Fox Green

⚛️ THE TRADES JUST DROPPED A NY-DSA LAWMAKER OVER NUCLEAR AND UTILITY TAKEOVER BILL ⚛️ Sept 24: @sarahana signs a letter opposing any state support for new nuclear plants in New York. Sept 28: The Hudson Valley Building & Construction Trades Council endorses her for Assembly. Oct 5: The trades pull it. "Assemblywoman Shrestha... recently opposed the build-out of nuclear energy in New York. HVBCTC cannot support that position. Nuclear energy projects create union jobs and a more reliable energy grid for New Yorkers." They also cited her push to take over Central Hudson, after talks with IBEW Local 320, which represents the utility's workers. Her takeover bill directs the new authority to pursue 100% renewable electricity by 2040 and orders a study to phase out the gas system serving about 90,000 Hudson Valley homes and businesses. She's said the takeover is about more than the Hudson Valley. On "Pod Damn America" in March: "If it happens here, that is definitely going to result in a domino effect." She's been pitching it in Manhattan, Brooklyn and Rochester, alongside NYC Council Member Chi Ossé, to Con Ed, National Grid and RG&E customers.

In 1974, New York State told the Town of Lloyd it could cut residents' property taxes by 80%. Town taxes would drop 91% and school taxes 89%. In return, the town had to accept a nuclear plant on 2,300 acres along the Esopus line, around Chodikee Lake in Ulster County. Many people in the region were open to it. In a 1974 poll of the district, 52.5% said they wouldn't object to an atomic plant nearby. The town's own advisory committee worried about something else: a tax cut that big would bring growth. In June 1974, Lloyd voted 805–328 against any power plant at all. Con Ed came back anyway. In 1978 it walked away, saying too many people were moving into the area. That never really happened. Today, within 10 miles of the site, there are still fewer than 500 people per square mile, which is under the federal siting guideline. What if it had been built? Add four 1,300 MW reactors to New York's actual 2025 generation, hour by hour: ⚡ Gas drops from 53% of the state's power to 26% ⚡ Zero-emission power rises from 47% to 74% ⚡ About 283 billion cubic feet of gas a year never gets burned, cutting roughly half of the state's power-plant CO₂ Lloyd was offered an 80% tax cut and cleaner air for the whole state. It said no. 📄 Sources: Temporary State Commission to Study the Catskills (1974), p. 203; Mid-Hudson Post, 6/26/74; Poughkeepsie Journal, 3/21/74; Southern Ulster Pioneer, 3/29/78; 2020 Census; NYEA counterfactual model on 2025 NYISO data.

Public Power NY and DSA are celebrating NYPA's biggest solar deal yet. Here's what the state actually bought. Rich Road Solar is a 240-megawatt project in St. Lawrence County. It won a state contract in 2021, then let it lapse as costs rose. On Monday, NYPA took a 51% stake. EDF, the private developer, keeps the other 49%. This isn't a one-off. We matched every project in NYPA's renewables plan against state records. 20 of its 29 private partnerships are projects whose earlier state deals had already fallen through. NYPA's own plan calls it "Investigating 'At-Risk' Projects." The pitch for public power was that state-owned solar would make money, and that money would lower your bill. NYPA's own numbers say otherwise. New solar costs "at least $100" per megawatt-hour to produce. The market pays "less than $50." The difference comes out of your electric bill for 20 years, through the same state contracts private projects get. For Rich Road, the state won't disclose the price until the plant is running. The bill credits that were promised? They come from a share of project revenue that NYPA's board chooses. The state set no minimum. Whatever comes back is a slice of what ratepayers paid in first. Rich Road is 1.6% of the 15 gigawatts the campaign says New York needs. Getting there means doing this about 61 more times. There are no profits to redistribute. There's a bill for New Yorkers. Read our investigation linked in the comments.

"With increase of population he has acquired wealth, derived from the cultivation of new and better soils; and he has acquired also the power of combining his labour with that of others, thus rendering that of all more productive. They now fell the heavy oak and the enormous pine, and avail themselves thereof for the construction of additional houses, each in regular succession better than the first. Health improves, and population increases more rapidly. Some of the sons are now employed in the field, while others prepare the skins and render them more fit for clothing: and a third set make axes, spades, hoes, ploughs, and other implements calculated to aid the labours of the field, and those of construction. The supply of food increases rapidly, and with it the power of accumulation." -Matthew Carey Painting: Thomas Cole, Home in the Woods, 1847.

Inside New York there are two grids: the one outside your window, and the one written in Albany. Almost everything you read about energy is about the second one. About 30 people, some who drove two hours, came to a historic church in Hurley to hear @MeredithAngwin explain the difference. Battery-plant opponents, a county legislator, a New York City sustainability official, and a man responsible for keeping the lights on all spoke up before the night was over. (The talk was supposed to be at a middle school. The district approved it in July, then cancelled a week out, claiming we're a "for-profit" group. We're not. FOIL request filed.) Our full account is linked in the replies.

If RFK Jr. championed the failed Ivanpah solar plant and forced the shutdown of Indian Point, it’s time to reevaluate his energy expertise. He's credited with pressuring his then brother-in-law Andrew Cuomo to ban fracking in New York.

The first test of New York's data center and energy future may happen in Newburgh. Tomorrow morning at 10:30, the Public Service Commission votes on the sale of the Roseton Generating Station to a Swiss-backed conglomerate. The petition says nothing will change: "no changes in the day-to-day operations of Roseton Gen will result." The buyer's own press release calls Roseton "an exceptional opportunity to develop a multi-use energy campus at scale" — and describes its business as powered land for advanced manufacturing and data center campuses. Both things are in the public record. Roseton is one of six New York plants this buyer has picked up, totaling over 1.8 GW. The thing about Roseton is that this is nothing new. It's always been a bellwether of what's going on with New York's grid, both good and bad. It was built as a oil-fired stopgap by Central Hudson and two other utilities after plans for a nuclear plant in Tivoli fell through. As it opened in 1974, OPEC instantly shot prices through the roof, while nuclear plants were demonized and made nearly impossible to build. Then, in the 2000s, cheap natural gas and a new wave of combined cycle plants made the plant unviable to run as more than a peaker plant. But since the closure of Indian Point, Roseton has been run more and more; it's in the midst of what may be its busiest year since 2007. We break down the history, the sale, and the future possibilities of the plant in the link in the comments.

Are you ready to pay $18.29/m more for electricity? 47 state legislators just said that you should, because of "affordability." On Friday, Assemblymembers and State Senators filed a letter in the most important state Public Service Commission proceeding that few ratepayers have ever heard of: Case 24-E-0165, or the “Grid of the Future” docket that opened in April 2024. The letter asks regulators to “require utilities to put electric heating rates in place by the end of 2027," in support of a petition filed originally by the Environmental Defense Fund, Alliance for a Green Economy, Building Decarbonization Coalition, Earthjustice, New Yorkers for Clean Power, Rewiring America and Sierra Club. What do "fair rates" for electric heating customers translate to? We did the math, using the methodology offered by the petitioners. It means that customers across the state who don't have electric heat will pay an average of $9.64 extra a month to subsidize electric heat. NYSEG customers would pay an extra $14.50 a month, and Central Hudson customers, who already pay some of the fastest-rising rates in the country, would pay an extra $18.29/m. It would affect seven of eight ratepayers in the state, to subsidize one in eight. We have the full breakdown of what this petition would do to customers of every New York utility, along with every source document, in the link in the comments.

What if the environmentalists didn't win? Between 1965 and 1989, eleven nuclear reactors in New York State reached a federal docket, a construction permit, or a full operating license... and were then killed or closed. Indian Point 2 and 3 ran for half a century before the state shut them down. Shoreham was finished, fully licensed, and never allowed to run, so Long Island ratepayers paid $6 billion for it anyway. Jamesport and Sterling had construction permits issued; New York killed them at the state level. Verplanck, Greene County, and New Haven died in their dockets. Twelve thousand two hundred twenty-six megawatts. And one more project: Storm King, Con Edison's 2,000-megawatt pumped-storage plant at Cornwall — licensed in 1965, tied up in court for seventeen years by the lawsuit that founded modern environmental law, abandoned in 1980. Its job was simple: soak up cheap nuclear power overnight, return it at the evening peak. In Con Ed's own 1965 newspaper ad, the plant is drawn into a photo of the mountain, to scale, to show you'd barely see it. So we ran the experiment. We took the last seven days of real NYISO grid data: every generator, every hour, and added the program back: all eleven reactors at the fleet's real-world 93% capacity factor, plus Storm King pumping every night and generating through every evening peak. Every assumption is on screen. The week we actually lived: 1,723 GWh of gas. The same week on the grid they wanted to build: 29. Ninety-eight percent less — in July, with the air conditioners running. Imports fall by a third too, from 459 GWh to 299 — which matters more than it used to. NYISO's own market monitor reported this spring that imports just hit the lowest level ever recorded, that New York now exports power to drought-stricken Quebec, and that the shortfall has landed on the state's oldest fossil plants.

Since 2019, the average Central Hudson bill is up about 72%. That's the 5th-fastest increase of any major utility in America. In that same stretch, the Hudson Valley built out rooftop solar faster than almost anywhere in the country (7th nationally), and Central Hudson customers adopted heat pumps several times faster than any other part of the state. So why, as NYISO wrote last week, is our grid teetering on the edge of collapse, relying on a bankrupt power plant built 75 years ago in Newburgh to remain open past its retirement date? The Hudson Valley did everything that New York's climate law asked, and things have only gotten worse. Meredith Angwin has a term for how this happens: the Fatal Trifecta. Over-reliance on renewables, over-reliance on just-in-time natural gas, and over-reliance on imports from neighbors who are having the same weather you are. We wrote up what all three legs look like in one valley, with rate-case filings and NYISO data to back it up. The link is in comments.