a separate 100 percent zero-emissions target for 2040, a decade later. This latter target reflects the actual goal of a decarbonized electricity system, a goal that can be achieved with a more expansive set of technologies than only renewables — such as nuclear. But the state has so far neglected to introduce any particular subsidy or process for incentivizing such technologies — a gap that labor unions and competitive power developers called attention to in 2021 — and only proposed concrete definitions for the goal just last December.

The entity responsible for operating New York’s electrical grid and power markets agrees. The New York Independent System Operator (NYISO), a private, not-for-profit entity, has spent the past few years raising the alarm about the need for “dispatchable emissions-free resources” (DEFRs). Such technologies need to be deployed on the grid for meeting that 2040 target of 100 percent zero-emissions electricity. But they’re also critical for maintaining reliable electricity service alongside the other prioritized resources. “As more wind, solar, and storage plants are added to the grid,” NYISO stated in a 2022 report, “DEFRs must be added to the system (or fossil generation retained) to [satisfy electricity demand] when intermittent generation is unavailable.”

In other words, renewables surely have a role to play in decarbonizing New York’s electricity generation, but a maximalist fixation on only renewables — ubiquitous among environmental groups and the Left — won’t cut the mustard. That’s why the state needs nuclear.

“Every forecast of New York’s clean energy future has recognized the need for nuclear energy to meet demand and maintain grid reliability,” Hochul spokesperson Paul DeMichele tells me. “The governor’s direction to NYPA ensures New York will be ready to power the grid of the future.”

When NYPA Built the Future

Hochul’s choice of location for her nuclear announcement, Niagara, wasn’t just a reminder of big public power. The full name of the hydroelectric station is the Robert Moses Niagara Power Plant: the infamous master builder and “power broker” oversaw that monumental project as NYPA’s chairman in the 1950s and early ’60s.

Having built two hulking hydroelectric projects, NYPA needed to advance into nuclear development alongside the state’s private utilities, as Moses wrote in the authority’s 1960 annual report:

The control of atomic energy will, before long, be the greatest domestic policy question before the American people, because those who control fission and fusion will be the masters of population growth and location, industry, trade, commerce and life itself. This is too great a control to be exercised otherwise than on the theory that it is affected with a major public purpose not to be left exclusively to private profit enterprise.

But a state committee convened by Gov. Nelson Rockefeller to plan for nuclear development in New York had recommended that NYPA stick to hydroelectric power instead and that the state’s private utilities should be the ones to bring New York into the Atomic Age. Any legislation to let NYPA join in the development necessitated further study, the committee’s report recommended.

Moses shot back against the “do-nothing recommendations” of the committee, which “counsels procrastination and delay,” with another report titled Atomic Power. Utilities were only considering small, demonstration nuclear projects and, alongside their profit requirements and pricier financing, their plants would take too long and cost too much. If NYPA didn’t get started immediately on a large nuclear plant, focused solely on producing economical power, the state would start losing industrial production to other states that, unlike New York, had plentiful fossil fuels to exploit.

After pressure from Democrats like Sen. Robert Kennedy, who championed the New Deal approach to public power as “yardstick” — a public sector alternative to put downward pressure on prices from private utilities — Gov. Rockefeller finally signed a law in 1968 enabling NYPA to build its own nuclear plants alongside the private utilities. Within seven months, NYPA submitted the application to build its first plant, the James A. FitzPatrick Nuclear Power Plant, named for Moses’s successor, to the federal Atomic Energy Commission, and construction started in 1970 once that approval was secured. NYPA lowered the cost of the plant by taking over core components that were in contract from a private utility and by locating it next to that utility’s just-finished plant. Because of that association, Chairman James FitzPatrick had to assure the public during its construction that, once built, it would be owned and operated solely by NYPA. The plant came online in 1975, and it’s still running today, half a century later; it’s one of three in New York.

NYPA’s original nuclear plant, however, is no longer owned or operated by the organization. In 2000, the authority sold off its nuclear division — not just FitzPatrick but half of the Indian Point nuclear plant that NYPA had taken over during construction, along with roughly half of the authority’s employees. As part of New York’s electricity deregulation, all utilities, including NYPA, divested their nuclear plants, selling them to merchant generation companies that ran them to produce power as a wholesale commodity, not as part of electricity service provided in the public interest.

New York State has a public power tool in NYPA that other states don’t have. That distinguishes Gov. Hochul from other, largely Republican governors like Gov. Phil Scott of Vermont, Gov. Ron DeSantis of Florida, Gov. J. B. Pritzker of Illinois, and Gov. Mike Braun of Indiana, all of whom have signaled interest in new nuclear development in their states, though none as vociferously as Hochul.

The governor’s operating theory is not at all about an ideological primacy of public power, nor is it about wielding public power as “yardstick.” Instead it’s a pragmatic deployment of state capacity to kick-start a new pipeline of nuclear development in the private sector — lining up a supply chain, finding industrial partners, and so on — a pipeline that was first envisioned last September at NYSERDA’s Future Energy Economy Summit. As Hochul’s spokesperson DeMichele explains it to me, “NYPA is playing the role of ‘special forces’ in the State’s energy portfolio, moving ahead to provide invaluable lessons learned while acting as a first mover” on new nuclear power.

Why exactly is Gov. Hochul wielding this tool — now — to build new nuclear? In her announcement, Hochul spoke of two prior occasions when NYPA stepped up to serve the state through big power projects, in the 1970s and earlier. Another occasion, which she omitted, was NYPA’s quick deployment in 2000 of a fleet of gas-powered “peaker plants” around New York City, installed on an emergency basis to stave off a projected power shortfall the following summer. (A state comptroller report on the deployment chastised the utility for interfering in the newly restructured electricity market with not-for-profit generators.) They’re still the cleanest power plants in New York City.

When it comes to NYPA stepping in to build, though, many observers of state energy politics have a different, more recent occasion in mind: the successful campaign to Build Public Renewables.

Building Public Renewables as Abundance

In 2019, NYC-DSA led the Public Power NY coalition, along with environmental nonprofits like the Alliance for a Green Economy, in a campaign to rekindle NYPA. The idea behind the BPRA campaign — named for the Build Public Renewables Act at the center — was unmistakably rooted in state capacity: if the private sector is not building renewables fast enough to meet CLCPA goals, then the state should step in, using NYPA, and build them itself, at lower costs to ratepayers thanks to the absence of profits for shareholders.

Is this not precisely what abundance, in the eyes of Klein and Thompson, should look like? Has the environmental left already delivered what liberals idolize, albeit with a more New Deal–style focus on public development and with a coalition that includes labor?

The answer isn’t as clear-cut as some on the Left would like to believe. The core idea of BPRA indeed checks all the right boxes of the abundance program. What’s commonly misunderstood about it though is that BPRA didn’t become law. Instead, the Hochul administration, surely with help from NYPA, rewrote it as part of the governor’s 2024 budget law, preserving most of the key ideas but stripping away some counterproductive elements.

That rewrite didn’t just maintain BPRA’s expansion of state capacity into the highly competitive domain of renewables; it also protected NYPA from a reduction of state capacity that was sought by the environmental left. Notably, the rewrite granted new authority to sell power from renewable projects into the state’s wholesale markets, crucial to the financial viability of building public renewables.

Beyond the positive arguments of Abundance, the BPRA campaign also exemplifies in many ways the book’s critique of progressivism gone awry, thanks to its steadfast alliance with environmental nonprofits.

First, it was environmental nonprofits, many of whom were behind the CLCPA climate law, who fixated exclusively on renewable energy, even though all rational planning for decarbonization identifies it as insufficient on its own to meet demand. Until the Hochul administration’s intervention, BPRA sought to shackle NYPA with a requirement to own and operate only renewables, thereby forestalling new nuclear but also consigning its fossil-fueled fleet to privatization or legal quagmire once 2031 rolled around.

Second, though BPRA sought to expand NYPA’s capacities, it also devised various new procedures to circumscribe the authority’s actions. A new “democratization plan” would compel NYPA to work with — and provide funding to — private nonprofits devoted to distributed renewable energy to “ensure that the scale up of renewable build out across the state occurs in line with the principles of energy democracy and transparency.” A new “just transition” plan would detail how NYPA’s employees devoted to its nonrenewable energy projects would be helped along as BPRA drove those projects out. And a new ten-year climate resiliency plan would have been required, with annual updates and a stakeholder process, to demonstrate how NYPA would be building renewables in compliance with CLCPA.

This all would have made the byzantine technical processes of electric reliability planning yet more complicated. Even worse, nonprofits the state considers “regional clean energy hubs” — including at least one environmental nonprofit in the PPNY coalition — would even get final sign-off, along with the NYISO grid operator, on retaining any fossil-fueled NYPA generators for reliability reasons after the imposed deadline. Who needs a public authority when you have an army of foundation-funded nonprofits?

A year and a half after passage, NYPA announced laudable progress by establishing a pipeline of dozens of renewables projects across New York. Given technical and permitting requirements, each can take well over a year to see through. “This is a pure lesson in the scalability of state capacity,” Paul Williams of the Center for Public Enterprise tells me. “NYPA, which already has a large energy portfolio, was able to harness its teams of engineers and underwriters to build out a huge new development pipeline for renewables.”

But that hasn’t stopped the PPNY campaign from opposing NYPA’s implementation all along the way. To the environmental groups and some in DSA, NYPA’s measurable progress isn’t good enough, and its CEO is, in their minds, a Republican “climate denier.” The coalition is demanding five times as many projects in order to meet the CLPA target of 70 percent renewable power by 2030.

It is unclear how these feats could be achieved, although much of the environmentalist left seems unconcerned with these practical questions. Its priority is instead creating bureaucratic procedures that they can oversee and proving to their funders that their work must continue. A month ago, Public Power NY celebrated new legislation not to help NYPA build but to “give New Yorkers the necessary tools to assess the scope, ambition, and progress of NYPA’s public renewables planning.”

For all their success in politicizing state capacity, with deft application of electoral pressure by DSA, the PPNY coalition hasn’t shown as much interest in how to effectively wield it. Though many in the coalition would consider themselves leftists rather than liberals, Klein and Thompson’s assessment of the latter rings true: they “have chosen to trust elected politicians and government workers less and trust regulatory and judicial processes more to ensure that government delivers.”

Building Abundance Without the Builders

For all the talk of building, the environmental left coalition behind Build Public Renewables has still never garnered public support from the builders themselves: not just the building trades but the labor unions involved in the highly unionized sector of utilities and power. The casual observer might find this fact surprising, given rose-colored reporting of the campaign’s ostensible labor support in this publication as well as the Nation, In These Times, and the American Prospect and from DSA itself.

Opposition to BPRA from unions like the International Brotherhood of Electrical Workers and the Utility Workers Union of America stems from NYPA’s poor track record of bargaining with its unions and, in particular, the New York State law that prohibits public employees from striking. In contrast, private sector renewables work already comes with prevailing wages and project labor agreements thanks to political efforts by the Climate Jobs NY coalition — which, unlike PPNY, truly put these unions in the driver’s seat.

“It’s easy to get, say, a teacher’s union to be in support of something like this,” a campaign activist said in a 2023 interview in DSA’s Socialist Forum. “At first, people like IBEW Local 1049 Business Manager Patrick Guidice were not into BPRA. It took a while for them to come around, but we were able to convince them once the just transition language in the bill was going to stay in the bill.”

The PPNY coalition laudably fought to retain some of their labor provisions in the final budget law. But if those provisions won the unions’ support, it doesn’t seem the unions got the memo. In a public comment on NYPA’s renewables plan released last December, the IBEW Utility Labor Council of New York State and UWUA Local 1–2, which represents some NYPA employees downstate, write that they are “deeply concerned about how this plan may impact our union members, the working people who keep New York’s energy systems operating safely, efficiently, and reliably.”

One of two signatories on that letter is IBEW Local 1049’s Guidice, who was said to be supportive of BPRA and who is also the chairman of the Utility Labor Council. Since the budget law established the authority to build public renewables, advocates have repeatedly cited his praise for BPRA’s labor language — a comment he made while opposing the legislation. “It was frustrating to keep seeing my name attached to support for that earlier version of BPRA when I was actively raising concerns on behalf of the Utility Labor Council,” Guidice tells me in an emailed statement.

The Road Ahead Lies With Labor

How do we articulate a vision of abundance rooted in public power that materially addresses the energy problems facing the state and that, unlike BPRA, appeals to the state’s organized builders? Thankfully, there’s a path forward if the Left would be willing to eat some humble pie: recognizing NYPA’s success in building renewables and jumping on board in support of Gov. Hochul’s plan for NYPA-led new nuclear development.

Speaking right after Hochul in the summer sun, UWUA president Jim Slevin embraced the governor’s articulation of a nuclear-powered future of reindustrialization. “This is gonna give a lot of hope to families, to make sure they can afford electricity — they can turn on their air conditioner today — and to make sure our grid is safe and reliable.” Gesturing at the Niagara project behind him, Slevin commended the NYPA pathway to new nuclear power “[for taking] the vision like they did decades ago. I applaud you for it, and I thank you for it, and labor stands behind you.”

“The governor’s nuclear announcement is a big deal,” IBEW’s Guidice says:

What’s exciting to me is that this isn’t NYPA stepping into an already crowded renewables space; it’s about taking the lead on something new and ambitious that doesn’t currently exist in New York. From a labor perspective, this feels like the right direction.

In a jointly authored op-ed published after the announcement, the head of both New York City and New York State Building & Construction Trades Councils and the head of the New York State AFL-CIO put all the pieces together in favor of public-led new nuclear. Citing NYISO electric reliability concerns, they argue nuclear “better ensures grid stability” than renewables do. For their members, nuclear plants employ “more permanent positions and salaries 50 percent higher than those working in other renewables.”

But the alternative to nuclear isn’t really renewables: “Without the scaling of nuclear power production that has met our energy demands, a dependence on fossil fuels has reignited. . . . And more emissions mean more harmful air pollutants that threaten the health of every New Yorker.”

Whereas the environmental left’s slogan “Build or Burn” called on Hochul to “build” public renewables or “burn” in an overheated climate dystopia, the industrial labor unions, and now the Hochul administration, understand it differently: either “build” nuclear or “burn” more fossil fuels.

Centrist liberals like the governor might march, admirably and audaciously, into this massive project with Abundance as a manifesto, but there is no Robert Moses to move heaven and earth to make it happen. There’s also little institutional capacity to start with, even in the state’s private sector, hence the need for NYPA as the “special forces” to start developing it.

But Robert Moses didn’t just lead NYPA in massive projects. He also hammered home the political arguments for public nuclear development. Sadly, there is no prominent political champion for that today, within NYPA or without. Though “Abundance” rightly plays up the need for state capacity to build, the New Deal ethos of muscular public development is too far in hindsight, and the nuclear part is too often antithetical to the idealistic and narrow-minded vision of renewables that’s upheld, explicitly or implicitly, by liberals and the Left, including within DSA.

Perhaps precisely because it smacks of Abundance and not “environmental justice,” the Left might, perversely, leave it to the state’s centrists and conservatives to champion New York’s public nuclear development. But to ensure the resulting plant remains firmly in the public interest — with fair balancing of costs between the state’s taxpayers, ratepayers, and new manufacturing customers, and with strong labor standards for its massive workforce — NYPA could use a New Deal–style progressive voice to shepherd and defend it, not merely chastise it from the sidelines.

The Left now faces a choice between siding with the environmental groups or rising to the defense of a muscular state, of public development, of realistic decarbonization, and of reindustrialization, alongside organized labor. This is the future liberals want, as the meme goes. If it’s not an appreciable step toward the future the Left wants too, then we have a problem.