Before New York Spends Billions on the Grid, It Must Get the Choices Right

By Raya Salter, Esq., Energy Justice Law and Policy Center, Member, Energy Policy Planning Advisory Council

The New York Public Service Commission is deciding how billions of dollars will be spent on transmission infrastructure that will shape electricity costs, reliability and power-plant operations for decades.

As a member of the Energy Policy Planning Advisory Council, we have been participating in this planning for three years. We have concluded that the Commission’s current analysis is incomplete. In comments filed in the proceeding, we urge the Commission to fully test which transmission investments will deliver the best results for affordability, reliability and overburdened communities.

New York’s grid-planning process has focused heavily on local transmission upgrades without fully evaluating larger bulk transmission projects that could move more lower-cost, cleaner electricity from upstate New York to downstate communities.

That matters because transmission choices affect far more than the grid itself. They shape electricity costs, reliability, and how quickly aging fossil-fuel plants can retire.

When transmission is constrained, customers can pay more for electricity and older generating plants may remain online because they are still needed for reliability. Those consequences fall especially hard on disadvantaged communities, which often face both high energy burdens and disproportionate exposure to pollution.

The Public Service Commission should require a full comparison of local projects and competitively proposed bulk transmission alternatives, including additional transmission toward New York City.

That analysis should consider long-term system savings, customer costs, reliability, fossil-plant retirements, pollution reductions, public-health benefits and impacts on disadvantaged communities.

New York’s Climate Action Council, for example, estimated that implementation of the state’s climate law could produce $50 billion to $110 billion in public-health benefits from cleaner air through 2050. Those benefits should be part of how we evaluate major grid investments.

The question is not whether New York needs to build. It does.

The question is whether we are choosing the investments that make the system more affordable and reliable while reducing the pollution burdens that some communities have carried for decades.

New York should answer that question before billions of dollars are locked in.

Raya Salter is executive director of the Energy Justice Law and Policy Center, a member of the Energy Policy Planning Advisory Council, the New York State Climate Action Council and the New York State Permanent Environmental Justice Advisory Council.