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There are at least two more developers in a position to trade offshore leases for fossil fuel investment.
It may sound like splitting hairs, but the difference matters when it comes to policymaking.
Governor Kathy Hochul’s proposal to weaken the state’s emissions targets reflects a fundamental tension in the process of decarbonization.
Rob hosts a Heatmap roundtable about Iran, Ukraine, long-duration batteries, seabed mining, and more.
“It is difficult to imagine more arbitrary and capricious decisionmaking than that at issue here.”
After a disappointing referendum in Maine, campaigners in New York are taking their arguments straight to lawmakers.
NineDot Energy’s nine-fiigure bet on New York City is a huge sign from the marketplace.
Battery storage is moving full steam ahead in the Big Apple under new Mayor Zohran Mamdani.
NineDot Energy, the city’s largest battery storage developer, just raised more than $430 million in debt financing for 28 projects across the metro area, bringing the company’s overall project pipeline to more than 60 battery storage facilities across every borough except Manhattan. It’s a huge sign from the marketplace that investors remain confident the flashpoints in recent years over individual battery projects in New York City may fail to halt development overall. In an interview with me on Tuesday, NineDot CEO David Arfin said as much. “The last administration, the Adams administration, was very supportive of the transition to clean energy. We expect the Mamdani administration to be similar.”
It’s a big deal given that a year ago, the Moss Landing battery fire in California sparked a wave of fresh battery restrictions at the local level. We’ve been able to track at least seven battery storage fights in the boroughs so far, but we wouldn’t be surprised if the number was even higher. In other words, risk remains evident all over the place.
Asked where the fears over battery storage are heading, Arfin said it's “really hard to tell.”
“As we create more facts on the ground and have more operating batteries in New York, people will gain confidence or have less fear over how these systems operate and the positive nature of them,” he told me. “Infrastructure projects will introduce concern and reasonably so – people should know what’s going on there, what has been done to protect public safety. We share that concern. So I think the future is very bright for being able to build the cleaner infrastructure of the future, but it's not a straightforward path.”
In terms of new policy threats for development, local lawmakers are trying to create new setback requirements and bond rules. Sam Pirozzolo, a Staten Island area assemblyman, has been one of the local politicians most vocally opposed to battery storage without new regulations in place, citing how close projects can be to residences, because it's all happening in a city.
“If I was the CEO of NineDot I would probably be doing the same thing they’re doing now, and that is making sure my company is profitable,” Pirozzolo told me, explaining that in private conversations with the company, he’s made it clear his stance is that Staten Islanders “take the liability and no profit – you’re going to give money to the city of New York but not Staten Island.”
But onlookers also view the NineDot debt financing as a vote of confidence and believe the Mamdani administration may be better able to tackle the various little bouts of hysterics happening today over battery storage. Former mayor Eric Adams did have the City of Yes policy, which allowed for streamlined permitting. However, he didn’t use his pulpit to assuage battery fears. The hope is that the new mayor will use his ample charisma to deftly dispatch these flares.
“I’d be shocked if the administration wasn’t supportive,” said Jonathan Cohen, policy director for NY SEIA, stating Mamdani “has proven to be one of the most effective messengers in New York City politics in a long time and I think his success shows that for at least the majority of folks who turned out in the election, he is a trusted voice. It is an exercise that he has the tools to make this argument.”
City Hall couldn’t be reached for comment on this story. But it’s worth noting the likeliest pathway to any fresh action will come from the city council, then upwards. Hearings on potential legislation around battery storage siting only began late last year. In those hearings, it appears policymakers are erring on the side of safety instead of blanket restrictions.
The state is poised to join a chorus of states with BYO energy policies.
With the backlash to data center development growing around the country, some states are launching a preemptive strike to shield residents from higher energy costs and environmental impacts.
A bill wending through the Washington State legislature would require data centers to pick up the tab for all of the costs associated with connecting them to the grid. It echoes laws passed in Oregon and Minnesota last year, and others currently under consideration in Florida, Georgia, Illinois, and Delaware.
Several of these bills, including Washington’s, also seek to protect state climate goals by ensuring that new or expanded data centers are powered by newly built, zero-emissions power plants. It’s a strategy that energy wonks have started referring to as BYONCE — bring your own new clean energy. Almost all of the bills also demand more transparency from data center companies about their energy and water use.
This list of state bills is by no means exhaustive. Governors in New York and Pennsylvania have declared their intent to enact similar policies this year. At least six states, including New York and Georgia, are also considering total moratoria on new data centers while regulators study the potential impacts of a computing boom.
“Potential” is a key word here. One of the main risks lawmakers are trying to circumvent is that utilities might pour money into new infrastructure to power data centers that are never built, built somewhere else, or don’t need as much energy as they initially thought.
“There’s a risk that there’s a lot of speculation driving the AI data center boom,” Emily Moore, the senior director of the climate and energy program at the nonprofit Sightline Institute, told me. “If the load growth projections — which really are projections at this point — don’t materialize, ratepayers could be stuck holding the bag for grid investments that utilities have made to serve data centers.”
Washington State, despite being in the top 10 states for data center concentration, has not exactly been a hotbed of opposition to the industry. According to Heatmap Pro data, there are no moratoria or restrictive ordinances on data centers in the state. Rural communities in Eastern Washington have also benefited enormously from hosting data centers from the earlier tech boom, using the tax revenue to fund schools, hospitals, municipal buildings, and recreation centers.
Still, concern has started to bubble up. A ProPublica report in 2024 suggested that data centers were slowing the state’s clean energy progress. It also described a contentious 2023 utility commission meeting in Grant County, which has the highest concentration of data centers in the state, where farmers and tech workers fought over rising energy costs.
But as with elsewhere in the country, it’s the eye-popping growth forecasts that are scaring people the most. Last year, the Northwest Power and Conservation Council, a group that oversees electricity planning in the region, estimated that data centers and chip fabricators could add somewhere between 1,400 megawatts and 4,500 megawatts of demand by 2030. That’s similar to saying that between one and four cities the size of Seattle will hook up to the region’s grid in the next four years.
In the face of such intimidating demand growth, Washington Governor Bob Ferguson convened a Data Center Working Group last year — made up of state officials as well as advisors from electric utilities, environmental groups, labor, and industry — to help the state formulate a game plan. After meeting for six months, the group published a report in December finding that among other things, the data center boom will challenge the state’s efforts to decarbonize its energy systems.
A supplemental opinion provided by the Washington Department of Ecology also noted that multiple data center developers had submitted proposals to use fossil fuels as their main source of power. While the state’s clean energy law requires all electricity to be carbon neutral by 2030, “very few data center developers are proposing to use clean energy to meet their energy needs over the next five years,” the department said.
The report’s top three recommendations — to maintain the integrity of Washington’s climate laws, strengthen ratepayer protections, and incentivize load flexibility and best practices for energy efficiency — are all incorporated into the bill now under discussion in the legislature. The full list was not approved by unanimous vote, however, and many of the dissenting voices are now opposing the data center bill in the legislature or asking for significant revisions.
Dan Diorio, the vice president of state policy for the Data Center Coalition, an industry trade group, warned lawmakers during a hearing on the bill that it would “significantly impact the competitiveness and viability of the Washington market,” putting jobs and tax revenue at risk. He argued that the bill inappropriately singles out data centers, when arguably any new facility with significant energy demand poses the same risks and infrastructure challenges. The onshoring of manufacturing facilities, hydrogen production, and the electrification of vehicles, buildings, and industry will have similar impacts. “It does not create a long-term durable policy to protect ratepayers from current and future sources of load growth,” he said.
Another point of contention is whether a top-down mandate from the state is necessary when utility regulators already have the authority to address the risks of growing energy demand through the ratemaking process.
Indeed, regulators all over the country are already working on it. The Smart Electric Power Alliance, a clean energy research and education nonprofit, has been tracking the special rate structures and rules that U.S. utilities have established for data centers, cryptocurrency mining facilities, and other customers with high-density energy needs, many of which are designed to protect other ratepayers from cost shifts. Its database, which was last updated in November, says that 36 such agreements have been approved by state utility regulators, mostly in the past three years, and that another 29 are proposed or pending.
Diario of the Data Center Coalition cited this trend as evidence that the Washington bill was unnecessary. “The data center industry has been an active party in many of those proceedings,” he told me in an email, and “remains committed to paying its full cost of service for the energy it uses.” (The Data Center Coalition opposed a recent utility decision in Ohio that will require data centers to pay for a minimum of 85% of their monthly energy forecast, even if they end up using less.)
One of the data center industry’s favorite counterarguments against the fear of rising electricity is that new large loads actually exert downward pressure on rates by spreading out fixed costs. Jeff Dennis, who is the executive director of the Electricity Customer Alliance and has worked for both the Department of Energy and the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission, told me this is something he worries about — that these potential benefits could be forfeited if data centers are isolated into their own ratemaking class. But, he said, we’re only in “version 1.5 or 2.0” when it comes to special rate structures for big energy users, known as large load tariffs.
“I think they’re going to continue to evolve as everybody learns more about how to integrate large loads, and as the large load customers themselves evolve in their operations,” he said.
The Washington bill passed the Appropriations Committee on Monday and now heads to the Rules Committee for review. A companion bill is moving through the state senate.
