From Watts Up With That?

Roger Caiazza and Richard Ellenbogen

New York Governor Hochul plans to pursue “the most ambitious development of nuclear power in America, setting a new goal to build five gigawatts of new nuclear capacity”.  While I believe that nuclear power is the best option to reduce electric system GHG emissions, this announcement represents another New York politician meddling in energy policy. This summarizes a more detailed post at Caiazza’s blog.

Hochul Proposal

On January 13, 2026 Hochul presented her State of the State  address.  It described the nuclear proposal as follows:

Establishing a Nuclear Reliability Backbone for a Zero-Emission Grid

As New York transitions to a zero-emission electric grid, the State must ensure reliable and cost-effective baseload power to keep homes, businesses, and critical infrastructure running at all hours.  Governor Hochul will ensure that New York State leads in the race to harness safe and reliable advanced nuclear energy to power homes and businesses with zero-emission electricity for generations to come.

To catalyze progress towards those goals, the Governor will advance a new initiative, the Nuclear Reliability Backbone, directing state agencies to establish a clear pathway for additional advanced nuclear generation to support grid reliability. The Nuclear Reliability Backbone will be developed by a new Department of Public Service (DPS) process to consider, review, and facilitate a cost-effective pathway to four gigawatts of new nuclear energy that will combine with existing nuclear generation and the New York Power Authority’s (NYPA) previously announced one gigawatt project, to create an 8.4 gigawatt “backbone” of reliable energy for New Yorkers.

This effort will provide firm, clean power that complements renewable energy resources and reduces reliance on fossil fuel generation. By creating a stable foundation of always-on energy, the Backbone will allow renewable resources to operate more efficiently and flexibly. Together, these actions will support a resilient, flexible, and zero-emission grid that meets New York’s growing energy needs.

New York Energy Issues

New York’s Climate Leadership & Community Protection Act (Climate Act) includes a 2040 “zero-emissions” mandate for the electrical sector.  We have chronicled the myriad issues with this target for years.  In brief, the State expects that the interim 2030 target to obtain 70% of New York’s electricity from renewable sources by 2030 is years behind schedule and the recently released State Energy Plan suggests that there will be a continuing need for fossil-fired units beyond 2040.

To her credit Hochul apparently recognized that nuclear should be included in a decarbonized electric system in her State of the State. The problem is that the State of the State did not confront the reliability crisis confronting the state in the near term that cannot be fixed with nuclear plants that will not be online for a decade or more.

Last November the New York Independent System Operator (NYISO) released its 2025-2034 Comprehensive Reliability Plan (CRP).  The report found that “the electric grid is at an inflection point driven by the convergence of three major trends: the rapid growth of large loads, (e.g.: microchip manufacturing and AI-related data centers); the aging generation fleet; and a lack of new dispatchable generation resources being added to the system.”   The description of the CRP went on to say:

The CRP highlights that the future reliability of the grid depends on the development of flexible generation capable of performing during extended periods of high consumer demand and extreme weather. The report examines lessons-learned from the June 2025 heatwave and the need for a planning framework that better reflects present challenges of operating the grid while anticipating plausible future risks.

“The system requires additional dispatchable generation to serve forecasted increases in consumer demand,” said Zach Smith, Senior Vice President, System and Resource Planning. “We also need to refine and evolve our planning processes to better reflect this period of great change on the grid and a broader range of plausible future outcomes.”

The CRP demonstrates that due to emerging reliability challenges, traditional planning methods built around a single forecast are no longer sufficient. To maintain system reliability and protect public safety, the economy and quality of life, the CRP recommends actions that will strengthen planning processes across a broad spectrum of system conditions and advance needed investment before reliability margins disappear.

Our biggest concern is the reliability margin crisis described in the CRP.  The NYISO plausible range of reliability margins illustrates the problem (Figure 1).  The CRP doesn’t explain what is going to keep the lights on after 2033, and possibly as early as 2027 if replacement capacity does not keep up with retirements.  Several new gas turbine projects were being permitted when Climate Act implementation started but two were rejected because of the Climate Act and others quietly stopped the process.   This should be the energy program priority but Hochul proposes a nuclear program.

Figure 1: Plausible Range of Statewide System Margins NYISO 2025-2034 Comprehensive Reliability Plan 

For background consider New York’s nuclear power plants (Table 1).  Five gigawatts of nuclear is basically equivalent to building five new traditional reactors like Nine Mile 2, the last completed plant in New York. While adding new nuclear capacity is appropriate, replacement of existing capacity must also be considered.  The youngest of the 3.4 GW of existing nuclear in NY State will be reaching 60 years of age by 2040.

Table 1: New York Nuclear Generating Plants

We agree on one thing completely: It’s a step in the right direction but it is too little, too late.  Building this amount of capacity will take a long time.  Nine Mile 2 construction took 13 years, and the most recent reactors built in the US at Vogtle, Georgia took 15 years from the start of initial site work.

The new Vogtle units are Westinghouse AP1000 designs with passive safety systems; The capacity of each unit is on the order of 1.1 GW.  Construction went over schedule and budget “as the first new U.S. nuclear build in decades, became a protracted megaproject with schedule slips and cost growth to roughly the mid‑$30‑billion range, widely characterized as one of the most expensive infrastructure projects in U.S. history”. These issues were caused by a “combination of incomplete design and planning, contractor and supply‑chain problems, first‑of‑a‑kind AP1000 implementation issues, weak project management and oversight, and the 2017 Westinghouse bankruptcy, which disrupted construction and financing”. 

Most of these underlying factors will be problems for New York State.  If new technology is used the design and planning will have to evolve as the plants are built.  There are contractor and supply-chain problems with existing infrastructure construction so this will be more of a problem for the new technology.  If the deployment goes so far as to mandate that the facilities are “built by and for New Yorkers”, then there will be delays because there are insufficient skilled trade workers available today.

Conclusion

In our opinion, nuclear power should be part of New York’s electric system future.  However, Hochul’s proposal is too little, too late as part of the Climate Act implementation without revising the schedule.  It is necessary first to pause implementation and reassess the schedule and ambition of the Act so that it can play a meaningful role without negatively impacting the reliability of the utility system as it is presently doing.

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Roger Caiazza blogs on New York energy and environmental issues at Pragmatic Environmentalist of New York.  Richard Ellenbogen has been commenting since 2019 regarding the deficiencies inherent in NY State Energy policy.