New York’s electric grid is nearing the end of its runway. NYISO, the independent operator responsible for keeping the lights on, is issuing its most urgent reliability warnings in decades. Meanwhile, the incoming mayor of New York City, Zohran Mamdani, is elevating advisors whose policy positions directly increase the risk of blackouts and higher energy costs.
The great irony of the recent New York City mayoral election is that while Mamdani thrashed his opponent Andrew Cuomo, he is going to do everything in his power to continue implementing the former governor’s signature 2019 climate law. Mamdani’s transition team is dominated by the same groups that closed Indian Point, oppose all gas infrastructure, and want to retire every NYC peaker plant by 2030 even though no replacement exists.
The stakes could not be higher: if this coalition gets its way, New York will continue down a path NYISO says leads to rolling blackouts as early as 2026.
New York’s Energy Landscape
The 2019 passage of the Climate Leadership and Community Protection Act got headlines for being “nation-leading” and ambitious, but it delivered a raw deal to New Yorkers: we have to pay to build out a renewable energy grid that is both less reliable and more expensive and creates land use, public safety and home rule conflicts up the ying-yang.
It mandated a massive expansion of heat electrification, while also mandating the shutdown of natural gas plants that can create electricity on cold nights. It mandates that new housing has to shoulder the costs of all-electric heat instead of tapping into existing natural gas infrastructure. It also mandated a solar energy buildout across a state that has famously cold and dark winters.
In addition to consumer bills skyrocketing, multiple grave warnings have been issued that the state will not be able to continue on the path that it’s on. Governor Kathy Hochul faces a court-ordered February deadline to either replace the CLCPA with a new energy policy, or implement upcoming mandates that will be harsher and more draconian measures than anything to this point. She must act carefully, as the New York Independent System Operator (NYISO) has warned of “reliability violations” in New York City beginning as soon as next year.
More than half of all fossil fuel peaker plants in NYC are now scheduled for retirement before a viable alternative is built.
Hochul Slowly Shifting to Reality
After delaying the inevitable until last year, Hochul pivoted to a healthier “all of the above” energy mix that includes a new 1 GW nuclear reactor and the desperately needed Northeast Supply Enhancement gas pipeline into New York City. She has weathered challenges from environmentalists who fought against the CHPE hydopower pipeline into New York City, and she helped make the Build Public Renewables Act more tolerable by slowing down its rush to close clean peaker plants in New York City.
The 2026 primary between Governor Kathy Hochul and her former Lieutenant Governor Antonio Delgado is a tightrope walk, as she must lower costs and create stable energy to drive economic development. Delgado, for his part, is campaigning on doubling down on Cuomo’s CLCPA plan and has promised the world to Bill McKibben, the most extreme climate groups, and most importantly, to mayor-elect Zohran Mamdani.
Although he kept quiet about climate on the campaign trail, Mamdani’s political career was built on pursuing extreme climate goals, above and beyond even the CLCPA. He is part of a network of environmental NGOs that simultaneously have closed Indian Point nuclear plant, ignored the rise in emissions and reliability costs, want to use state capacity to take over upstate land for solar mega-farms, and also believe that all fossil fuel infrastructure is a “stranded asset” even though more people are relying on them than ever.
With New York City accounting for the largest share of demand, emissions, and political pressure in the state, the energy agenda set by mayor-elect Mamdani will play a major role in New York’s direction.
The Choice Between Affordability or Climate Change
While Mamdani said that “we should consider” nuclear energy upstate to help meet New York’s energy needs, he has been clear about the Northeast Supply Enhancement pipeline: he doesn’t believe in investing in any fossil fuel infrastructure.
This is a clear diversion from Governor Hochul, who has greenlit the plan to relieve a crippling and expensive energy bottleneck into New York. It would pay for itself in two years and would reduce the use of dirty “dual fuel” generators by relieving transmission constraints.
Mamdani’s latest shot against Hochul’s all-of-the-above approach came in his picks for a Transportation, Climate, & Infrastructure transition team. Despite Mamdani’s noted campaign emphasis on affordability over doomsday climate prognostications, his choices signal otherwise.
This team has little representation from utility labor or grid management experience.
Of 33 team members, 20 have some kind of track record with energy issues, almost exclusively as non-profit activists. Of those 20, 16 are drawn from the same coalition that, in loose terms, has closed Indian Point, ignored the resulting increase in fossil fuel use, opposed every major gas project since, wants to carpet upstate farmland with solar, while retiring every peaker plant in the five boroughs by 2030.
Upstate, dozens of towns have blocked battery storage and solar megafarms, setting up a collision between Mamdani’s advisors and rural New Yorkers who will have to host land-intensive renewable infrastructure.
Meet the New York City Advisors Who Will Shape Your Electric Bill
These 16 advisors listed alphabetically below have clear and consequential records on energy policy. Their past advocacy shows exactly what Mamdani energy policy will look like in practice, and how that agenda conflicts with NYISO’s increasingly urgent warnings about grid reliability.
The unifying theme among these advisors is belief in a frictionless, all-renewable path, even as NYISO and other grid experts keep pointing out that transmission, storage, and permitting realities simply do not match this rhetoric or timeline.
1. Eddie Bautista – NYC Environmental Justice Alliance
NYC-EJA is a founding member of the PEAK Coalition, the group campaigning to shut down all NYC peaker plants by 2030. Those are the same dispatchable resources NYISO says are needed to maintain reliability as early as 2026. Bautista quit the NYS Climate Justice Working Group because Governor Hochul was delaying the implementation of a potentially disastrous “cap and invest” scheme.
“Can clean renewable energy plus battery storage also replace all the City’s older, polluting private peaker plants? Can NYC become the first city in the nation to have all its peaker plants replaced? We believe we can – especially if we follow the visionary direction established by the New York State Climate Leadership and Community Protection Act.”
Eddie Bautista in 2022
NYC-EJA also has attacked Hochul’s nuclear proposal as “more expensive” and that it will “take way more time to build… than solar.”
2. Tabitha Decker – Spring Street Climate Fund
Spring Street is the fiscal sponsor of the Public Power Coalition, which wants to overpower the wishes of “rural landowners” about solar panels and block public nuclear energy from being built.
Spring Street also provides financial firepower for the NY Heat Act and Local Law 97 proposals, and contributes directly to anti-nuclear groups like Alliance for a Green Economy, NYPIRG, the NYC Environmental Justice Alliance, the Environmental Defense Fund, Catskill Mountainkeeper, Food and Water Watch, and the list goes on.
3. Noah Ginsburg – New York Solar Energy Industries Association
NYSEIA is the solar industry’s primary lobbying group in New York. Ginsburg’s advocacy focuses on accelerating statewide build-out of solar farms and rooftop systems, including on agricultural land, as a core replacement for fossil fuel and nuclear capacity. This assumption directly conflicts with NYISO’s conclusions that intermittent resources upstate cannot replace dispatchable power in NYC.
He and NYSEIA regularly advocate for overriding home rule and local opposition to utility-scale and distributed solar, and have opposed new public investment in nuclear as an alternative to solar and storage.
4. Rhiana Gunn-Wright – Green New Deal architect
Gunn-Wright, as part of the Roosevelt Institute, is one of the main intellectual architects of wielding Keynesian economics to justify a 100% renewable Green New Deal and a leading national voice for rapid fossil fuel phaseout, electrification, and environmental justice as policy first principles.
She has written that nuclear energy is a “false solution.”
5. Chris Halfnight – Urban Green Council
Urban Green Council treated the closure of Indian Point as a foregone conclusion, focusing exclusively on how building retrofit, electrification, and demand management that could lessen the blow to NYC’s electricity needs.
6. Monika Hansen
Hansen currently works for a government staffing agency and previously held a leadership role at BlocPower, the climate-tech startup tasked with managing Ithaca’s headline-grabbing effort to electrify 6,000 buildings by 2030.
The reality failed to match the ambition: BlocPower completed only 10 electrifications; local officials and residents reported project cost overruns, opaque financing terms, and an unannounced abrupt withdrawal. As sustainability director Rebecca Evans put it, “We helped BlocPower make headlines, and really created a national market for BlocPower based on this program. It put us in a position to make a lot of promises that we weren’t able to fulfill”.
7. Lauren Phillips – National Resources Defense Council
Phillips is part of NRDC, a national advocacy group deeply influential in New York’s energy policy, including as an architect and cheerleader for the CLCPA and Indian Point’s closure.
NRDC played a central role in the campaign to shut down Indian Point nuclear plant and, in 2011, publicly claimed “energy efficiency and renewable energy resources could replace Indian Point’s output,” directly contradicting NYISO. NRDC is also a frequent signatory to coalition letters opposing gas expansion projects and even sued the Columbia County Town of Copake, NY for opposing a massive 60 mW solar project.
8. Nancy Romer – PSC-CUNY
The Professional Staff Congress at CUNY is one of the unions that is trumpeted by the Public Power coalition as a source of support from organized labor, supporting a massive upstate solar energy buildout to justify the end to NYPA’s NYC peaker plants.
9. Daphany Rose Sanchez – Kinetic Communities Consulting
Sanchez’s company advocates for demand-side reductions as the primary path to decarbonization.
10. Peggy Shephard – WE ACT for Environmental Justice
Shepard’s WE ACT is a core member of New York’s environmentalist coalition that dismisses NYISO’s reliability warnings, opposes delayed fossil retirements, and frames any hesitancy on renewables as a failure of political will, not technical feasibility.
11. Lise Strickler – Three Cairns Group.
Stickler is a trustee of the Environmental Defense Fund, one of the original 1970s-era non profits that formed to “sue the bastards” and close Indian Point with lawfare.
12. Tyler Taba – Waterfront Alliance
The Waterfront Alliance believes that investments in renewable energy will allow peaker plants to be shut down in NYC.
13. Tiffany Ann Taylor – Regional Plan Association (RPA)
Tiffany Ann Taylor’s (and RPA’s) October 2025 testimony about NY’s Draft Energy Plan supports plowing forward with the CLCPA and made arguments for more aggressive state action while downplaying nuclear energy and natural gas. Once again, physical grid restraints were positioned as a lack of will.
14. Midori Valdivia
Midori Valdivia helped author an influential “Climate for Change” plan, now cited as the standard-bearer for city climate ambition. The blueprint Valdivia helped craft is the same strategy NYISO warns cannot maintain reliability in NYC without new firm generation. Her role on the transition team adds further weight to a worldview that assumes generation can be eliminated faster than it can be replaced, despite the grid operator’s explicit warnings about 2026–and-beyond shortfalls.
15. Laurie Wheelock – Public Utility Law Project (PULP)
PULP has testified repeatedly in favor of expediting upstate solar, renewables, and grid upgrades, calling for stronger community benefits and equity carve-outs, but rarely acknowledging grid reliability risks, peaker plant needs, or affordability trade-offs flagged by NYISO and state regulators.
16. Justin Wood – New York Lawyers for the Public Interest (NYLPI)
Wood and NYLPI have consistently pushed for rapid retirement of NYPA’s and private peaker plants in the city by 2030, asserting that renewables and batteries alone can replace their function, a stance directly at odds with independent grid operator and technical analyses.
Four other people were selected for the committee who have backgrounds that are a little different on energy. Benjamin Kabak of 2nd Avenue Sagas has criticized the Indian Point closure. John Samuelson of Transport Workers Union of America has lauded Hochul’s nuclear expansion plan. Ben Furnas of TransAlt has supported nuclear energy. Esther Rosario of Climate Jobs NY has pushed for expanded labor protections in a number of otherwise short-sighted proposals.
What’s Next?
For years, these activists have said that closing Indian Point and enacting the CLCPA would not lead to higher energy costs. When the public started to feel the pain of higher bills, they shifted accountability to investor-owned utilities, a lack of political will, AI data centers, Russia and Trump; and not to the very policies that others warned would cause problems.
Now, many of the same groups are promising the grid can survive even deeper cuts to firm power. This time, everyone knows exactly who is in charge.
The activists who designed this policy are now running the table at City Hall. If their plan fails, there will be no one left to blame. The buck stops with them.
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