Charting new lines of power generation for New York, using renewables

The New York Power Authority quietly has a heavy footprint on New York’s electrical grid, with projects stretching from Long Island to the Canadian border. With the state itching for ways to meet its latest climate goals, NYPA and its network of power generators, transmission lines and projects is seen as a solution, although there is some disagreement from activists about size and scale. 

NYPA CEO Justin Driscoll has been operating on shifting tides since taking on the job last year. Between inflationary pressures and a long-growing push for renewable energy in New York, energy policy is now at something of a tipping point, and with the NYPA’s latest Renewables Draft Strategic Plan, Driscoll has designs on addressing the latter. 

Driscoll, even if he’s looking ahead to the countless projects that will bring megawatts of renewable energy to the market, is still concerned about the overall health of the grid, which he monitors from the authority’s White Plains control room. It’s getting old and with the specter of natural disasters looming, will need close attention. Private industry also is interested in investing in the country’s grid, so outfits like NYPA won’t need to go it alone both with maintaining New York’s electric grid and updating it for a greener future. 

Driscol, who is to deliver keynote remarks at City & State’s Clean Energy Summit at the Museum of Jewish Heritage in Lower Manhattan on Thursday,  sat down with us to discuss NYPA’s mission, the future of renewable energy and public concerns. 

This interview has been edited for length and clarity. 

What would you say is the purpose of NYPA?

So the way we think of ourselves fundamentally is we’re one of the operating utilities here in New York state, but we’re a utility with a public mission, and our public mission is to progress toward achieving its clean energy goals. So unlike other utilities that have their own decarbonization clean energy goals, we’re doing it on behalf of the state and on behalf of the people, the residents of New York state, and we do that in several ways, through generating power, through our generation activities, our transmission activities, moving that power around the state and then serving our largely governmental customers with either energy or sometimes energy efficiency projects as well. And that could include all kinds of clean energy technologies. It used to be just HVAC work and lighting work that we would do for these customers. Now we’re doing everything from smart LED lighting projects, EV charging, solar and storage, virtual power plants, all the kind of what I would call clean energy technologies are also now part of our product offerings for those customers.

So with this new draft strategic plan, how did you balance ambition versus the practicality of getting all this new renewable energy online?

I think we’re really at an interesting point in time in the energy transition, we think we’re playing a significant role in that transition here at NYPA, and of course, fundamentally, our generation and transmission work is very important to the state in terms of keeping the lights on here in New York. So we continue to focus, obviously, on our core operations of generation and transmission and providing for customers, but at the same time, we’re trying to participate and accelerate the transition to a clean energy economy. So looking to build more renewables, looking to do more solar and storage on site for customers, looking to work with other utilities to develop some new technologies, whether it’s green hydrogen production, thermal energy networks, all the kinds of you know, new technologies that are coming online to try to get us to our clean energy goals.

With the governor’s new focus on nuclear possibilities does that factor into long-term planning for NYPA?

She just held an energy summit up in Syracuse back in September and essentially signaled that we’re going to need to explore all different types of energy production and energy resources, and obviously a lot of debate in the industry is around the role that these small modular nuclear reactors can play. And so I think it’s very early in that in the technologies haven’t really been fully developed yet, but everybody’s looking at it and and seeing whether it might be part of the solution, but I think it’s too early to tell whether that will be part of the plan here in New York, and we as a utility, like all the utilities in the U.S., are trying to try to keep track of and stay up to speed with the developing technologies.

How do you see or view possibilities for NYPA’s expansion beyond government institutions?

In terms of customers that we serve I think our customers are laid out in our statute. So that would really be more of a question for the state Legislature in terms of whether they wanted to expand the types of customers that we serve. But right now, we’re very busy with our existing customer base, helping them figure out how they can decarbonize their operation. So all of our customers, being governmental, all have clean energy goals that they’re trying to achieve, and many of them look to us sort of as their energy advisor to help them chart a path forward toward their decarbonization. So that can be planning how to retire certain emitting equipment and replace it with clean energy technologies. We can also procure equipment and services and vendors for these customers. We can help them, connect them with companies that can provide those types of services. So we’re very busy with our existing customer base and trying to help them. But again, expansion of that would be a question for the legislature.

Does it sort of feel tricky to see the collective furor that a lot of ratepayers have towards these private or public-private utility providers, as opposed to NYPA?

Well, you know, it’s interesting, because we play different roles in different functions. So we’re not what they call the distribution utility. So we don’t have any, we don’t own any wires or have any billing to residents unlike other investor-owned utilities like the Con Edisons and the National Grids, and so what you’re referring to is just some of the ratepayer response to energy markets and the energy transition and so forth. But we don’t have those, those direct retail relationships. So we’re a little different. We’re a wholesale generator of electricity because we participate in the markets and are a grid operator. But now we’re going to be getting into a new line of generation business through the development of renewables under the strategic plan. So we’ll be adding to our generation portfolio with these new renewable projects.

What role would you say private industry has to play in helping not just NYPA achieve those climate goals, but New York.

I think to the extent that we want to achieve these goals as fast as possible, you would want as many participants in that effort so that you can get as much built as quickly as possible. So we see partnership opportunities with the private sector as a way to get more built faster. Plus, in some ways, it’s de-risking projects as you take on partners. You can spread the risk of project development over more parties, which is the typical financing approach to projects. So the idea would be to get more built and so we’re looking to partner with the private sector where we can. We’re also looking to take over projects from the private sector where they may want to recycle their capital and move on to another project, or we’re happy to consider those types of projects.

What concerns might you have for just New York’s overall energy needs?

A lot of the grid is old. We’re the largest owner and operator of the high-voltage grid in the state, and we’re doing a lot of work to upgrade our existing lines and also build new lines. So some of our facilities are over 60 years old, and so those need upgrades. We’ve tackled the oldest and the most need of upgrade already, and we’re going to continue with that, but there’s not only the need to upgrade these older assets, but also with more electrification and with more projects getting developed, there’s going to be the need for new transmission as well. We feel like we’re playing a significant role in that build-out.