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The city is caught between its energy past and future.
There’s a reason decarbonization advocates talk so much about power lines. Without them, the fruits of non-carbon-emitting forms of electricity generation, which are often located far away from population centers or are only available when it’s sunny and windy, can’t be fully harvested in the form of electrons flowing to customers when they need them.
The New York state electricity system operator said in a report released Friday that New York City specifically is at risk of a shortfall of 446 megawatts — about enough to power over 350,000 homes — of transmission for nine hours on an especially hot summer day in 2025 when demand for electricity is at its peak.
To those that follow New York state energy planning specifically or, like me, have the sickness that is reading reports from grid operators across the country all the time, the result was not surprising.
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The New York Independent System Operator (New York ISO) chalked up the shortfall to a combination of planned shutdowns of some natural gas plants, called peakers, that switch on when demand is high and can’t be supplied with existing resources, as well as expected growth in electricity demand from both economic growth as well as increased used of electricity for building heat and vehicles.
So far, peakers generating just over 1,000 megawatts have either shut down or reduced their operation, and another almost 600 megawatts of New York City peakers are scheduled to do so in less than two years. This has been a deliberate policy choice by the state. Two plants in the New York City area had their plans for upgrades rejected in 2021; state regulations on nitrous oxide emissions have effectively made several of these types of plants uneconomic to run.
“With the additional peakers unavailable, the bulk power transmission system will not be able to securely and reliably serve the forecasted demand in New York City,” according to New York ISO.
While this may seem like an issue of generation (i.e. producing the power) as opposed to transmission (moving it around), New York ISO projects that this shortfall “is expected to improve” in 2026, when the long awaited and under construction Champlain Hudson Power Express (CHPE), a transmission line that would bring hydropower from Quebec to downstate New York, is scheduled to come into operation.
New York City is caught between its energy past and energy future, and like many areas that are aggressively promoting renewables and retiring existing fossil fuel generation, there is a worry that reliability may suffer in the interim.
The plan is to build out a combination of renewable energy and storage to meet downstate’s needs. This includes massive installations of wind power which will hopefully both directly provide electricity as well as charge batteries which can be used to dispatch power when generation is otherwise falling short. The shortfall between New York's decarbonization goals and its ability to produce carbon-free electricity was exacerbated by the shutdown of Indian Point nuclear power plant in the Hudson River between 2019 and 2021, which corresponded to an immediate uptick in fossil fuel emissions.
Regulators and grid operators across the country have echoed New York ISO regularly, voicing concern about reliability as the renewable buildout runs into barriers of inadequate transmission and delays, while fossil fuel plant shutdowns happen quickly.
But this doesn’t mean that every state or region trying to decarbonize its electricity grid is doomed to blackouts. California is facing a massive heat wave and, at least so far, its grid operator is not expecting any major issues, partially thanks to plentiful hydropower and its massive buildout of energy storage. (It also will likely keep some gas-fired power plants in operation past their original decommissioning date).
And in New England, the grid operator concluded that an expensive terminal for importing liquefied natural gas could probably close in 2025 without imperiling the electricity system (although this depended on there being ample supply of oil for power plants to run in the winter when natural gas is used for heat). Overall, New England, which has been fretting about its energy reliability for years, has turned more optimistic, thanks in part to a substantial buildout of rooftop solar, which reduces demand on the gird.
But the report does raise the question of just how fast the grid can get away from gas in any region in the midst of the energy transition. For example, there are still plans for a new peaker plant in Peabody, Massachusetts, despite a state law with the goal of cutting carbon emissions in half by 2030 and reaching net zero in 2050.
The 2019 rules which are responsible for the peaker shutdowns envision up to four years of extensions “if the generator is designated by the NYISO or by the local transmission owner as needed to resolve a reliability need until a permanent solution is in place.” Whether transmission, wind power, and storage can be built by then is the challenge New York faces.
Read more about power lines:
The Canadian Wildfires Ominously Messed Up a Clean Energy Power Line
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Solar and wind projects will take the most heat, but the document leaves open the possibility for damage to spread far and wide.
It’s still too soon to know just how damaging the Interior Department’s political review process for renewables permits will be. But my reporting shows there’s no scenario where the blast radius doesn’t hit dozens of projects at least — and it could take down countless more.
Last week, Interior released a memo that I was first to report would stymie permits for renewable energy projects on and off of federal lands by grinding to a halt everything from all rights-of-way decisions to wildlife permits and tribal consultations. At minimum, those actions will need to be vetted on a project-by-project basis by Interior Secretary Doug Burgum and the office of the Interior deputy secretary — a new, still largely undefined process that could tie up final agency actions in red tape and delay.
For the past week, I’ve been chatting with renewables industry representatives and their supporters to get their initial reactions on what this latest blow from the Trump administration will do to their business. The people I spoke with who were involved in development and investment were fearful of being quoted, but the prevailing sense was of near-total uncertainty, including as to how other agencies may respond to such an action from a vital organ of the federal government’s environmental review process.
The order left open the possibility it could also be applied to any number of projects “related to” solar and wind — a potential trip-wire for plans sited entirely on private lands but requiring transmission across Bureau of Land Management property to connect to the grid. Heatmap Pro data shows 96 renewable energy projects that are less than 7 miles away from federal lands, making them more likely to need federal approval for transmission or road needs, and another 47 projects that are a similar distance away from critical wildlife habitat. In case you don’t want to do the math, that’s almost 150 projects that may hypothetically wind up caught in this permitting pause, on top of however many solar and wind projects that are already in its trap.
At least 35 solar projects and three wind projects — Salmon Falls Wind in Idaho and the Jackalope and Maestro projects in Wyoming — are under federal review, according to Interior’s public data. Advocates for renewable energy say these are the projects that will be the most crucial test cases to watch.
“Unfortunately they’ll be the guinea pigs,” said Mariel Lutz, a conservation policy analyst for the Center for American Progress, who today released a report outlining the scale of job losses that could occur in the wind sector under Trump. “The best way to figure out what this means is to have people and projects try or not try various things and see what happens.”
The data available is largely confined to projects under National Environmental Policy Act review, however. In my conversations with petrified developers this past week, it’s abundantly clear no one really knows just how far-reaching these delays may become. Only time will tell.
We’re looking at battles brewing in New York and Ohio, plus there’s a bit of good news in Virginia.
1. Idaho — The LS Power Lava Ridge wind farm is now facing a fresh assault, this time from Congress — and the Trump team now seems to want a nuclear plant there instead.
2. Suffolk County, New York — A massive fish market co-op in the Bronx is now joining the lawsuit to stop Equinor’s offshore Empire Wind project, providing anti-wind activists a powerful new ally in the public square.
3. Madison County, New York — Elsewhere in New York, a solar project upstate seems to be galvanizing opposition to the state’s permitting primacy law.
4. Fairfield County, Ohio — A trench war is now breaking out over National Grid Renewables’ Carnation Solar project, as opponents win a crucial victory at the county level.
5. El Paso County, Colorado — I don’t write about Colorado often, but this situation is an interesting one.
6. St. Joseph County, Indiana — Something interesting is playing out in this county that demonstrates how it can be quite complicated to navigate municipal and county-level permitting.
7. Albemarle County, Virginia — It’s rare I get to tell a positive story about Virginia, but today we have one: It is now easier to build a solar farm in the county home to Charlottesville, one of my personal favorite small cities in our country.
Getting local with Matthew Eisenson of Columbia Law School’s Sabin Center for Climate Change Law.
This week’s conversation is with Matthew Eisenson at Columbia Law School’s Sabin Center for Climate Change Law. Eisenson is a legal expert and pioneer in the field of renewable energy community engagement whose work on litigating in support of solar and wind actually contributed to my interest in diving headlong into this subject after we both were panelists at the Society of Environmental Journalists’ annual conference last year. His team at the Sabin Center recently released a report outlining updates to their national project tracker, which looks at various facility-level conflicts at the local level.
On the eve of that report’s release earlier this month, Eisenson talked to me about what he believes are the best practices that could get more renewable projects over the finish line in municipal permitting fights. Oh — and we talked about Ohio.
The following conversation was lightly edited for clarity. Let’s dive in.
So first of all, walk me through your report. How has the community conflict over renewable energy changed in the U.S. over the past year?
A few things I would highlight. In Ohio, we now have 26 out of 88 counties that have established restricted areas where wind or solar are prohibited. These restrictions are explicitly enabled by the state law, SB 52. I’d also highlight that while the majority of litigation in our database is state-level litigation and contested case administrative proceedings, there are certain types of projects — particularly offshore wind — that have an extremely high prevalence of federal litigation. A majority of federally permitted offshore wind projects have been subject to federal lawsuits. The plaintiffs in these lawsuits have never succeeded on the merits, but they keep filing them and they drive up costs.
In general, as a topline takeaway, [our] report shows more and more of the same.
You personally do quite a bit of legal work on solar and wind permitting battles in the state of Ohio, where as you noted counties are curtailing deployment left and right. What’s your bird’s eye view of the situation in the state right now?
So Ohio has for years had a state-level siting process. The Ohio Power Siting Board reviews all applications for large-scale energy generation facilities, 50 megawatts or larger. The Siting Board has a set of criteria they are required to apply when they are reviewing an application, but basically only one of them seems to matter in deciding whether a project is approved or denied: whether the project serves the public’s convenience and necessity.
We’re seeing that in the majority of proceedings for approvals of large-scale wind and solar projects, there will be groups that intervene in opposition to the project, and often these groups will argue that there is so much local opposition that the project cannot possibly serve the public interest.
The Power Siting Board has been rejecting that argument in important cases recently. The board is still putting substantial weight on whether local governments are supportive or not supportive of a project, but are not rejecting projects just because of a demonstration of local opposition.
Say you’re a developer and you start facing opposition. What is the right legal avenue? How should they do the calculus, so to speak, on how to navigate legal options?
There’s numerous things developers can do. They can work with the local government and community-based groups to work with the local government to craft host community agreements, community benefit agreements — voluntary but binding contracts with the local community where a developer provides benefits; in exchange, community-based groups would agree to support the project, or at least not to oppose it. These can be very helpful and particularly meaningful in places where a local government itself is not in charge of permitting decisions themselves. So in a state like Ohio, if a developer negotiates host benefit agreements with local township governments and then those governments don’t turn around to intervene against a project, those would be extremely helpful.
It’s also important for developers to do community outreach and build a base of local supporters, and get those supporters to turn out at public meetings. Historically opponents of projects are more motivated to show up at a local meeting than supporters, but it’s really not a good look for a project when you have 500 turn out against it and 10 turn out to support.
For years the opponents were very proactive. There would be a proposal for a project in one county in Kansas and a group of opponents in the neighboring county would propose a restrictive ordinance to block future projects — supporters weren’t thinking proactively in the long-term. I think a concentrated effort will produce meaningful results. But they’re behind.