To help my own public power research and to scratch an itch in archiving historical materials, I’ve gone through the work of producing a digital archive of Chattanooga’s Labor World newspaper for the years 1929 to 1940. Labor World was published by the Chattanooga Trades and Labor Council, an affiliate of the American Federation of Labor, from 1915 to 1984. The archive is organized into PDF files by volume, each one indexed by issue number and date, which you can now read, download, and search through for free on Archive.org.

Warning: The rest of this post is a boringly detailed description of the process of procuring the raw microfilm scans and of the use of modern AI tooling — Claude Code — to refine them into the final, organized product. It’s intended to help labor historians and others understand how to use these tools as research assistants for their own archival projects, not just saving an incredible amount of time but accomplishing tasks one doesn’t know how to do otherwise.

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The search for local public power history

From time to time I dig through historical newspaper archives when researching public power history, using subscription services like Newspapers.com. A recent interest of mine has been the history of public power in Chattanooga around the dawn of the Tennessee Valley Authority in the 1930s, and in particular the 1935 city election that ratified the bonds needed to initiate a public power utility. For that, the archives of the erstwhile progressive newspaper the Chattanooga News have proven invaluable. I’ll have more to say about that campaign in a future post.

When reporting on the public power campaign, the News periodically cited a publication called the Labor World, a local newspaper published by the Chattanooga Trades and Labor Council, itself a body affiliated with the American Federation of Labor. For example, on March 9th, 1935, under the heading “Labor World Indorses [sic] Public Power,” the News excerpted labor’s championing of public power:

The Labor World believes that organized labor will go down to the polls practically en masse and vote for the bond issue which will make possible the distribution of power by the people rather than by the Power Trust. The Labor World, mouthpiece of the Chattanooga Trades and Labor Council, calls on every working man and woman to go to the ballot box on March 12 and vote 'Yes'.

Very interesting! I wanted to learn more about Labor World and I definitely wanted to dig through the archives. But information about the 20th-century labor publication is hard to come by. A 2007 article in a local news outlet (and still available online!) offers a rare overview:

For seventy years, the Labor World newspaper kept Chattanoogans informed about the labor rights movement, and made sure that readers knew of the original significance of Labor Day. […]

Labor World was first published in 1915, and adopted the motto, “Devoted to the interest of all the wage-earners.” The biographies of each of its editors over the years show that the newspaper was headed by individuals who were writing from the perspective of being members, not spectators, in the labor movement.

The newspaper ran from 1915 to 1984 according to that article.

Where can one read archived copies of Labor World? According to WorldCat, only eight libraries have any copies, and each of them holds those copies only as physical microfilm, with no digital access.

Among those libraries, the Tennessee State Library and Archive offers a microfilm digitization service: for $90 per reel of microfilm, they will scan every image in the reel and mail you a thumb drive with the files. So I ordered three reels of Labor World to be scanned and sent to me. Within a few weeks, I was the happy owner of a thumb drive with a decade of New Deal-era labor history.

My new digital copy of the Labor World consisted of 1,990 pdf files split across three folders for the three reels and named simply by sequence numbers. Each file contained a 300 dpi image in a “2-up” layout: each a scan from an open book, with left and right pages on either side of a spine. And there was no metadata to be found in any of them.

To be of real use to me, though, I needed these two-thousand images of Labor World to be indexed by volume, issue number, and date. All the text should be searchable, too, at least to the extent that its sometimes shabby source would allow. That required three phases of processing:

1. For starters, I needed to split the left and right page images from each 2-up source image so that my final PDFs would have a single printed page per PDF page.

2. With each individual page now a separate file, about four-thousand of them, I needed to detect which ones represented the front page of an issue. Each front page needed to then be visually scanned to detect the volume, date, and issue number in the horizontal strip below the masthead. That would tell me which issues I had and give me a sense of how complete the archive actually was.

3. Finally, I wanted to run optical character recognition (OCR) on the images in order to extract the text and embed them in the final PDFs. That would make them searchable in standard PDF readers — say, if you wanted to find mentions of “public power.”

The incredible challenge of organizing this archive with the processing above would be up to me. (I knew that in advance; the wonderful librarians at TSLA didn’t suggest otherwise!) If it were a a few dozen files, I could have done all of the above myself — load up GIMP for splitting the source files; manually flip through them to detect front pages; and toss them to an OCR program — but at nearly two-thousand files that was out of the question.

Thankfully, as a noted “STEM professional on the Left,” I do have some proficiency with modern AI tooling to help me. Following in the footsteps of Odd Lots’ Joe Weisenthal, I started my foray into digital humanities with Anthropic’s all-purpose AI product Claude Code at my side.

Preserving labor history with the master’s tools

For those unaware of the major AI developments in the past year or so, Claude Code is a leading “generative AI” product for carrying out programming-adjacent tasks. Check out this New York Times writeup on it from January.

Think of Claude like a research assistant that you communicate with via a regular, human, (English-language) conversation, one that can — with your permission — read and write your local files, install open source software, run various commands, and, most important, understand and write code to do just about anything.

Because I imagine it would be useful to many readers, I’m gonna spell out my process of working with Claude to organize my Labor World files sent to me by the Tennessee library.

First, I loaded up VSCode and opened up the directory on my laptop where I had copied over the source reel files. I’d already installed Claude Code and linked it to my Claude subscription ($20/month for Pro). In VSCode’s Claude Code extension I started a new project and let Claude initialize a starting CLAUDE.md project file based on what it saw: those PDFs.

The project file tells Claude about what it will be working on, and lays out some basic tools and methodology it should use in the process. Here’s an example of what it put in the file:

### Reading PDFs
To read PDF content, the system needs poppler-utils installed:
```bash
brew install poppler  # macOS
```

Once installed, use the Read tool with the `pages` parameter to read specific pages from PDFs.

## Working with PDFs

When analyzing or searching PDFs:
1. Use the Read tool to extract text from specific pages
2. Reference files by their full path: `700B/gray00123.pdf`
3. Specify page ranges when reading to avoid processing large documents: `pages: "1-5"`
4. PDFs are numbered sequentially within each directory - there may be gaps in numbering

That has nothing to do with me or the Labor World project; it’s just basic instructions for dealing with PDFs on a Mac, all part of the Claude model’s general knowledge. By the way, for this project, I chose to use the newly released Opus 4.6 model of Claude, which is “costlier” in the sense that it consumes more of my allotted “tokens” in my subscription, but it’s better at deeper, more complicated tasks. Would the alternative, Sonnet 4.6, have been just as capable? I’m not sure!

The next step was to tell Claude what I was trying to do with this project. If Claude starts off as a research assistant with capable general knowledge (specifically around software), I needed to give it some basic instructions. To do that I fleshed out more info in that same CLAUDE.md file:

This is a document archive containing PDF files of digital scans of an archival newspaper called Labor World. This is NOT a software development project - there is no source code, build system, or version control. …

The directory structure organizes all the PDF files of the newspaper into three directories, one for each reel of microfilm the files were scanned from. Loosely, each directory covers a distinct span of time for the newspaper. …

We want to organize the files so that we can reconstruct a digital archive of Labor World for the issues covered. Then we will publish them online at Archive.org for everyone to read and understand. That means we’ll want to organize all the pages of a given issue into a distinct file, for all issues in the project, with clear dating and numbering. We’ll also want to run OCR on them so that the resulting files have text that can be searched.

I did my best to explain the visual structure of what appeared in the files, and how to recognize those images that contained a front page of an issue:

You can see the top ~1/4 of the content on the page is the “LABOR (X) WORLD” heading, where (X) represents a graphic. Underneath that heading is a thin horizontal header bar that spans the entire width of the page, containing three pieces of text on the left, in the center, and on the right. Consecutively, those pieces of text contain, for example:

• “Volume XIII” ---> The volume number for this issue, as a roman numeral

• “Chattanooga, Tennessee, January 4, 1929” ---> The date of the issue

• “Number 31” ---> The issue number (within the volume?)

And finally, I gave a key instruction:

DO NOT DELETE OR MODIFY ANY OF THE SOURCE PDF FILES. Only NEW files should be created.

Copying 20 GB worth of images from the library’s thumb drive onto my laptop is not something I wanted to sit through again, in case Claude messed with them.

In general I used this CLAUDE.md project file to impart upon Claude everything I already knew about the project, the files, and what I wanted out of it. You can read the full project file here. I then asked Claude to reload the project file and got started.

In the screenshots above (of the claude-code-history tool; I forgot to take screenshots of VSCode in the moment), you can see my starting direction to Claude for the project, its assessment of software that would be required (all free software it knew how to download and install for me), and its understanding of the phases of the project. Not too shabby.

Teaching Claude to rip pages in half

The first task in the digitization project was to split about 2,000 images in half, to extract the left and right pages into separate files. This proved a hell of a lot more complicated than I thought it would be, due to the irregularities of the source images. Because the original newspaper had narrow margins on the sides, the bound collection that was originally scanned into the microfilm presented a center line along the spine with little room for error in the splitting. Unfortunately, too, one side often cast a shadow or even simply occluded a sliver of the text on the other side.

Claude first carried out this task by spitting each image at the horizontal midpoint. Specifically, it synthesizes little Python programs to read and modify images, installing whatever libraries it needs in the process, and executes them for me. Looking at some example pages, I realized it needed work: the split left way too much of the opposite side in the picture. Claude was already well on its way to the next phase, front page detection, but I stopped it with a request:

As you can see in the exchange above, using Claude Code amounts to interacting with it like a research assistant. It randomly sampled some source files to split with the new “7% overlap” logic and presented me the results. Some looked okay, but for others the overlap was too excessive. I asked Claude to try something else:

It took that and ran with it, trying it on all the same sample images before, and comparing the split point to its original choice. Only one of the new samples looked bad. Claude gave each one a “consistency” percentage score, which I didn’t fully understand (and didn’t ask it to elaborate), but suggested it could use this new visual recognition method unless the score drops too low, at which point it falls back to the previous method. Sure, Claude. It ran this method — and by that I mean the Python script it generated to implement it — on the full set of source images. It then got to work on the front page detection.

Later, though, after the front page detection phase of the project was complete and I had a PDF for each Labor World volume, I noticed that still some of the splits looked bad. That’s only because I manually (and quickly) scrolled through each document to eyeball it.

After a few rounds of me providing bad pages, I expressed my frustration to my research assistant: “This is very time-consuming. Can you automate this for me?” Claude then did its own analysis of the “left/right width ratio” and of its confidence scores, resulting in 66 source images being redone. Still too much overlap, I told Claude, and it tried again. Now even worse! “Can you improve your edge detection to find that crease? And also give just a little bit of room around it.” We went back and forth like this until I found the results satisfying. Each time, it generated a “contact sheet” of thumbnails like the following, for me to quickly spot-check.

At some point I felt satisfied with the resulting PDFs. Now back to that front page detection.

Organizing the pages into volumes

With a sequence of almost 4,000 individual pages, rather than “2-up” images, it was time to identify which ones contained the front page of a Labor World issue and to identify each one’s volume, number, and date. The first part of this required Claude to visually identify the Labor World masthead.

Claude first did its own visual recognition of the first couple dozen right-hand-side pages to spot the masthead. From there, it determined that the masthead had a distinct visual pattern where the top section of a front page had a lot of dark pixels and then the darkness drops for the remaining vertical extent of the page. I had nothing to do with that analysis!

Claude then decided the images were too large and too numerous (about 2,000 right-hand-side images that could be front pages) to simply iterate that detection over all of them. So to take this on, it would produce more contact sheets of scaled-down thumbnail images that it could process more quickly. To reduce the search even more, Claude decided — again, based on its own initial understanding of the images — that front pages occurred every 4 to 8 pages, i.e., that each issue was from 4 or 8 pages long. Then it only needed to produce contact sheets for pages that weren’t just right-hand-sides, but also followed a skipping pattern.

Above is an example of such a contact sheet that it created, with helpful file numbers under each, after the first few attempts gave it an understanding of the heuristics to look for. From the above image, Claude deduced a pattern: aha, the front pages appear to be all the even-numbered files (i.e., every other right-hand-side page).

Claude kept churning through pages, checking how that issue-length assumption held up. It did not, in fact. Claude even realized itself that some issues were Labor Day special editions that ran much longer. But it still found irregularities that made its job difficult, requiring it to come up with new heuristics, for example:

Claude presented me with some sample contact sheets showing the masthead and the strip below it with the issue information. The point, of course, is not just to identify the masthead but that issue information. As you can see, it made some mistakes both in identifying the front pages but also in including the issue info:

I pointed out the error and Claude took it to heart, churning through the pages again after correcting its analysis. In total it produced 42 such contact sheets for it to process visually. But there was a hitch: Claude wanted to install the free, open-source software for image recognition, tesseract, but failed to do so. Turns out my laptop and Mac OS version are so old that the brew install approach to installing it failed. Claude was then going to use its own internal image recognition, which it said would be much slower and less efficient. I stopped Claude and offered my services as a software-knower:

That was quite an arduous process for me actually; it took a good 24 hours for a bazillion low-level libraries to install. But I helped my assistant do its job better. With that library installed, Claude finished its visual analysis of the front pages and extracted dates for 520 of 599 (then-) recognized front pages.

For this task, Claude came up with its own methodology of a CSV file to record the front pages, their issue data, and the provenance of each one (did Claude find it with some kind of analysis, or did I manually identify it). Below is a screenshot of the final state of the CSV, after a lot of rounds of corrections from me:

The rest of the task involved Claude presenting me with sets of pages it struggled with and asking me to help it out. Here’s where the natural-language interface with Claude came in handy: there didn’t need to be some kind of user interface specific to the task; it just synthesized an image file containing, say, 4 images, opened it for me in VSCode, and then I wrote natural language back to Claude, like the following bulleted list:

• XXI, Nov 13, 1936, num 29

• XXI, Feb 5, 1937, num 41

• XXI, Feb 12, 1937, num 42

• XXI, Feb 19, 1937, num 43

At some point, Claude felt confident about the state of things and generated its PDFs of every individual issue. But when I looked through them, I saw yet more errors:

At this point, that CSV file Claude came up with proved very handy to making progress and ensuring completeness. Now we both had a sequence of issues that we could look over to find irregularities like issue numbers that were skipped or even duplicated.

As it turns out, some of those irregularities stemmed from the image scanning — a whole swathe of early-year images were simply repeated — and some even stemmed from the Labor World publication itself! In some instances, the newspaper repeated issue numbers, skipped issue numbers, or mislabeled the volume number. The following screenshots show the various kinds of manual corrections I asked Claude to perform, each one being encoded in the master CSV file.

One of the great things about doing this with Claude’s assistance is being able to rely on it to keep track of the current state of the project. I didn’t have to explain how it should do this; it just figured it out. For example, here’s a glimpse at how I knew where to focus my manual inspections:

Finally we got to a point where it seemed the only missing issues were indeed absent from the scans I received. The front page detection and issue metadata extraction was complete. Now it was time to assemble the final PDFs. Claude made reasonably quick work of that, and in the end I asked it to assemble them by volume.

Uploading to Archive.org

Once I had the PDFs, I wasn’t sure what to do with them exactly, where to release them. With Claude’s help, it suggested Archive.org as the appropriate repository. Helpfully, it also pointed out that Archive.org will perform the OCR upon upload — converting images to searchable text to embed in the PDFs, which after a solid 24 hours running on my computer I eventually gave up on doing myself.

Even more helpfully, Claude helped me understand the copyright concerns involved with the project. One cannot simply upload textual materials to the internet, after all. The library had told me in advance that the copyright holder of the Labor World microfilms was, today, the Tennessee AFL-CIO. A cold email I sent via their generic Contact Us form eventually came back with permission for me to publish the scans.

When uploading a collection to Archive.org, one must fill out various metadata fields: title, description, creator, publisher, tags, and license. Most of that were fields I could have fleshed out on my own, but it was nonetheless helpful to have Claude’s (surprisingly good) suggestions to start with. But the license is really where I had no idea. Claude helped there, too:

In the end, I kicked off the upload of 13 volume-based PDFs for a total of ~20 GB of data and walked away. If memory serves, the upload itself took a few hours. But then Archive.org’s post-processing of the contents — reshaping, OCR, indexing, etc. — took a good 72 hours I believe, all of it done on their servers.

Behold, the fruits of my labor!

Final thoughts about using Claude

Without the assistance of AI, this digitization project would have consumed me for weeks. With Claude’s help, it took just a few mornings and evenings. That’s a tremendous value to me.

If I were to start all over, I’d probably be less rigid in explaining the layout of the files, letting Claude know up front that there wasn’t always regularity in the source data. Basically, I started things off by assuming too much about the source.

Everything Claude did involved Python scripts that it wrote to carry out the immediate task at hand. Most of those were one-offs it wrote temporarily just to execute, but some of them were more organized (and documented!) programs that it returned to over and over. I never had to modify, or even look at, these programs. My work was entirely confined to the Claude chat interface in VSCode, and to the master CSV files it came up with to keep up with the state of the project.

One fact of life with Claude is the need for compaction: every now and then its context of what’s currently in mind needs to be “compacted” by performing a brain dump, in the form of text that a human would write too, into an internal file containing its session history, after which time it clears its short-term memory, reads that brain dump from the file, and continues. It only takes a minute or so but it can be somewhat disruptive nonetheless. In my case it never posed a serious barrier to the project.

Finally, the cost. All of this I did on a $20/mo Pro plan. At one point I did hit the limit in the amount of “tokens” I’m allowed to consume in a given period. (I’m still not sure what the limits are, or how regularly they replenish; Anthropic doesn’t make this part easy to understand.) Claude told me I’d have to wait a few days to continue, unless I purchased extra tokens. Thankfully, because of the recent release of the Opus 4.6 model, Anthropic was offering a free $50 worth of extra tokens to try the model. After clicking a button to accept that offer, it gave me enough juice to finish the project.

All of the above AI assistance only cost me $20. The human labor of scanning the microfilm for the three reels cost about 14 times that amount. In the end, AI saved me weeks of my limited free time! And as a result we can all benefit from a new glimpse into some local labor history.

Let that be a lesson to my fellow travelers on the Left: this whole AI thing does indeed have value, and not just for some Big Tech shareholders.

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New York Gov. Kathy Hochul delivered her State of the State plan this week. One major plank in that plan is a proposal for at least 3.3 GW of new nuclear power on top of the 1 GW of public power-led nuclear development she’d already initiated. She calls it the “Nuclear Reliability Backbone.” As usual, New York’s staunchly antinuclear environmental left groups have something to say.

Bill McKibben’s Third Act and the Public Power NY coalition, led by the Democratic Socialists of America, are citing a new paper from a researcher at Penn's Center for Science, Sustainability, and the Media group to denounce Gov Hochul's plans.

The paper, “New York’s Nuclear Anti-Affordability Fiasco: Why the State’s Deeply Flawed Energy Plan Would Explode Electricity Rates” by Penn’s Joseph Romm, makes substantive mistakes and omissions. My rebuttals to some of his arguments, which are by no means complete, are below.

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Faulty claims on AP1000 costs

Romm presents unrealistic cost estimates for the AP1000 nuclear reactor, the only large nuclear plant design that's on the table as potentially being built in New York, and the only nuclear plant design that has been built from scratch in America this century.

First, he asserts that "[a]ny new NY reactors are likely to cost the same or more than Vogtle’s." That is completely bonkers. Construction of Vogtle's first of two AP1000 reactors started before the reactor design itself was finalized. Not only that, the Fukushimi Daiichi accident in Japan led to regulatory changes that also required design and project changes mid-construction. But now two such plants have been built at Vogtle. The design is finalized and approved. Any new build project in NY would not suffer these first-of-a-kind problems.

Second, he disputes an estimate of $12,100/kW capital cost for another AP1000, a figure used by state agency NYSERDA as a cost assumption in its report Zero by 40 Technoeconomic Assessment. That's based on the high end of a 2024 estimate from a detailed MIT study specific to the AP1000 and the experience of Vogtle, and it bakes in cost reductions from various learnings in the construction since that project. But Romm disputes such reductions: "there’s no reason to believe there will be any learning gains" since Vogtle.

To argue the lack of any such learning gains in the AP1000, Romm cites a 2024 meta-analysis across technologies, which states, as Romm quotes, "It is important to note, however, that learning rates are not a guarantee on their own. Several countries have experienced little to no learning as more nuclear was deployed (e.g., the US)." But the very next sentence in the cited report qualifies that: "To materialize, learning needs to occur with a standardized design (with little or no variation between units), a consistent regulatory environment, and a robust supply chain and workforce." In other words, learning rates do materialize in the context of a standardized design like AP1000. In fact, a coauthor of this cited report, Koroush Shirvan, is the sole author of that MIT study focused on AP1000.

To summarize, Romm selectively quotes studies out of context in order to argue that new AP1000s in New York would absolutely not experience any reduction in cost since the over-budget fiasco of Vogtle, but the very research he cites to make these claims argue the opposite.

Demonstrably false claims about global nuclear plans

Romm paints a picture of nuclear as globally understood to be unnecessary. "New reactors grew so costly," he writes, "that every country in the world other than China has all but stopped building them." This statement is laughably false.

According to the World Nuclear Association's current count, there are today 73 reactors under construction globally; China leads with 37 but there are also construction projects in East Asia, South Asia, the Middle East, Eastern Europe, and Northern Europe. Aside from that, there are 117 reactors that are planned (i.e. approvals and funding committed, with operations expected within 15 years), across roughly the same widespread geography, including also 2 in Canada.

Faulty claims about renewable alternatives

Why pursue expensive clean firm power when solar plus batteries suffices, Romm asks. He quotes global clean energy think tank Ember as arguing: "Solar is no longer just cheap daytime electricity, solar is now anytime dispatchable electricity." Great, who wants to put them in charge of the grid? The absurdity of this statement is hard to overstate, as it flies in the face of modeling by grid operators across the country, particularly NYISO, which has spent years arguing in very explicit terms that this is absolutely not enough. Instead, NYISO argues, there is increasing, imperative need for "dispatchable emissions-free resources" which, they state, does not include battery storage and intermittent renewables like solar and wind.

New York solar power's capacity factor currently fluctuates between 5% and 25% depending on the month, and likewise wind fluctuates between about 15% and 35%. Slapping 4- or even 8-hour batteries on that does not account for seasonal lulls -- at least not when you are planning a real energy system for a real society, and not just some green foundation-funded think tank's paper model. (Not to mention the very real battles over land use across New York State that such a profusion of wind and solar projects would exacerbate.)

To aid his argument, Romm cites another study showing how solar and batteries can help power data centers off-grid for relatively low cost. What he doesn't mention is that the study was specific to the US Southwest, where land is plentiful, where the sun shines more often year-round, and where peak load on the grid lines up nicely with solar output (unlike New York, where the grid is increasingly experiencing peak load in cold winter mornings, especially as more heating is electrified).

Misrepresenting geothermal energy in New York

Another alternative Romm highlights is enhanced geothermal systems (EGS), which is indeed an exciting and promising source of clean, firm power, like nuclear. But Romm misrepresents its costs and its applicability to New York. He writes: "A 2025 Nature article found that by 2027, 'in the USA, enhanced geothermal is expected to achieve plant capital costs (US$4,500/kW)' ... It would be firm and potentially even dispatchable power 3 times cheaper to build than the Vogtle reactors." That sounds promising.

Unfortunately, he misrepresents the research. The Nature article in question does not find that cost estimate; it comes from the Department of Energy's 2024 "Commercial Liftoff" report for EGS. That low cost is not nationwide; it's specific to the best, easiest sites to explore with EGS — which are entirely in the West and Southwest — and assumed for the year 2030, after the industry improves from learning (an industrial effect Romm explicitly denies to further AP1000s).

What would the costs be for New York? According to 2025 peer-reviewed research from Princeton, even under the lowest cost assumptions the capital cost is closer to $10,000/kW, with baseline closer to $15,000/kW. (There's also less potential capacity available.) That's because the geothermal temperatures needed for EGS are much deeper in New York than in California, where the estimated capital cost does indeed reflect the Commercial Liftoff report's figure. See their figures below showing capacity cost estimates by main electrical grid (New York lies in the Eastern Interconnection) and by region, where New York is highlighted in particular.

Romm cites this exact same Princeton study as stating "under baseline assumptions that EGS could plausibly contribute up to a fifth of total US electricity generation by 2050 and drastically reduce the cost of electricity decarbonization even in lower-quality resource areas east of the Mississippi—a much larger role for the technology than has been previously assumed." What the lofty promise omits, which is made explicit in the paper, is that the statement presumes after extensive learning in the EGS industry over the course of the next 25 years that we might have feasible technology to exploit the much deeper geothermal energy in places like Mississippi or New York. Imagine what 25 years of nuclear plant construction might do for its costs?

He also suggests geothermal energy behind the meter can satisfy data center demand growth (the source of all unaffordability, he argues). "A March study finds advanced geothermal could 'meet 100% of data center demand growth in 13 of the 15 largest markets' by early 2030s at low cost." Unfortunately here too he takes regional claims about the West, that absolutely do not apply to New York, and ... applies them to New York. That March study clarifies: "Among major growth markets, only Atlanta and New York City don't show meaningful promise for behind-the-meter geothermal." Oops.

Making a mountain out of a legalese molehill

Finally, Romm casts aspersions on the state's nuclear cost analysis by highlighting legal language in a contracted study. The state agency NYSERDA’s aforementioned 2025 Zero by 40 Technoeconomic Assessment was prepared by a third party (the Electric Power Research Institute) on behalf of NYSERDA. That report, he writes, "starts with an unprecedented disclaimer”:

'NYSERDA, the State of New York, and the contractor make no warranties or representations, expressed or implied, as to … the usefulness, completeness, or accuracy of any processes, methods, or other information contained, described, disclosed, or referred to in this report.

‘NYSERDA, the State of New York, and the contractor … will assume no liability for any loss, injury, or damage resulting from, or occurring in connection with, the use of information contained, described, disclosed, or referred to in this report.’

“Since no one associated with the report stands behind its accuracy or the consequences of using it,” Romm concludes, “policymakers and New Yorkers should not use it as a basis for policy.

“The analysis in this paper confirms that conclusion. The findings are not defensible. Thus, the same is true of the Plan.”

But the language is far from “unprecedented”: NYSERDA writes exactly this language in its template for all such reports, pictured below.

The same language was also used, for example, in a 2014 report NYSERDA commissioned from a contractor, "New York Offshore Wind Cost Reduction Study," which in turn was cited in state reports on its offshore wind program. (Notably, offshore wind, which is itself very expensive, is not mentioned anywhere in the paper. That's despite its final energy cost to New York consumers approaching the ballpark cost of another AP1000.)

Romm is flat-out wrong about this legal language and is highlighting it disingenuously to scaremonger about the feasibility of the nuclear cost analysis.

Final thoughts

That's my read of the new study touted by New York's environmental left to criticize the prospect of new nuclear in the state (even the project led by the public power authority!). There's plenty more one could criticize in it; it's basically a screed of selective citations to scientific-sounding work that could be picked apart like how I did above.

In short, yes, nuclear is expensive -- and so are all the alternatives -- but there are good reasons to believe the costs of another large AP1000 reactor will come down, especially if planned as part of a fleet. As for SMR projects, that's another question, and perhaps there's more kernels of truth in Romm's criticism on that front, which I did not respond to.

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Earlier this week, the New York Power Authority announced a major staffing update regarding its new nuclear project: they’ve hired Todd Josifovski, formerly project director for neighboring public power utility Ontario Power Generation’s major Darlington Nuclear Refurbishment, to be the executive in charge of the project. They’ve also got former Nuclear Regulatory Committee Chair Christopher Hansen as a consultant.

New York Governor Kathy Hochul in June directed the state’s public power authority to boldly go where the private sector has not gone before (in 50 years) and build a new nuclear plant in the state. NYPA’s new nuclear project embodies what I’ve called the governor’s “atomic abundance.” Her goal is to advance the decarbonization of the state’s electricity grid — recognizing that nuclear is exactly a “dispatchable emissions-free resource” that the state’s grid operator has spent years demanding be deployed — while also unlocking new manufacturing development Upstate, such as the power-hungry Micron semiconductor facility.

But not everyone is excited about NYPA’s new nuclear project. The state’s environmental groups have largely opposed it. To them, nuclear is a distraction from the primary task of deploying renewables in concert with the state’s landmark climate law the CLCPA, an initiative that combined the common disregard for execution by these groups and by former Governor Andrew Cuomo. (Nuclear will be a critical part of the law’s requirement of 100% zero-emission electricity by 2040, but the groups and Cuomo didn’t carve out any particular requirements for it like they did renewable technologies.)

Because of Hochul’s recent approval of a major new gas pipeline into the state — a very worthwhile bargain with Trump for offshore wind, Charles Komanoff argues — a coalition of environmental groups are now backing Hochul’s gubernatorial challenger. “Governor Hochul has been, on issue after issue, on the side of the real estate industry, Wall Street, and polluters,” argues Pete Sikora of New York Communities for Change to The American Prospect, “Antonio Delgado, on the other hand, is running as an economic populist, and he is embracing the kind of FDR-like vision of government as a force for good that can make people’s lives better.” A new Deadline Hochul campaign from that group and various others seeks to bring the star power of Bill McKibben and Mark Ruffalo to the challenge against Hochul.

I won’t argue that expanding public power utilities is the most important issue in politics, but the climate left should certainly consider its significance while they warn about energy affordability and talk up FDR. And on this Kathy Hochul is a clear standout among politicians across the United States today.

The Case for Hochul as Public Power Champion

In my Jacobin article this summer I’ve already argued that Hochul stands above all other governors today by directing public investment in and development of new nuclear power.

It’s not just about the nuclear project though. Gov. Hochul must be recognized as a champion of public power for the expansion of NYPA to “build public renewables,” as the environmental left campaign demanded.

Many of you will ask “isn’t Zohran Mamdani, or DSA in general, the champion of public power?” For the past few years I have consistently credited the environmental left coalition led by DSA for campaigning on the crucial idea of unlocking the state power authority to build public renewables. Absolutely they deserve a W for that.

But throw a stone and you’ll hit a journalist, academic, or other writer who doesn’t understand the details of that campaign’s legislation and just how much the Hochul Admin transformed it for the better. Most of them write as shorthand that the Build Public Renewables Act passed; precious few using the shorthand realize how significantly that failed legislation differed from what became law.

Here’s a list of the major improvements the Hochul Administration made to building public renewables as part of NYPA’s expanded authorities in the 2023-2024 budget law:

1. Throwing out the destructive and unrealistic requirement that NYPA only own and operate renewable resources. This would have required a privatization of the various fossil resources owned and managed by NYPA for the state’s grid; they’re not retiring by the impossible 2031 deadline the left sought. (These are not the peakers but the 24/7 gas plants most of the left doesn’t realize exists.)

2. Throwing out the requirement that NYC NGOs get a say in the electric reliability need of NYPA’s critical peaker plants. Truly, this was a destructive measure.

3. Throwing out the funding and other decision making power for climate NGOs.

4. Adding the authority to arbitrarily sell and market power from new renewables at wholesale. This in particular was the crucial blocker for NYPA being a renewables developer. Nothing ever stopped them from building and owning renewables before; they just couldn’t sell the power to bring in new revenues.

5. Scrapping the magical 50% retail price cut that NYPA would have been required to offer low and moderate income customers (NYPA has never sold retail power to residential customers anyway) in favor of a program of bill credits to distribute some revenues from renewables projects.

6. Simplifying multiple processes of reporting their progress and collecting community input into a single annual one. Though this hasn’t stopped the left from trying to legislate yet another such process in the past year.

Readers of Public Power Review should be familiar with all of the above already. As far as I know, I’m still the only person presenting this comparison for the general public.

NYPA has been set up by the Hochul Administration to carry out this endeavor — to build state capacity in renewables development from scratch — has done a tremendous job. It’s a largely untold story because very few journalists pay much attention to the details here and because the Hochul Administration and NYPA both have remained largely silent when it comes to taking public credit, leaving it to the left to “own” the execution at the same time they dismiss it entirely.

Back to Zohran Mamdani and DSA. I recently wrote for Heatmap the case for the New York City mayor-elect to endorse NYPA’s big public power expansion into nuclear. So far, he and the DSA advocates of revitalizing NYPA have been completely silent. The Public Power NY coalition that unites DSA and environmental groups, who championed the Build Public Renewables Act, hasn’t just been silent; they’ve actively opposed the nuclear project along with all the other environmental groups. Meanwhile they avoid any responsibility to shepherd NYPA’s foray into renewables, opting instead to consistently argue “make number go up! or else!”

There are countless laudable developments across public power utilities nationwide. If you work at a public power utility and are reading this, know that you have my respect (and my ear!) But none are being spearheaded so forcefully by an elected leader, integrated into a larger political vision. For all these reasons, Gov. Kathy Hochul is indeed the champion of public power today.

New York City votes for their next mayor today and, shockingly, all three candidates say they see a role for new nuclear power in the state, even Democratic candidate and democratic socialist Zohran Mamdani. In the words of another democratic socialist, one who never could escape the environmental left’s hostility to nuclear, this is “yuge!”

But even though he’s been a champion of a successful campaign to “build public renewables” — led by the Public Power NY coalition between his own organization, the Democratic Socialists of America, and various environmental groups — and even though Governor Kathy Hochul, who endorsed him in the race, wants to use the New York Power Authority to build public nuclear, the otherwise pro-abundance Mamdani has been totally mum.

That is, until a debate just a week and a half before the election.

If he becomes New York City’s mayor, can Mamdani escape the gravitational pull of intensely antinuclear groups in DSA’s environmental left coalition as he steward’s the city’s power needs? What could he even do to support nuclear power, and why?

And if he does escape the gravitational pull of antinuclear environmental groups, will the industrial labor unions who recruit, represent, and organize the builders and operators of the energy system finally see more of a reason to get behind him? “Nuclear energy, being the cleanest, zero-emission, and most efficient way to produce energy, should be a no-brainer,” one New York City utilities union leader tells me.

In my debut for Heatmap today — the best climate and energy outlet out there — I tell the story. Please go check it out here.

At the end of June, New York Gov. Kathy Hochul made an exciting announcement of new nuclear development in the state. Unlike other governors, she is directly appealing to state capacity — the New York Power Authority — to drive it. It's a big deal.

Back in July, Jacobin recently published my story on this news. I hope you read it, if you haven’t already. (I’ve been terribly slow to write up my published articles here.) Below I lay out some of the main ideas and then present some additional research and links on NYPA’s nuclear past.

My story on this massive nuclear news is framed in terms of Abundance by Ezra Klein & . After all, the governor made overt references to the book and its arguments in making the case. A Hochul spokesperson tells me the idea is to use NYPA as "special forces" for state capacity.

In the article I trace the history of New York’s energy priorities, from Gov. Nelson Rockefeller’s original solicitation of nuclear power in the mid 1960s, to the expansion of that nuclear development into the public sector with NYPA in the late ‘60s, to the turn away from nuclear and toward smaller, safer energy sources in 1975, to the electricity deregulation in the late ‘90s, to the past few decades of prioritizing renewables with competitive solicitation of independent power producers.

The key state agency for the current era of competitive renewables procurement has been the New York Energy Research and Development Authority, or NYSERDA. But Until 1975 it was the Atomic and Space Development Authority — an embodiment of the shift in state energy policy.

Another focus of the article concerns the usual labor unions vs. environmentalists pattern. Various labor unions have spoken in great detail about how much they support the Governor’s announcement.

Gesturing at the Niagara project behind him, [International President of the Utility Workers Union of America Jim Slevin] commended the NYPA pathway to new nuclear power “[for taking] the vision like they did decades ago. I applaud you for it, and I thank you for it, and labor stands behind you.”

Pat Guidice, the head of IBEW Local 1049 and of the New York State Utility Labor Council told me “the governor’s nuclear announcement is a big deal.” Moreover, he explained:

What’s exciting to me is that this isn’t NYPA stepping into an already crowded renewables space; it’s about taking the lead on something new and ambitious that doesn’t currently exist in New York. From a labor perspective, this feels like the right direction.

The state’s climate groups obviously aren’t on board with new nuclear. Last year they bragged about 153 of them saying no to new nuclear for New York. But what’s frustrating is even the Democratic Socialists of America-led coalition that helped to bring new energy into NYPA is opposed to the plan for new nuclear. Rather than stand with labor and realistic decarbonization, they have chosen the climate groups.

More on NYPA’s Nuclear Roots

In the article, as I did with my 2022 Jacobin feature on Indian Point, I also provide some juicy history of NYPA that’s not exactly easy to stumble upon otherwise. For instance, this chest-beating 1960 statement from then-Chairman Robert Moses (yes that Robert Moses) on the need for NYPA to go nuclear:

The control of atomic energy will, before long, be the greatest domestic policy question before the American people, because those who control fission and fusion will be the masters of population growth and location, industry, trade, commerce and life itself. This is too great a control to be exercised otherwise than on the theory that it is affected with a major public purpose not to be left exclusively to private profit enterprise.

That was quoted in the fascinating 1961 NYPA report titled simply “Atomic Power.” I highly recommend giving that one a read below.

Atomic Power, 1961

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Especially through today’s “abundance” lens, it’s clear that the forebears of liberalism were deeply concerned with how to produce key goods, how to attract industrial production for the sake of the economy, and the importance of just building. “We urge you [Gov. Rockfeller] therefore to reject the do-nothing recommendations” of a state commission that urged only private-sector development of nuclear (see below), the NYPA report declares, “and to support legislation which will permit the Power Authority to contribute to the development of nuclear power in New York.”

Gov. Rockefeller had kicked off interest in nuclear power in the state with an address on February 17th, 1959.

Gov Rockefeller Address Atomic Energy 1959

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Rockefeller set up the Office of Atomic Development, which eventually became the Atomic and Space Development Authority. That office put forward its first report, “An Atomic Development Plan for the State of New York,” in December 1959:

New York State Atomic Development Plan 1959

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The office’s plan the following year is the one Moses criticized in “Atomic Power”:

Atomic Development Plan 1960

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For some years after “Atomic Power,” NYPA and certain voices in the legislature argued publicly for the need for new public nuclear power. After Moses was Chairman James A. FitzPatrick, who picked up the mantle of championing public nuclear power.

1967 Newspaper Debate on Public vs Private Nuclear

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In 1968 the legislature passed, and the governor signed, Senate Bill 5746, “an act to amend the public authorities law, in relation to the powers of the power authority of the state of New York and of New York state atomic and space development authority.” The law itself is attached below.

1968 NYS Law NYPA Nuclear, Text

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Some interesting tidbits in the text of the law:

• As with Hochul’s contemporary plan, the law enabled NYPA “to supply low cost power and energy to high load factor, manufacturers which will build new facilities in the authority’s area of service.” The dependability of NYPA’s power supply, given fluctuating hydropower output, is a key reason given for the new capability.

• The law also authorized NYPA to develop a new pumped storage hydro plant, which unlocked the ability for them to start construction on the Blenheim-Gilboa plant a short time later.

• To operationalize the “yardstick” promise of public power, it urged NYPA to share operational data with private utilities in the New York Power Pool (the precursor to NYISO).

• The law also authorized the Atomic and Space Development Authority “to participate in the construction and operation of nuclear facilities for the purpose of desalination or distribution of water.” In other words, to build nuclear-powered oceanwater desalination plants — something Matt Huber and I have also written about.

After the legislature enabled NYPA to enter the nuclear space, it immediately go to work.

Within seven months, NYPA submitted the application to build its first plant, the James A. FitzPatrick Nuclear Power Plant, named for Moses’s successor, to the federal Atomic Energy Commission, and construction started in 1970 once that approval was secured. NYPA lowered the cost of the plant by taking over core components that were in contract from a private utility and by locating it next to that utility’s just-finished plant. Because of that association, Chairman James FitzPatrick had to assure the public during its construction that, once built, it would be owned and operated solely by NYPA. The plant came online in 1975, and it’s still running today, half a century later; it’s one of three in New York.

An interesting tidbit I learned in the research for the article is the involvement of investor-owned utility Niagara Mohawk in the development of the FitzPatrick plant. FitzPatrick isn’t just located near the two-unit Nine Mile Point; it was developed alongside the then-one-unit Nine Mile Point with direct assistance from then-owner Niagara Mohawk. Beyond the aforementioned acquisition of core components and shared facilities, Niagara Mohawk employees even operated the FitzPatrick plant for its first year of operations. Only after that first year did NYPA take over, in 1976.

One thing I was surprised not to find any evidence of was a retrospective look at the completed FitzPatrick plant by Robert Moses. Not a single quote from or interview with Moses that discussed his achievement of pushing NYPA into atomic power. Robert Caro’s meticulous critique of him, The Power Broker, came out in 1974 and won the Pulitzer in 1975, the year FitzPatrick first came online. Perhaps there just wasn’t public interest in any of positive achievements before Moses died in 1981.

In the months to come I’m sure there’ll be a lot more news on the NYPA-led nuclear project. Subscribe to Public Power Review to stay in touch with any updates.

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The Tennessee Valley Authority is deep into its 2025 Integrated Resource Plan process, after opening up a draft plan to public comments last Fall. Now those public comments are publicly available.

Every several years, TVA develops and publishes an integrated resource plan, or IRP, laying out the future of their energy resources. Potential scenarios they may find themselves in, political and economic, are evaluated against potential strategies that TVA may pursue.

Most utilities across the country perform some kind of IRP, by law or by regulatory order in their states. TVA is required by the Energy Policy Act of 1992 to perform “least-cost planning,” which they implement largely via the IRP. (Readers might recall I previously reported in The Nation that this requirement is part of the “Rubik’s cube” they must solve for developing new nuclear plants.) That statute says, for example, that “[b]efore the selection and addition of a major new energy resource on the [TVA] system, the [TVA] shall provide an opportunity for public review and comment […].”

In this post I’m sharing some takeaways from the public comments on TVA’s Draft 2025 IRP.

TVA’s charted strategies

The Draft IRP lays out five strategies for how they can navigate the various risks and costs they’ve planned for, each strategy prioritizing certain kinds of resources. They are:

• A, Baseline Utility Planning: what it says on the tin;

• B, Carbon-free Innovation Focus: playing up riskier, advanced technologies for decarbonization like nuclear, carbon capture, and long duration energy storage, in partnership with federal labs;

• C, Carbon-free Commercial Ready Focus: banking on existing commercial technologies, i.e., non-hydro renewables;

• D, Distributed and Demand-Side Focus: less centralized TVA power, more decentralized TVA customer power, and more intense demand response; and

• E, Resiliency Focus: smaller generating units all over the place, across various (not necessarily low-carbon) technologies, and more investment in the transmission system.

If you ask me, the way TVA can best serve its territory and the nation whose people it’s “built for” is to go whole-hog on Strategy B. With government help, TVA should be investing in the risky but necessary technologies for decarbonization, and seeing them through from lab work to operations. Of course not everyone agrees with that perspective. But what’s really striking in the public comments on the Draft IRP is that the Biden Administration did not agree either.

Biden’s EPA wants renewables, but Tennessee’s counterpart wants nuclear

The Biden Administration did a lot for nuclear power in America. But its efforts did not extend to TVA.1 Public comments from EPA—and, more damning, from the General Services Administration, in the next section—highlight just how much the Biden Administration’s stance on TVA is, effectively, renewables or bust.

The EPA is required by the National Environmental Policy Act (NEPA) to comment on all federal Draft Environmental Impact Statements. TVA submitted one alongside its Draft IRP, so the EPA decided to comment on the latter as well as the former. And what are their thoughts on the portfolio options outlined in the Draft IRP?

The EPA encourages the development of a portfolio mix that emphasizes demand-side reductions to reduce the need for power, increased development of renewable technologies, and expanded use of mitigation technologies to offset the impacts from extensive use of natural gas.

The 14-page comment, however, largely focuses on criticisms of how emissions and the social cost of carbon are modeled throughout the TVA system, and how environmental justice is concerned.

Amusingly, they ding TVA for “not evaluat[ing] the risks related to natural gas supply and the implications for grid reliability from a less diversified generation mix with a high share of natural gas generation” but of course suggest no such risks for a sharp increase in the integration of renewable energy. They also criticize some of TVA’s modeling around future policy scenarios, like around the EPA’s greenhouse gas rule finalized in 2024. They could not, it seems, foresee that a new administration would retract it.

Call me crazy but I’m not sure it should be within the EPA’s remit to dictate to TVA how it should model its energy system and which kinds of energy resources it should be prioritizing. Especially when national media treats EPA’s comments about TVA as some kind of golden truth about how to run a grid. Does anyone at EPA have to take on that critical responsibility?

At the state level, however, Tennessee’s Department of Environment and Conservation reminds TVA that it is state policy, under Governor Bill Lee, to promote nuclear energy development and asks that they review the state’s plans around that. “Additionally, TDEC supports TVA’s inclusion of Small Modular Reactors (SMRs) in the 2025 IRP,” they write. “SMRs represent a vital pathway for clean and reliable energy in Tennessee. TDEC recommends TVA prioritize partnerships and coalition-building to ensure the successful deployment of SMRs.”

Biden’s public energy buyer vs. big tech energy buyers on new nuclear at TVA

The federal government’s General Services Administration maintains federal buildings and, as such, procures the electricity that powers them.2 It’s a big energy buyer, not unlike a number of large corporations. As such, channeling the federal government’s buying power is a powerful tool of the state to promote certain industries. Christian Parenti calls it The Big Green Buy.

Under the Biden Administration, GSA signed memoranda of understanding (MOUs) with various utilities, like Xcel in Colorado, to provide 24/7 carbon-free power to its properties. One such utility was even TVA itself: the MOU between GSA and TVA would “provide DOE’s Oak Ridge National Laboratory and the Y-12 National Security Complex in Oak Ridge, Tennessee, and potentially other Federal facilities in TVA’s service territory, with 100% locally supplied carbon pollution-free electricity by 2030.”

Going beyond nonbinding agreements, GSA even signed, in the last days of the Biden Administration, a power purchase agreement with competitive merchant generator Constellation to purchase nuclear power over a period of ten years. The contract will help finance uprates (i.e., upgrades that increase the generating capacity) at their existing plants. It was hailed as the largest-ever federal procurement of nuclear energy.

Given these gestures toward using the power of the state to purchase 24/7 carbon-free power, even the MOU with TVA itself, one would find the GSA’s comments on TVA’s Draft IRP to be quite mystifying and counterproductive:

In these comments - which were coordinated with customer agencies including Department of Defense and Department of Energy - we recommend that the Board direct TVA to create an actionable implementation plan, with next steps and milestones, clearly pursuing Strategy C (Carbon-free Commercial Ready Focus), along with supplemental elements of Strategy D (Distributed Energy Resource Focus) where appropriate.

Recall that the Strategy C promotes existing commercial technologies, i.e., renewables, basically to the exclusion of new nuclear. They note that “Strategy B [Carbon-free innovation] actually achieves the most carbon reduction benefits of any strategy TVA analyzed over the planning period.” GSA nonetheless “believe[s] that, although environmental benefits are key to the public interest, so are other outcomes – like cost.” It’s hard to argue with that conclusion, but it’s also hard to watch the state simply give up on the risky endeavor with its one (indirectly) controlled nuclear-powered utility.

It’s worth noting that they also recognize the land use problem of renewables. “TVA has also correctly noted that there are potential increased risks associated with large-scale renewable build-outs and land use requirements.” The solution? TVA should just inform the people to accept it. “Further education on the benefits and costs, and stakeholder engagement to better understand local opposition may alleviate those challenges.” Perhaps GSA should read the other public comments, described below.

Aggregating the buying power of many entities nationwide into a single political unit isn’t unique to government. Large corporate consumers of electricity like Big Tech, McDonald's, and General Motors have the Clean Energy Buyers Association (CEBA). The IRP comment from CEBA argues much the same as that of the federal government, with one major difference:

CEBA recommends that TVA model a strategy that puts the same high promotion on utility-scale solar, wind, battery storage, and long-duration storage as Strategy C but also puts a high promotion on nuclear resources. Such a strategy would likely lead to deeper decarbonization than either Strategy B or Strategy C … [emphasis added]

The private sector lobbyist mirror of the federal government’s procurement agency sees more value in new nuclear than did the Biden Administration’s executive agencies, apparently.

Many urge new nuclear, few urge new large nuclear

Many, many comments include support for TVA’s existing nuclear fleet and support new nuclear generation in general. But as far as I can tell, only three specifically urge new large nuclear, in contrast to the more commonly advocated small modular reactors (SMRs).

For the past few years I’ve been a vocal advocate for TVA to develop an AP1000 nuclear project, like the two built in 2023 and 2024 at Plant Vogtle in Georgia, as a way to kickstart American nuclear industrial capacity. Along those lines, I submitted my own comment to TVA’s Draft IRP, a largely technical comment on their overinflated cost estimate for a new large reactor:

In the Draft IRP, TVA's estimate for overnight capital costs (OCC) of Advanced Pressurized Water Reactor (APWR) nuclear technology is far higher than more recent estimates from the Department of Energy and as a result skews TVA's modeled scenarios away from this technology. Table 3-3 of the Draft IRP gives an estimate of 12,928 $/kW for OCC of APWR. But the "Pathways to Commercial Liftoff: Advanced Nuclear" report compiled by the Department of Energy's Loan Programs Office, released days after the Draft IRP, estimates that a two-unit AP1000 project, the APWR technology recently deployed at Plant Vogtle in Georgia, would have an OCC of 8,300 $/kW. TVA's estimate of the cost of new large, conventional nuclear generation is therefore 56% higher than DOE's estimate. TVA should confer with the DOE on this APWR technology and reconcile the tremendous difference in overnight capital cost estimates before continuing to evaluate the scenarios in the Draft IRP.

As far as I can tell, I’m alone in pointing out this discrepancy. But two other comments talk up the need for TVA to pursue their own Vogtle project.

Mark Kirshe of Knoxville writes that “it seems to me that the 2025 IRP is short of strong nuclear expansion, [which] is important for Tennessee and our nation to grow, prosper and reduce carbon emissions associated with expansion of burning of fossil fueled generation.” Kirshe urges “development of licensed and proven Gigawatt class BWR and PWRs as shown by the already operational Vogtle units in Georgia.”

Michael McLean of Chicago, a familiar face from X, “strongly encourage[s] TVA to prioritize the AP1000 reactor technology within the 2025 Integrated Resource Plan. … With increasing electricity demand and the need for dispatchable, carbon-free resources, AP1000 reactors represent a dependable solution, enabling TVA to retire aging fossil fuel plants without compromising reliability or increasing operational costs.”

Plenty of people hate gas, hate nuclear, hate solar, hate batteries

Name a source of electric power and people have submitted comments urging no more at TVA, except perhaps hydropower.

One form letter copy-pasted from a few dozen residents of Millington, Tennessee, demands that TVA “[k]eep solar and battery storage facilities and wind power plants on previously zoned industrial sites!” Last year the permit for a private solar farm by European energy developer RWE was rejected by the county board of commissioners as part of a new moratorium on commercial solar. That rejection was reversed after the developer sued the county, and the two sides settled. It will sell power to a Meta data center in Tennessee, with the surplus being sold to TVA. It will occupy 600 acres of 1,500 total that RWE mostly leased from landowners.

Opposition to new gas plants runs through what seems to be around half of the comments. There’s no denying the expressed sentiment is far more against gas than in favor of it. But at least a couple commenters disagree. Compared to solar, one commenter writes, “[n]atural gas works better, and the US has a lot of it. You guys do what you need. I wouldn't have known about this if it wasn't for a protest. You guys are the experts. Keep TVA profitable and the power on. Have a good one!”

Another states “I’m in favor of a natural gas pipeline. The climate is always changing primarily as a natural process. Not a climate crisis. Thank you TVA for what you’ve done for our communities.” I’m struck by both of these comments’ expressed interest in TVA itself.

Another commenter speaking in favor of gas development as an affordable path forward claims a family connection to TVA’s tainted history with coal power. “My grandfather worked at the Johnsonville steam plant and I was sad to see it decommissioned and I was afraid that it was not going to be replaced and I was delighted to see that it was replaced by a new gas power plant which is cleaner and more efficient and cheaper to sustain.” Environmentalists are misrepresenting the costs and even the effects, this commenter argues. “I know [gas] has to be a lot cheaper than environmental groups portray like evergreen action is heavily advertising against TVA's use of natural gas power plants. … Environmentalist are never happy hence this case now as they're saying natural gas is as polluting as coal production, which I'm sure is absolutely untrue.”

My own perspective on the hotly debated issue of new gas plants at TVA can be found in this post from last year.

Who’s missing from the comments?

In my report on TVA for The Nation last year, I framed the politics of contemporary public power as a conflict between, on one side, private renewable energy developers and myriad environmental groups and, on the other, labor unions and advocates for the public power model in general.

The greens of course have a handful of different organizations commenting on the IRP, from the Southern Alliance for Clean Energy to the Sierra Club. Their, ahem, partners in the private renewables industry have commented too, like the trade group Southern Renewable Energy Association.

But on the other side of that conflict there is no organization weighing in on the IRP. As I’ve emphasized over the past year, there is no advocacy organization that promotes the public power model of TVA. There are still key organizations in this camp: labor unions. For example, I reported the story that both the building trades unions and the professional employees’ union lobbied Congress to get TVA recognized explicitly as eligible for IRA tax credits.

The unions, however, are completely absent in the Draft IRP public comments. I couldn’t even find a single comment from an individual claiming to be a member of one of TVA’s unions. One person I asked about this suggested that, well, the unions just never have commented on the IRPs in the past, and nobody’s prompted them to do so.

With so many organizations and business interests promoting private power development for the TVA system, perhaps it's time for labor unions to speak up?

In my last post I wrote about how New York City environmental groups expressed anger in 2023 that one of the NYPA peakers in the Bronx ran more frequently in the (then) two years since the Indian Point nuclear power plant closed. But they only obliquely pinned it on the closure—in the title of a chart not in any text.

Their public comment, and that chart, only concerned the Harlem River Yards peaker. What about the rest of the NYC peaker plants owned by NYPA? Turns out all but one of them have indeed run more often since the Indian Point closure, as the following chart shows:

Over the last decade, the two in the Bronx have increased their monthly output since the closure by almost three times, while the one in Queens is next at two-and-half times. Only the Joseph J. Seymour peaker in Brooklyn has slightly reduced its output, though that might be an artifact of recent data for it being unavailable.

As a caveat, one can’t easily argue causation here; there could be myriad factors involved in explaining why the peakers are being relied on more often since Indian Point’s second unit shut down in 2021.

Wait, aren’t the environmental groups the reason IP shut down in the first place? So if they’re angry that NYPA’s Harlem River Yards peaker ran more often in the wake of its closure, does that mean they are now realizing what a huge mistake it was? Is there an admission of guilt?

No! Of course not!

In a 2023 comment filed in opposition to the state renewing HRY’s air permit, a constellation of environmental groups and local politicians argued the HRY peaker was being run like a regular power plant, not a rarely used peaker in times of need, and that NYPA was therefore creating undue harm to the area residents.

They write in the comment: “The chart below shows a comprehensive picture of how HRY’s operations have increased significantly since 2018, and particularly in the last two years." Emphasis mine. Here’s that chart, from page 8, whose title indicates what was special in those last two years but which isn't mentioned in the text anywhere: “Peak Power Plants in the South Bronx are Operating Far More Frequently Since Closure of Indian Point Units 2 and 3, Exposing Area Residents to Even More Pollution.” Again, emphasis mine.

There’s no other mention of Indian Point or how the loss of the city’s nuclear power supply led to HRY -- and other, older, dirtier plants -- running more often.

Multiple groups on this letter supported Indian Point’s closure. As far as I know, none of them have admitted that the closure was a mistake. But one environmental group on this letter stands out as shameless hucksters: Riverkeeper, who led the charge against Indian Point for many years, thanks to chief prosecuting attorney Robert F. Kennedy Jr. See my 2022 Jacobin feature for more on that.

I’ll make an updated version of that chart soon. UPDATE: See this post for the analysis of all the NYPA peakers in the city.

The New York Power Authority has released its transition plan for its New York City-area peaker plants, as required by the law that sprang from Build Public Renewables campaign. See my previous writing on that. NYPA’s report says what any rational person would expect: we can't retire them because it would increase emissions and threaten grid reliability. It lays out a process for how each one will be evaluated for emissions and then reliability independently.

Just as obvious as that report, the environmental left coalition behind the campaign has their angry response where they say, with all their responsibility to reliable electricity, that NYPA is simply wrong and doesn't care enough.

The whole thing is a farce.

Installed in 2000 and 2001 as a state intervention in the economy, NYPA’s peaker plants are the newest, cleanest, most efficient ones in New York City and they're publicly owned and run for need not for profit. Peaker plants run not all the time but only on hours and days when the grid needs them, to meet “peak” demand; that also makes them critical for integrating intermittent renewables. (Environmental groups are already mad that the closure of Indian Point has led to the peakers running more often than they did before; see analyst Charles Komanoff’s writeup on the disaster of its closure five years after the fact.) Retiring NYPA’s peakers means increasing emissions in the city because older, dirtier, orders of magnitude less efficient plants, run for profit and much riskier to rely on, will run more often as a result.

As I wrote on the original law, we have the Hochul Admin to thank for rewriting DSA's BPRA legislation into a far more sensible final law, in particular adding the requirement that the peakers can't be shut down until they demonstrably do notincrease emissions. The environmental left are licking their lips for a media-friendly victory over the evil fossil fuels and don't show much interest in this part. In their response to NYPA’s report, they deny this would happen, but an earlier report NYPA produced in concert with the PEAK Coalition of environmental NGOs found the exact same result.

The socialists of the environmental left have attached themselves to that older NGO campaign to target NYPA's peakers for closure first, against all reason, and against any material analysis of the interests of capital vs the interests of the public, simply by the force of their pressure campaigning. It was always stupid and misguided.

Reading their response to the report further shows just how irresponsible they are, complaining that NYPA relies on too pessimistic scenario planning like "can we keep the lights on if CHPE is delayed" (ie the Champlain-Hudson Power Express, a major new transmission line) instead of more optimistic scenarios. Echoing NGO analysis since the peakers were first proposed in 2000, they also point to demand response as an unexplored solution.

Call me old-fashioned but I'd rather rely on public resources that are in all ways better and more efficient than for-profit ones, and not on the wishful thinking of virtual resources that exist only if the actions of many can be coordinated to reduce demand on the hottest hours of the year. Maybe NYPA can ask its customers in public housing, or the subway system, to turn off their air conditioners and to run fewer trains.

Or maybe it can do that anyway, and run the peakers less often, instead of retiring them entirely. That is, if it doesn’t just mean some plant from the 1960s runs instead, earning revenues to its owner.

In case you missed it, mine and Matt Huber's latest essay, “Won’t Somebody Please Think of the Grid?”, discusses this very issue. Give it a read!

Last Monday the transmission system of the Iberian Peninsula experienced a catastrophic failure that caused blackouts across Spain and parts of Portugal. Spanish grid operators had to perform a black start operation, rare for a system of this scale, to restore electrical service. Almost 24 hours later, the grid was back to normal.

Also last Monday, Damage published mine and Matt Huber’s new feature article on the essential importance of a reliable electrical grid! We even mention black start in the opening paragraph. A wild coincidence.

Our article, “Won’t Somebody Please Think of the Grid?”, serves as a follow-up to our article last year in Damage’s second issue, “The Utility of Utilities,” but now fits the new issue’s title of “Responsibility”:

Liberals and the Left tend to ignore the importance of a reliable electricity system, pushing visions of rooftop solar and 100% renewables out of line with the reality of our electrical grid. A responsible politics must aim to deliver what a reindustrializing society depends on: a stable grid.

A core idea we’re presenting is that the grid, composed of various territorial authorities with the monumental task of 24/7 balancing operations, represents a century-long socialization of the responsibility for reliable electricity service. Increasingly, though, progressives have criticized the necessary attention paid to electric reliability as conservative reaction, even outright climate change denial.

Against the socialization of electric reliability into utilities and grid operators, a growing interest in—and market for—“off-grid” home generators, rooftop solar panels, and battery storage represents a more recent privatization and individualization of that responsibility. The Right has always had its champions of rugged individualism, however divorced from reality that idea might be, but with rooftop solar the Left joins in the delusion. “From the beginning, I knew I wanted to cover my roof in solar panels,” we quote popular climate advocate Leah Stokes as saying. “That way, I could generate clean energy for my house and car.” Elsewhere, she puts a fine point on the importance of consumer choice in direct opposition to the institutions tasked with grid reliability: “if you decide to put solar on your roof, you begin to undermine [the electric utility’s] monopoly status.”

Like wind and solar power more generally, rooftop solar is a technology whose social benefits can be outweighed by the political-economic circumstances in which it is deployed. The dream of rooftop solar that is shared across the political spectrum rests on a particular form of compensation for its owners called net energy metering (NEM), the subject of intense political battles in California in recent years. We argue the case against NEM, a case that is rarely heard among progressives who ordinarily support public goods rather than private ones and who would ordinarily oppose subsidies for affluent homeowners at the expense of the working class.

In the article we also take aim at the absurdity of “100% renewables,” pinning the blame on prominent environmentalist and progressive advocate Bill McKibben, who argued that it should be a political demand on par with Medicare for All. McKibben has pollinated the pages of many liberal outlets over the past decade, in each one preaching the gospel of 100% renewables as envisioned by controversial, debunked Stanford scholar Mark Z. Jacobson. Though if you listen to McKibben and to Hollywood celebrities like Mark Ruffalo and Don Cheadle, who sit on the board of Jacobson’s star-studded nonprofit, you’d never know how what a punchline, not prophet, he’s actually become.

What advocates of an ever-increasing “percent renewables” misunderstand is what their beloved metric even means: a financial accounting scheme predicated not on the physical reality of what makes the grid function but on the organized exchange of so-called renewable energy certificates, or RECs. Even many intellectuals chiming in about decarbonization are misled by this financialization of electricity.

In New York, landmark legislation pushed by an environmental Left coalition has rekindled public power at the New York Power Authority. But while the state’s grid operator actually tasked with ensuring reliable electricity service warns of the impending electricity shortfalls in New York City, the environmental Left—most prominently the Democratic Socialists of America—plug their ears and demand the closure of NYPA’s fleet of gas-powered peaker plants. They’re not just the only city peaker plants that are operated for public need and not for profit, but also the cleanest ones by a wide margin. But that doesn’t stop the public power advocates on the left from targeting them.

Finally, at the Tennessee Valley Authority, where public power also serves as an entire grid operator (i.e. a balancing authority), plans for new gas-burning power plants—and a new pipeline extension to fuel them—elicit nothing but outrage from liberals and the environmental Left. Whether this new infrastructure is needed for reliable electricity in the face of massive coal plant closures and rising residential and industrial demand doesn’t matter to them; the opposition sees only an intentional desire to harm the planet.

Read the full article here: WON’T SOMEBODY PLEASE THINK OF THE GRID?

I hope you read the article in full on the Damage website. It’s free to read with an email signup. If you subscribe to the Damage print edition, you can read it on the beautiful page, alongside other great contributions on the theme of responsibility. Readers of mine can click this link for 15% off a Damage digital or U.S. print subscription.

Last week President Trump announced a major collaboration between tech and AI companies for what they called Project Stargate, an endeavor to create a “physical and virtual infrastructure to power the next generation of advancements in AI,” consisting of “the construction of colossal data centers.”

It’s unclear what role the public sector would play in this private-sector project, but it seems safe to say that it will be subsidized or otherwise coordinated by the government, to some degree, as part of a national priority. After all, it comes on the heels of a Trump executive order to fast-track power plants needed for AI data centers. “We need to double the energy we currently have in the United States,” Trump said at the order’s signing, “for AI to really be as big as we want to have it.”

The electric power demanded by the Stargate facility has been reported to be 5 GW, based on the plans made for the first such facility in Texas last year. That’s a lot of power! So much so that it’s hard to get a sense for how much that is in comparison to the power demands from other nationally prioritized industries. Heavy industrial production, after all, has long been a major consumer of electricity.

Electricity for nationally prioritized industries

On X I pointed to a study by the think tank CSIS which observed that the aggregate power demand of the 45 new electric vehicle battery manufacturing facilities announced since the Inflation Reduction Act likely came to around 5.2 GW. Establishing a domestic EV battery industry was absolutely a priority of the previous administration, and there we can see the power demand is roughly the same as a single Stargate facility.

Another frame of reference for the power needed by nationally prioritized industry can be found in the history of the Tennessee Valley Authority.

In my article last year for The Nation making the case for new nuclear power at TVA, I gave a history of the TVA power system. That history very profoundly involves the construction of generation capacity needed to provide power to federal labs that were enriching uranium for nuclear weapons during the Cold War. TVA’s gargantuan and storied coal fleet was developed in large part to serve that load.

One likely has strong feelings about the national priority of a nuclear arsenal buildup. I know I do. But the fact of the matter is that TVA was instrumentalized by the federal government to provide the huge amount of electric power needed for a national priority.

TVA’s power for uranium enrichment, in context

In light of the huge demand of Stargate, I wondered how that compared, quantitatively, to the power TVA served to the Atomic Energy Commission and the federal labs at Oak Ridge, TN, and Paducah, KY, for uranium enrichment. Let’s dive in to archival records and find out.

1957 was the peak year for TVA’s energy sales to these federal customers, by volume.1 According to the annual report for that year, TVA supplied the AEC and federal labs with about 3.6 GW of power:

The AEC has long-term contracts with TVA for a total of 3,125,000 kilowatts of power. Since electricity-using plants can be constructed much more rapidly than electric generating facilities to serve them, TVA also has been supplying interim power from various sources. The sources included some of the older plants and power obtained from other systems. TVA has also been supplying about 500,000 kilowatts of "extended load" at the AEC plants, over and above the long-term contract demands. More than half of AEC's load for production plants throughout the Nation was supplied by TVA.

How much was 3.6 GW compared to the whole TVA system? The report also mentions that the TVA generation system, consisting mostly of its own resources but in some cases third party resources, amounted to 9.9 GW. But a more appropriate number to compare it against would be the peak demand served by TVA that year: 9.2 GW.2 The uranium enrichment demand therefore constituted about 39% of peak system demand.

The energy sales to these federal customers in 1957 amounted to 31.7 TWh out of a total of 57 TWh — about 55%. For comparison, other industrial customers bought 8 TWh (~14%) and the local municipal and cooperative distributors bought 17 TWh (~29%) and resold that to about a million a half consumers.

A more positive, more hopeful legacy of TVA’s federal customers deserves mention while we’re at it. The federal gaseous diffusion plant in Paducah, KY, eventually became a private facility that, from 2001 to 2010, recycled former Soviet nuclear warheads into fuel for civilian nuclear power plants as part of the monumental Megatons to Megawatts project. When the facility closed in 2013 it was TVA’s largest industrial customer.

Let’s fast forward to today. What would the uranium enrichment demand look like at the scale of today’s TVA system?

Just last week, due to the frigid temperatures that gripped much of the nation, TVA hit a new peak load record of 35.3 GW. If we look at the same portion of peak load that was consumed by the 1957 uranium enrichment, it would be a bit under a staggering 14 GW. That’s a tremendous amount of power, almost three Stargates’ worth.

Quenching the thirst for power

In the 1950s, TVA met that federal demand through a huge expansion of coal plants, a fleet that made TVA the largest electricity producer in the nation. TVA’s voracious demand for coal was such a core part of operations that in 1975 they nearly purchased Peabody Coal, America’s former top coal producer, in order to secure their fuel needs during the 70s energy crisis. TVA’s coal fleet resulted in a legacy of air pollution, of strip mining, and of criticism that undermined TVA’s public power model for generations. In 2008 the half-century-old Kingston coal plant, built for the uranium enrichment, was the site of a disastrous and deadly accident. But the coal fleet also secured generations of affordable power for Valley residents and industries.

If TVA took on a Stargate-sized industrial demand today, would the generating capacity built to serve it be so environmentally ruinous as coal? Or even gas? What if it were a nation-leading fleet of carbon-free nuclear plants?

It remains a major frustration of mine that the Biden Administration didn’t similarly tap TVA to power hydrogen production, direct air capture of carbon, and other new clean industrial priorities — while at the same time spurring a new nuclear fleet. Instead, we saw tax credits and competitive bids for regional industrial hubs, one of which TVA even lost out to.

Will the Trump Administration look to TVA and new nuclear capacity to meet new industrial demand for national priorities? The exact production might be a questionable use of public resources, like Stargate and AI data centers, or a bellicose perversion of the original Atoms for Peace mission, like a nuclear arsenal buildup, but the resulting generating capacity could serve national electric demand in a carbon-free way for generations to come.

Monday, December 9th, is the last day that the New York Power Authority is accepting public comments on the draft of its inaugural NYPA Renewables Strategic Plan, in accordance with its recently expanded authority that has been covered extensively on Public Power Review.

Much to my surprise, NYPA has announced a portfolio of 3.5 GW of wind, solar, and battery projects. Most of these are the result of NYPA partnering with existing projects in the very long, very backlogged NYISO interconnection queue, priority projects that NYPA has identified using its decades-old engineering expertise. NYPA will be taking majority if not total ownership of each such project. Some, however, are “self developed” projects from NYPA.

Despite that substantive progress, the legislators and activists that provided the motive force for NYPA’s expanded authority, through their Build Public Renewables campaign, are channeling thousands of public comments into dissatisfaction, with an assist from Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez. To paraphrase their argument: “3.5 GW isn’t cool. You know what’s cool? 15 GW.” (To more accurately reflect the messaging, replace the adjective “cool” with the morally charged description “going to save the planet.”)

To my mind, this is a fantastical and pointless target, based on the activists’ analysis of a modeling study they commissioned. 3.5 GW is nothing to shake a stick at, especially for an institution that is starting from scratch in a mature field.

Instead, I think public power advocates ought to argue for a less quantitative, more qualitative strategic priority for NYPA: it should take over and finish the Clean Path NY transmission project.

Below is the public comment on the draft plan that I’ve sent NYPA as part of the process. Readers in New York State are encouraged to copy-paste the comment in its entirety and submit it via email to StrategicPlanComments@nypa.gov, after removing the sentence about myself and changing the signature, of course.

To Whom It May Concern,

Thank you for soliciting public comment on the NYPA Renewables Draft Strategic Plan. I am an independent writer and researcher on the electric power sector and on public power in particular. I would like to raise three points in this comment.

First, the portfolio of 3.5 GW of potential projects is a surprising achievement. Public servants at NYPA should be commended for the incredible progress they’ve made carrying out their new expanded authority to build renewables, especially given the fact they started from scratch entering this already-mature field. Moreover, the Draft Strategic Plan is filled with critical information on financial and legal concerns that would benefit public power authorities across the nation.

Second, to advance its Strategic Plan while also making a massive contribution to decarbonizing New York City’s power, NYPA should investigate taking over the Clean Path NY transmission project whose contract with the state was recently cancelled [1]. Since NYPA was already a minority partner in the project; since the constituent wind and solar projects already have permits and/or steel in the ground; since some of those projects may already be part of NYPA’s current portfolio; since NYPA has decades of expertise designing, building, and operating transmission lines; and since, critically, the viability of the project always depended on NYPA’s Blenheim-Gilboa pumped hydro storage facility, NYPA would be the natural entity to see it through as part of state energy needs.

To take over Clean Path NY, NYPA would surely need to directly enter into a Tier 4 REC contract with NYSERDA, rather than merely bidding on such a contract against other competitors in some prospective new auction process. Directly contracting with NYSERDA is exactly the key capability that NYPA identified in its September comments on the biennial review of the state’s Clean Energy Standard [2].

Notably, it would not be the first time NYPA stepped in to take over, complete, own, and operate a power project that was essential to the state’s energy system. In 1975 NYPA acquired from Con Edison, with assistance from the legislature, the partially built Unit 3 of the Indian Point nuclear power plant outside New York City and operated it until its sale in 2000 [3].

Third, as revealed in the state’s recent Future Energy Economy Summit [4], advanced nuclear will prove essential for the reliability and decarbonization of the state’s power system. Though the expanded authority does not include it, NYPA should seek to partner with other entities on advanced nuclear. Particular partners could include fellow public power authorities Ontario Power Generation and the Tennessee Valley Authority, the former being NYPA’s partner in the original hydropower project, on their small modular reactor collaboration [5].

Sincerely,
Fred Stafford
PublicPowerReview.org

[1] https://www.cleanpathny.com/sites/g/files/ujywhv376/files/2024-11/NYSERDA%20Notice%20of%20CPNY%20Mutual%20Termination.pdf
[2] https://documents.dps.ny.gov/public/Common/ViewDoc.aspx?DocRefId={00792092-0000-CF10-955F-CD20C1697071}
[3] https://jacobin.com/2022/06/how-liberals-created-then-destroyed-publicly-owned-nuclear-power
[4] https://www.nyserda.ny.gov/summit
[5] https://www.tva.com/newsroom/press-releases/tennessee-valley-authority-ontario-power-generation-and-synthos-green-energy-invest-in-development-of-ge-hitachi-small-modular-reactor-technology

The Clean Up TVA coalition held a rally in Nashville on Saturday to demand that the Tennessee Valley Authority stop its plans “to rush forward one of the largest gas buildouts of any utility in the nation,” according to the Sierra Club.

Clean Up TVA formed in 2022 in response to TVA’s announced plans to replace its massive Kingston coal plant with new gas plants, some fueled by new gas pipeline infrastructure to be developed by a private partner. The coalition appears to be led by the regional environmental nonprofit the Southern Alliance for Clean Energy, or SACE. Joining them are fellow regional environmental groups Appalachian Voices and Energy Alabama; national environmental groups like the Sierra Club, the Center for Biological Diversity, and the Sunrise Movement; social and racial justice groups like the Memphis NAACP and Interfaith Power and Light; and even local chapters of the Democratic Socialists of America.

That claim of TVA developing “one of the largest gas buildouts” in the country has been repeated by various groups. Sometimes they even state it’s “the largest,” without the qualifier. Media has at times repeated the claim. But how true is it?

Well, if you ignore the decades-long restructuring of the electricity grid into utilities, independent power producers, and balancing authorities as distinct entities; yeah, it is narrowly true. But for all practical purposes it’s demonstrably false.

In this post, I use data from the U.S. Energy Information Administration and from TVA to contextualize their planned new gas plants within the rest of the country’s power system.

In a recent pair of posts, I wrote about the importance of analyzing balancing authorities, the grid operators who keep electricity balanced and flowing in their section of the larger grid. In a follow-up I explained that the TVA isn’t just a utility that owns and operates individual power plants; it’s also a balancing authority. And as such, it actually operates one of the cleaner large grids in America.

As part of their decarbonization goals, TVA is retiring its remaining coal plants at the same time it replaces that capacity and builds new capacity to handle a huge increase in electrical demand for its region. In addition to solar, batteries, pumped hydro storage, and even new nuclear power — don’t forget to read my report in The Nation on that! — TVA is planning to build multiple new gas-fueled plants, on top of two new ones completed last year. Altogether this new gas capacity comes in at almost 7 GW of power. For the full list of these plants, check out the table here.

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When environmental groups claim TVA is developing one of the largest gas buildouts in the country, this is true of TVA as a utility and plant owner. The following table lists the top 10 owners of power plants ranked by the planned change in gas capacity from 2020 to 2035.1 TVA is #1. Note that they also plan to retire some existing gas capacity over this timeframe, so the total planned change in gas is just under 5 GW.

In the table, I’ve emphasized the owners that are not electric utilities but rather independent power producers: each one competitively develops and sells power over wholesale markets. Unlike the three utilities in the table (TVA, FPL, DTE), the IPPs all have less overall generation capacity. Some even have zero capacity today because they’re just LLCs for individual plants set up for particular equity financing arrangements.

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Eagle-eyed readers might be familiar with the Cricket Valley Energy Center LLC: it represents one of the three gas plants that was built in order to replace the power from the Indian Point nuclear plant outside New York City. If you haven’t read it before, check out my 2022 feature story on the rise and fall of Indian Point.

Each owner, though, falls within a particular balancing authority, also given in the table. TVA is the only plant owner on this list that is also a balancing authority. And what purpose does an owner’s gas plant serve? As I wrote in my previous post, it’s a resource managed by the balancing authority to keep the grid stable and balanced with respect to all the other resources and all the consumers. In short, TVA is developing gas plants because TVA as its own balancing authority needs them.

Comparing TVA instead to the other utilities and plant owners in the country is a key analytical misdirection by the environmental critics: of course TVA’s gas buildout looks outsized when most of the grid today, in the restructured markets, diffuses plant ownership into competing firms.

To really see the difference between the two organizations of ownership in the grid, I’ve prepared the following maps of today’s existing gas plants in the PJM, MISO, ERCOT, and TVA balancing authorities, each one colored by registered plant owner.2

The first three represent restructured areas of the grid with competitive wholesale markets, so their total gas capacity is decentralized into many different owners, or in this case, colors. But TVA mostly owns and operates its own gas plants, with a few third-party exceptions from whom TVA buys power.

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When we look, then, at the top balancing authorities by planned changes in gas capacity, we see a completely different result: TVA is no longer the worst offender.

The PJM and ERCOT balancing authorities have larger changes in gas. If one looks only at the new additions, PJM, ERCOT, and MISO all have larger buildouts of gas than does TVA. It’s simply not true that TVA has the largest, when you consider balancing authorities instead of individual owners.

To be fair, those three other balancing authorities are much larger than TVA; I’ve included in the table the total installed capacity in each to show the relative sizes. The gas additions in TVA are therefore a larger share of TVA’s total capacity. But all this talk about the role of gas in the grid obscures the still-existing role of coal, a far more pollutant fossil fuel. And wasn’t that one of the whole points of TVA’s gas buildout — to replace their remaining coal plants?

The following table shows the largest balancing authorities’ planned changes not just in gas capacity but also coal capacity, as a share of total capacity. The balancing authorities are ranked by the combined share of coal and gas capacity that is currently planned for 2035, according to EIA data. Here, TVA comes in at #6, after PJM and MISO but before ERCOT.

In other words, despite TVA’s gas buildout, which will help retire its coal plants, it will still have a lower share of fossil-fueled power than some competing balancing authorities are planning to have in 2035.

The Nation just published my latest article: “The Case for Public Nuclear Power.” It’s about the Tennessee Valley Authority’s new nuclear program and the desperate need to follow labor unions’ example and champion public funding for it. It’s a mixture of on-the-ground impressions, history, power system analysis, interviews with representatives from TVA, labor unions, and environmental groups, original reporting (like why the TVA is eligible for IRA tax incentives), and a political call to arms. And it’s the culmination of a few years of study and of building relationships within unions there. Please read and share the article!

Below are some photos I took during my visit to Watts Bar Nuclear beyond the two that The Nation used in the final article, followed by a recap of the thread on X that I posted summarizing and excerpting the article yesterday.

This summer I visited TVA's Watts Bar Nuclear plant. There I saw an unbelievably lush green landscape; deer frolicking on the premises; surprisingly clean industrial facilities; a shitload of pipes; and a key slogan out front: "Built for the People of the United States of America."

But this isn't a travel story; it's a reminder of the importance of this 90-year-old New Deal public good. TVA wants to drive forward new nuclear to decarbonize itself & serve national interest. But without government help, it will have to turn to the private sector. Here's labor’s perspective on that possibility:

“I’ll be honest with you,” said Brent Hall, the 10th District vice president of the International Brotherhood of Electrical Workers, about the latter option. “I think that will be the beginning of the end of public power.”

TVA announced their new nuclear program in 2022, aimed at building a new kind of small modular reactor (SMR), the GE-Hitachi BWRX-300, in collaboration with Ontario's public power utility and others.

I talked to TVA's chief nuclear officer about that project and more.

The benefits of these smaller reactors, Rausch explained, is that “they bring in a lot more diversity in the way our grid is operated.” Unlike a conventional “gigawatt-scale” reactor that needs transmission system expansions to accommodate it, the SMR could fit more easily within the TVA’s existing system. The SMR can also be operated more flexibly: Taking it offline for maintenance and refueling can be done more nimbly, and its power output can ramp up and down, for example, to balance against sunrise and sunset.

A few companies in the private sector are also developing SMRs, like Bill Gates's TerraPower. But Rausch, TVA's chief nuclear officer, makes a good case for TVA's unique capacity to take this on.

Asked what makes the TVA uniquely suited among American companies looking to develop new nuclear power, Rausch told me that it “bring[s] a wealth of best practices and lessons learned in megaprojects like nuclear plants,” for example, myriad technical matters around permitting, site design, and nuclear safety regulations. Crucially, it also has institutional memory of the mistakes of the past TVA nuclear program.

Put in those terms, it’s a wonder why tapping America’s homegrown nuclear operators and megaproject experts—the ones not beholden to shareholders concerned with stock prices and dividends—hasn’t been at the forefront of the resurgence of industrial policy.

But I learned something else straight from the horse's mouth: TVA building another AP1000 plant, just like the one recently (finally!) finished in Georgia, is absolutely on the table. They even already have four perfectly good sites from the stalled 1970s nuclear program!

One tremendous advantage the TVA has if it does decide to invest in a large reactor: four perfectly good sites, each one frozen in amber since the original nuclear program stalled out. Rausch highlighted the TVA’s 1,200-acre Bellefonte site in particular. It has the water supply, suitable topography, carefully considered seismic conditions, transmission connection, and even cooling towers already in place. “That piece of property becomes more and more valuable as we analyze the demand growth.”

For this article I did something that the left, or really anyone, ever does when it comes to reporting on the Tennessee Valley Authority: I talked to leaders of the labor unions that represent thousands of TVA employees. They are, without a doubt, TVA's political stewards.

When it comes to a potential large nuclear project, labor unions representing thousands of TVA employees are fully on board. “For us as the union, knowing the need for new demand and the rate at which it’s growing, we see a large nuclear plant as being a viable option for TVA today,” explained Curtis Sharpe, an IBEW international representative working with Hall and a longtime TVA electrical worker himself. They represent about 2,300 full-time TVA employees. “That doesn’t mean taking SMRs out of the picture.” SMRs, he said, “should be the future of nuclear.”

Why not both? That sentiment is echoed by the International Federation of Professional and Technical Engineers, which represents some 2,500 white-collar professionals at TVA. Arguing that it “makes sense that TVA would lead the way on SMRs,” the union’s international president Matt Biggs told me they “fully support TVA moving forward on SMRs and large nuclear alike.” After all, “nuclear is critical in our efforts to meet net zero emissions.”

Along those lines, something I'm reporting here that has never been public knowledge is that the *reason* TVA can now use clean energy tax credits in the Inflation Reduction Act, after decades of being ineligible for renewables incentives, is because of labor union lobbying.

Another key element of the unions’ stewardship is to lobby Congress—something that the TVA, as a federal entity, is prohibited from doing. The most significant legislative result in recent years is the TVA’s eligibility for clean energy tax credits in the Inflation Reduction Act, a monumental reversal of precedent. “We took it to the White House that TVA deserves those tax credits just like anybody else,” Hall explained. “They shouldn’t be exempted just because they’re part of the government.” Biggs confirmed that IFPTE, too, lobbied Congress for TVA’s eligibility.

Most people and politicians who'd otherwise be very interested in defending public goods like TVA instead get all of their understanding of the authority from well-funded environmental nonprofit groups. But I don't think they deserve sole voice anymore.

Labor’s advocacy for the TVA contrasts with the other major political constituency, environmental nonprofits who regularly train their crosshairs on the public power authority. The common narrative from the likes of Sierra Club is that the TVA is investing in gas plants instead of solar farms out of a fossil-fuel agenda, not as the satisfaction of any technical or economic constraints. … These environmental groups fail to acknowledge that the TVA is one of the cleanest grid operators in the country; it just arrives at that outcome primarily with nuclear, not solar, power. And with more nuclear power, it could rely less on natural gas, for example, to undergird the integration of more renewables.

Stephen Smith, the longtime executive director of the Southern Alliance for Clean Energy, told me his organization is “not currently supporting TVA building nuclear plants”—nor did it support Watts Bar Nuclear, which actively contributed to TVA’s decarbonization—and “are not in favor of willy-nilly raising the debt limit.” Senior attorney Amanda Garcia of the Southern Environmental Law Center told me they “do not oppose research into unproven technologies like TVA’s proposed small modular reactors” but would only support federal funding with requirements on curbing new gas investments. (The BWRX-300 is based on the proven technology of boiling water reactors that the TVA has operated for decades; it even uses the same fuel.) The Center for Biological Diversity declined to comment for this story.

The TVA absolutely needs supplementary funding to pursue new nuclear -- both "big" and "small." Will it be federal appropriations like in the old days? Or a Big Tech customer offering a private source of funds in a new kind of special arrangement? It's now up to us.

However the TVA manages to secure funding for a new nuclear plant, and no matter whether it’s a small modular reactor or a modern large nuclear plant, it would be a tremendous achievement for clean energy and for public power. But without political support for government funding of TVA’s nuclear program right now—the kind that labor unions demand and environmental lawyers ignore—that project will be the result of private interests muscling their way into public power.

If and when that plant is built, let’s make sure the entrance reads “Built for the People of the United States of America” without needing an addition: “and Google.”

Please read the article on The Nation’s website: “The Case for Public Nuclear Power.”

More often than not, when you hear about the Tennessee Valley Authority these days, it’s something about TVA giving the middle finger to the earth by building new gas plants, due to its “fossil fuel agenda,” while dragging its feet on renewables. The TVA, of course, is the federally-owned public power system set up during the New Deal and still kicking over 90 years later.

“The biggest public utility in the U.S. is also one of the dirtiest,” claims Evergreen Action. TVA gets an “F” from the Sierra Club and, according to the Center for Biological Diversity, it’s “obstructing the clean energy transition and serving as a poster child for dangerous, fossil fuel-burning utilities.”

Many of these assessments from Green groups and their aligned environmental reporters also include data that purports to quantify how much TVA is a fossil-fueled nightmare. Numbers surely don’t lie, right?

As it turns out, the latest such article that I’ve come across, from Nashville’s NPR outlet, makes exactly the error I described in my previous post. There, I pointed out the misleading nature of common rhetorical claims about a state’s electricity generation, and I argued instead for basing claims about carbon intensity of electricity on the physical power system. That in turn requires that we look not at state borders but at the balancing authorities of the grid, each doing the magical work of operating the grid for their own discrete portion of it.

I’ll return to that specific NPR error further down, but first let’s look at some general facts about TVA’s power.

TVA’s power is far from one of the dirtiest

Among all the extreme rhetoric about TVA from Green groups, it’s rare to see an analysis of the actual carbon intensity of TVA’s balancing area in comparison to other balancing areas of the grid. Let’s take a look:

The chart above shows the average carbon intensity of consumed electricity for the 10 largest balancing areas in the U.S., for roughly the past six years.1 As you can see, TVA is far from a dirty outlier. One could argue that the line for TVA is not trending downward enough, like ERCOT’s for example. But it’s simply absurd to argue that it’s one of the dirtiest.

Averaging across the whole six years, TVA comes in at #5, and it’s still #5 if you look only at the past year; in both cases it has lower carbon intensity than the large BAs it neighbors: MISO, PJM, and SOCO.

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For those of us concerned with decarbonization, reducing the carbon intensity of electricity consumption is the whole point, right? But that’s a tricky metric, one that depends on estimates of “emissions factors” for each generation type.2 For many Green groups, however, the point is “more renewables, less fossil fuels.” So let’s instead break down the generation mix inside each of these 10 largest BAs to see, on average, how much local generation (i.e. within the BA itself) is provided by each generator type:

Here, too, we can see that TVA has a lower share of fossil-fueled generation than all but CISO, more commonly referred to as CAISO, the California Independent System Operator. That’s despite having the least wind and solar generation of the 10 largest BAs.

TVA had cleaner power than neighbors in recent heatwaves

June and roughly the first half of July saw very high temperatures across Tennessee and the rest of the TVA territory. Higher temperatures means more air conditioning and more electricity demand — and perhaps calling more on gas-powered plants. So how did TVA’s carbon intensity compare to its neighboring balancing areas during that period? Once again, favorably, even compared to wind-heavy MISO.

Similarly, we can see that over the same period, TVA had a higher share of carbon-free generation than did MISO. It’s important to note that the share of wind and solar generation in MISO is far higher than that of TVA — in this period, but also in general. That’s because TVA’s carbon-free generation is predominantly nuclear and, to a lesser extent, hydropower.

Shining light on a dirty Green analytical trick

In that previous post of mine that highlighted the importance of analyzing the physical grid, not state data about generators, I concluded with the following:

When it comes to carbon intensity of electricity, a region’s generators do not tell the whole story of that region’s electricity as a consumed service. That’s because that service is the result of the work of a balancing authority using all the resources at its disposal, including interchange with its neighbors.

“Did you know Vermont’s electricity is the cleanest in the nation?” Hopefully now you’re better equipped to understand — and rebut — a misleading claim like that.

In the recent report I mentioned at the top, the one castigating TVA, journalist Caroline Eggers at Nashville’s local NPR affiliate purports to argue that South Dakota and Texas both have cleaner energy — energy that’s less dependent on fossil fuels — than the TVA:

South Dakota got 84% of its in-state electricity generation from renewables in 2022, while even fossil-heavy Texas generated 31% of its power from solar, wind and geothermal. TVA, which provides nearly all of Tennessee’s electricity, produced virtually zero non-hydro renewables last year and got 4% of its electricity needs from purchased solar and wind. 

Using the tools and datasets I detailed in the previous post, I will rebut this misleading comparison. (There are other misleading statements in the report, but I’m focusing only on the power system claims.)

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States don’t provide electricity; balancing authorities do

“South Dakota got 84% of its in-state electricity generation from renewables in 2022.” In other words, using EIA data, she shows that among generators located in SD, 84% of their total produced energy came from generators that were renewable.

But the electricity that “South Dakota got” did not come only from generators in the state’s borders. In fact, there’s a clear lopsidedness, as SD’s generators produce way more electricity than what is used in the state — 17.9 GWh vs. 10.9 GWh3 — meaning that a huge chunk of that renewable energy is exported out of state, in a sense.

As I’ve argued, we must look instead to the electrical balancing areas, the grid operators that do the work of balancing electrical resources and providing electricity service for their territory. The “extra” energy generated in South Dakota simply acts as a resource in the larger mix of some balancing authority.

South Dakota’s utilities, from which people and businesses purchase electricity in the retail market, straddle three different balancing authorities:

• Midcontinent Independent System Operator (MISO)

• Southwest Power Pool (SWPP)

• Western Area Power Administration - Rocky Mountain Region (WACM)

Each utility in SD sells electricity that is the product of one of these BAs. That means we can look at all the retail electricity sales by the state’s utilities and proportionally allocate them to the BAs those utilities are part of.

For example, using EIA Form 861, the latest data of which covers 2022, we see that the BA whose in-state utilities’ retail sales are the largest is SWPP, with 4,812,004 MWhs, which covers about 44% of all such sales in the state.

Next Eggers gives a similar claim about Texas: “… even fossil-heavy Texas generated 31% of its power from solar, wind and geothermal.”4 Let’s do the exact same breakdown for Texas as with South Dakota, resulting in the BAs:

• Electric Reliability Council of Texas (ERCO aka ERCOT)

• Southwest Power Pool (SWPP)

• Midcontinent Independent System Operator (MISO)

• El Paso Electric (EPE)

ERCOT covers 87% of the state’s retail electricity sales, with SWPP a distant second at 7%.

The chart above puts the two states together, showing us roughly how much of each state’s electricity usage — how much of the total retail electricity sales to residential, commercial, and industrial customers by the two states’ utilities — comes from a handful of BAs.

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TVA operates a cleaner grid than balancing authorities serving South Dakota and Texas

Now that we’ve seen how electricity consumed in South Dakota and in Texas actually comes from BAs, we can compare the carbon intensity — as a property of the electricity service provided by the physical power system — between those BAs and my favorite BA, the Tennessee Valley Authority’s. The following chart uses the EIA data described in my previous post to depict average carbon intensity of consumed electricity by BA:

Plain as day, one can see that TVA’s BA is cleaner than every BA serving South Dakota and Texas. These numbers reflect the average daily carbon intensity of electricity consumed in each BA, for the year 2023.

Eggers though didn’t go so far as to talk about carbon emissions, just local generation mixes. Once again, the key error she made — the focus of my previous post — was looking at the share of generation within states rather than within balancing areas serving those states. That meant the cited figures were divorced from the reality of how electricity service is provisioned and consumed.

But one still might be interested in the generation mixes of the BAs. Earlier we already saw that TVA had a lower mix of fossil-fueled generation than eight of the other nine largest BAs, which included ERCO, SWPP, and MISO. The remaining BAs powering South Dakota and Texas — WACM and EPE — also have a much higher mix of fossil-fueled generation than does TVA; here’s the chart.

Though it’s obviously correct to argue that other BAs have more wind and solar power, the picture Eggers paints — of TVA and its “fossil fuel agenda” — is utterly misleading.

Why all the Green interest in criticizing TVA for being “one of the dirtiest utilities in the U.S.”? Essentially, there are two core reasons. First, it’s because TVA has relatively low wind and solar power, the Greens’ preferred (and market friendly!) way to produce low-carbon power. Second, it’s because TVA deigns to build more gas-powered generators — which, in some cases, necessitates new gas pipeline extensions.

Why would TVA be building more gas power? “We’re in a climate crisis!” the groups tend to say. I’ll save a more detailed discussion about it for another time, but until then, one should note that the balancing areas that Greens argue in favor of, the ones with more wind and solar power, have a larger share of coal-, gas-, and oil-powered generation, as we saw above. Maybe adding more gas plants in TVA — especially when they displace retiring coal plants and come with big new investments in clean power — is not the villainous, unjustifiable act the Greens make it out to be?

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According to federal data, Vermont, wouldn’t you know, has the lowest CO2 emissions rate among states — over five times lower than the next one, Washington.

But what does that really mean? Is electricity in Vermont “five times cleaner” than that in Washington? Is provisioning it five times less dependent on fossil fuels? No.

In this post I try to explain why one should be careful with such claims. It’s not that they’re wrong; it’s that they’re narrower statements about discrete electricity generators but purport to be wider statements about electricity provision and consumption.

Instead, I argue the physical unit of “balancing areas” should be used instead of the political unit of states when comparing emissions rates between places. And I’ll show how government agencies offer the authoritative data for such analysis.

EPA’s authoritative but limited data

At the end of January every year the US Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) releases the latest version of its annual Emissions & Generation Resource Integrated Database dataset — or “eGRID” for short. As “the preeminent source of emissions data for the electric power sector,” in the agency’s words, the data set synthesizes power plant data from two governmental sources: generation data from the US Energy Information Administration (EIA), which collects that data from the power sector, and emissions data from the EPA itself. It lags real time by over a year, unfortunately — I’ve come to realize just how much work goes into making the dataset accurate — so last January only saw the release of the 2022 data.

In short, eGRID is the authoritative dataset for emissions of all individual generators on the grid in the United States.

Some might use eGRID to answer questions like “what was the highest sulfur dioxide-emitting power plant in New York State?” The Long Island Power Authority’s Northport plant, whose gas-powered generators came online in the 60s and 70s.

Or, given the generation data, it can be used to determine emissions rates: “what was New York City’s generator with the worst nitrous oxide emissions per kWh of generation?” The on-site, oil-fired emergency generators at the St. Mary’s Hospital for Children, according to estimated emissions based on fuel type. But among EPA’s measured emissions data on select facilities, using on-site pollution control equipment, it’s Con Edison’s old Hudson Avenue plant, which the utility retired in November 2022 to comply with the city’s “peaker rule.”

EPA aggregates its generator data to the level of states, and that’s where a claim like Vermont having the cleanest electricity in the nation comes from. But one shouldn’t derive too much meaning from that statement.

Sets of generators don’t tell us enough about electricity service

If one wants to compare generators between states, the state-level data is fine. Vermont’s generators produce five times less CO2 per unit of energy as compared to Washington’s generators. But if one wants to compare the electricity provisioned and consumed on the grid, that state-level data doesn’t cut the mustard. Let’s look at two concrete examples of the application of electricity in those two states.1

For Vermont, consider a maple creemee machine in Burlington, which uses electricity from the grid to freeze the delicious ice cream and to extrude it onto a crispy cone. For Washington, consider Microsoft’s Columbia Data Center, which uses electricity from the grid to run and cool a whole lot of computers. These are consumers, not generators, of electricity, and so nothing about them is covered by eGRID.

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The question at hand is how clean and dependent on fossil fuels they are. That’s a property of the electricity service that is provisioned for them. And because neither Vermont nor Washington is an island (unlike Hawaii!), electrons flow in and out of each state along the physical connections of the grid, regardless of state borders. That makes a statement about not depending on certain generation resources, like on fossil-fueled power, essentially impossible to prove. Maybe a coal plant across state lines really keeps the maple creemees flowing.

Where does the electrical resource dependency stop? How far away might a generator be before a consumer doesn’t at all depend on it? At the broadest possible level, “the grid” refers to an AC network collectively — and somewhat miraculously — maintained at a frequency of 60 Hz. We have three spanning the continental United States: the Eastern Interconnection, which covers Vermont, the Western Interconnection, which covers Washington, and the Texas Interconnection, which covers most of Texas. A butterfly flapping its wings might contribute to a typhoon across the globe, and a nuclear plant in Miami might contribute to the maple creemees across the Eastern Interconnection.

But there is also a finer granularity of analysis of the physical electricity system, one that more accurately captures the reliable provisioning of electricity within the grid — the balancing authority area.

Balancing authorities paint a clearer picture

According to NERC, the North American body that determines electric reliability standards, a balancing authority is “the responsible entity that integrates resource plans ahead of time, maintains demand and resource balance within a Balancing Authority Area” — each area “the collection of generation, transmission, and loads within the metered boundaries of the Balancing Authority” — “and supports interconnection frequency in real time.”

Basically, they’re the fundamental grid operators performing that miraculous work of keeping electricity stable at all times, each one controlling a discrete territory within the larger system, each one connected to others.

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In traditional areas of the power system, the utilities that send you monthly bills act as BAs, like in parts of Washington, but in restructured areas with liberalized power markets, larger entities called RTOs/ISOs do that work, like in Vermont. Generators and even some large consumers are centrally dispatched by the BA in order to keep electricity balanced and stable.2 In some places there are multiple BAs covering a state, like Washington, but in other places a state is entirely covered by a single BA that spans other states too, like Vermont.

Back to our two examples. The electricity serving maple creemees in Burlington is the result of balancing supply and demand within the entire BA — ISO New England, or ISO-NE for short — whose territory spans not just Vermont but Connecticut, Maine, Massachusetts, New Hampshire, and Rhode Island too. The electrons powering the machine can’t be traced to any particular generators, within Vermont or without; they are just as much the result of a Vermont solar farm as a Massachusetts gas plant. It’s ISO-NE’s job to keep those electrons stable at all times, and to ensure that grid resources are planned, installed, and retired in such a way that they can perform that job over the years.

In this way, balancing the grid rests on the interplay of all the resources. One can’t say the solar farm (or a nuclear plant for that matter) in the ISO-NE footprint doesn’t depend on the availability of a gas plant. On the contrary, ISO-NE might very well be relying on such a gas plant to balance the fluctuations of solar output and demand. It could even be relying on resources in a neighboring BA; we’ll look at such interchange with neighbors later.

The Columbia Data Center, on the other hand, is part of a much smaller BA, the Grant County Public Utility District, or Grant PUD for short. There, the region’s abundant water resources provide bountiful carbon-free hydroelectric power, and unlike wind or solar resources, the hydropower can be ramped up and down as needed for balancing.3 Because of its limited territory, Grant PUD has a far lighter responsibility, balancing far less supply and demand, than does ISO-NE. It’s also not operating its own auctions to transact for power and incentivize new resources.

But if ISO-NE is so large, might there be constraints on the grid that effectively isolate certain areas? For example, if there was only one small transmission line connecting utility systems in Vermont to those in other states within ISO-NE, technically the respective systems would be within the same BA but congestion on that line would turn Vermont into a de facto island. (In that case, the state-level analysis might appear more accurate after all.) Unfortunately, we simply don’t have standardized public data on the power system at a finer granularity than BAs,4 so we have to settle for BAs as the analytical sweet spot. Their responsibility for balancing makes that sweet spot sweeter.

Maple creemees vs. data centers, round two

We’ve seen that eGRID synthesizes EPA emissions data with EIA generation data, and that its aggregation at the state level doesn’t help us understand the “dirtiness” of electricity on the grid in a given state. Thankfully, eGRID also aggregates data at the BA level too.

What then are the relative CO2 emissions rates of the ISO-NE BA, which plans and balances resources encompassing the Vermont maple creemee machines, and the Grant PUD BA, which does the same for a much tinier footprint that contains the Washington data center? As shown in the table below, the emissions rates between the two are markedly different.

The BA-level numbers are so different from the naive state-level ones that they tell a completely different story: the maple creemees’ electricity isn’t five times cleaner than the data center’s; the data center’s electricity is, err, infinitely cleaner than the maple creemees’.

Another result of the BA analysis is that the provisioning of electricity within Vermont is actually substantially dirtier — that is, much more physically dependent on fossil fuel generation — than the Green Mountain State’s residents and politicians would have the rest of us believe.

As a caveat, however, Vermont and Massachusetts both have a considerable amount of behind-the-meter solar generation (i.e. rooftop solar) which is not accounted for in the eGRID dataset. If it were, CO2 rates for generation in both states and the whole ISO-NE would be a bit lower. That’s the flip side to generation resources not on the grid: our public data doesn’t know about it.

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What balancing area analysis reveals about the grid

Zooming out to the whole country, let’s take a look at all the BAs, or at least those of substantial size, ranked by CO2 emissions rate. The chart below, drawn from eGRID, shows the 20 BAs with at least 10 GW of installed capacity. To make it more interesting, I’ve also added columns showing the percentage of different kinds of generation in each BA.

Two interesting results from the chart above are worth highlighting.

1. BAs with lower emissions rates aren’t simply those with higher percentage of wind and solar generation. Of the top 10, only two have more than 10% wind and solar on the grid, while some BAs with substantially higher percentage of wind and solar generation also have substantially higher CO2 emissions rates. The deregulated market covering most of Texas, ERCOT, is a prime example of the latter.

2. BAs for vertically integrated monopoly utilities sometimes have lower emissions rates — sometimes far lower — than BAs for restructured markets that have more wind and solar generation. Look at Salt River Project, the two Duke territories, Florida Power & Light, and the Tennessee Valley Authority for example; all are cleaner than the BAs for the competitive markets of ERCOT, PJM, MISO, and SPP. Advocates of such competitive markets would have you believe this simply cannot be true.

Why is the CO2 emissions rate of a BA not exactly correlated with the percentage of wind and solar in it? Because the big carbon-free power sources of hydro and nuclear dominate in the cleaner BAs.

Coveting thy neighbor’s resources

Earlier I said neither Vermont nor Washington was an island, but the same is true for the corresponding BAs. On top of managing the resources within its area, each one also manages imports and exports of power with its neighboring BAs along the physical transmission lines between them. That’s what makes the BAs add up to a whole Interconnection — a grid.

So far I’ve argued that one should look at the generators inside a BA rather than merely those inside a state to understand the “dirtiness” of electricity. Going further, one should also look at the BA’s reliance on imports. A hypothetical BA that consists entirely of intermittent wind and solar generation would have no supply-side means of balancing that power to meet demand — but it might rely on “dispatchable” imports from a neighbor to balance.

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The EPA eGRID dataset doesn’t tell us anything about power interchange between BAs. Instead, the EIA provides public data on generation and interchange for all BAs in the country. There are two key ways that EIA’s BA data differs from eGRID.

1. EIA’s BA data is provided on an hourly basis, not annually, and it lags real-time by roughly a day or so, not more than a year like eGRID. That’s because…

2. EIA’s BA data does not include any generator-level data, whether generation or emissions. Instead, it only offers the total amount of generation and estimated CO2 emissions by fuel type (for wind, solar, gas, etc.), within each BA, along with demand and imports and exports with neighbors.

For example, consider the following chart showing ISO-NE’s interchanges over the first week of June this year. There’s a clear pattern of daytime and afternoon exports (positive values) to New York ISO, the BA serving New York State, followed by evening imports (negative values) from the Hydro-Quebec, the (public power) utility and BA serving Quebec.5

Putting it all together with flow tracing

With the addition of imports and exports of power, the BA-level analysis can move us even closer to an understanding of “dirtiness” of different areas of the grid. If ISO-NE had relatively clean generation internally but relied heavily on imports from a coal-heavy neighbor for balancing, for example, then for an understanding of electricity consumption in ISO-NE we should take into account the emissions rates of those imports.

That’s exactly what the “flow tracing” emissions accounting method accomplishes. It was first applied to the level of BAs in work published in a 2019 PNAS article by Stanford researcher Jacques de Chalendar and his colleagues. Since then it has been adopted by the popular Electricity Maps app and even the EIA itself. Electricity Maps has a nice blog post about the method, but the gist is that you process the entire networked system of BAs alongside the hourly generation and interchange data to come up with a CO2 emissions rate or “carbon intensity” of electricity consumption, not just generation, for each BA.6

de Chalendar’s website hosts visualizations of the emissions rates of various BAs. Below is a chart showing the weekly emissions rate of ISO-NE over the past several years, with the weekly average emissions rate of generation, of imports, and of overall consumption (“Demand”) shown in the respective lines.

The clear takeaway is that imports, like Quebecois hydropower, have always been far cleaner than local generation inside ISO-NE.

Returning to the original example, now equipped with BA-level consumption data that takes imports into account, we see slightly dirtier CO2 emissions rates for both maple creemees and the data center:

It’s not perfect, but it’s much closer to reality than state-level aggregation.

When it comes to carbon intensity of electricity, a region’s generators do not tell the whole story of that region’s electricity as a consumed service. That’s because that service is the result of the work of a balancing authority using all the resources at its disposal, including interchange with its neighbors.

“Did you know Vermont’s electricity is the cleanest in the nation?” Hopefully now you’re better equipped to understand — and rebut — a misleading claim like that.

My regular collaborator and I are the featured guests on yesterday’s episode of Odd Lots, the popular Bloomberg podcast that zooms in and zooms out on miscellaneous economic subjects. Hosts Joe Weisenthal and Tracy Alloway invited us on to talk about our recent Damage essay, “The Utility of Utilities,” which I posted about here last month. Our conversation ranged from the history of electric utilities and the sector’s restructuring; the key difference between offshore wind project execution and finance in New York vs. Virginia; why the power markets aren’t good for nuclear; the need for big public power; and the inspiring history and continuing importance of the Tennessee Valley Authority.

• Listen on Apple Podcasts

• Listen on Spotify

• Listen online or read a transcript

The episode from Wednesday, an interview with The Price is Wrong author Brett Christophers, serves as an excellent companion episode to our own. Read Matt’s review of the book in Jacobin from earlier this week, explicitly connecting the dots between Brett’s arguments about wind and solar’s unprofitability and our own arguments about utilities.

Greatest Hits

For those new to my writing on these subjects, besides the aforementioned essay check out the following:

In Defense of the TVA (Jacobin)

The Tennessee Valley Authority was one of the greatest achievements of FDR’s New Deal. But a new generation of liberals and leftists are turning against the dream of “big public power” in America.

Here, mine and Matt’s first collaboration, we lay out the broad strokes of our critique of progressive energy ideas in the NGO world — like the emphasis on decentralization and small-is-beautiful thinking, and the technical absurdity of “100% renewables” — and urge the left to return to the Big Public Power model of the TVA.

In this essay I believe we’re the first people on the political left to draw attention to how the renewable energy tax credits have been denied to public power organizations like TVA and the utilities of the whole state of Nebraska, leading to wind and solar plants in these territories being developed, for profit, by third parties.

Indeed only about 0.02 percent of TVA’s renewable energy capacity is owned by TVA itself. The largest solar farm in the TVA system — built for Facebook’s “100 percent renewable” claim for a new data center, despite 24-7 operations that depend on the whole TVA grid — generates tax credits that flow to owner-investor Wells Fargo. …

… Today a quarter of Nebraska’s electricity generation comes from merchant generators — all of it wind and solar.

We Need a Nuclear New Deal (The Breakthrough Institute)

And the Tennessee Valley Authority is the perfect utility to manage it.

The Breakthrough Institute’s journal editors asked me to write a socialist argument for nuclear as public power, and I was happy to oblige. I open with the 2016 birth of TVA’s long-dormant Watts Bar 2 nuclear plant, offering a key statistic that I think is quite telling and worthy of broader awareness:

[Since that birth] this one reactor in eastern Tennessee has generated almost as much carbon-free energy as all the wind turbines and solar panels in New England combined. In fact, TVA’s whole nuclear fleet of seven reactors … has generated more over that period than … California’s great wind and solar industry has brought to market, and with only a minuscule fraction of the land (and rooftop) footprint.

The essay stands as both a socialist argument for nuclear and a critique of the market failure that solidified its decline. Once again, especially the Inflation Reduction Act’s reversal of decades-old federal clean energy incentives denied to public power, I argue that we need to return to a New Deal model of public power — starting right there at the TVA.

This article was written in late 2022. More recently, HuffPost reporter Alex Kaufman covered the very real possibility of new conventional “large” nuclear plants at the TVA, using the AP1000 design that was just completed in Georgia.

How Liberals Created, Then Destroyed, Publicly Owned Nuclear Power (Jacobin)

The battle over New York’s Indian Point power plant was quietly a battle for the soul of American liberalism.

My print magazine debut, in Jacobin’s Infrastructure issue in 2022. Here I chart the public power birth and Green market death of New York City’s Indian Point nuclear power plant. Unlike other Indian Point retrospectives, I give a sweeping history of New York energy politics, covering the New York Power Authority, environmental legal battles of the past that bled into the present, the labor union perspective on progressive environmental opponents of the plant, and the surprising role of not just Robert F. Kennedy Jr. in the story — his direct involvement in killing the plant is common knowledge now — but also his father, as a champion of nuclear public power. I guarantee there’s something new you’ll learn in this story of the changing winds of liberal views on energy over the course of the plant’s lifetime.

That’s all for now. Please subscribe to this newsletter to keep up to date with my writing.

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On Friday the state of New York announced the cancellation of three offshore wind projects totaling about 4 GW. Essentially, upstream manufacturing issues necessitated changes to the projects that would increase their costs. The project developers, though, can’t simply raise the price for the offshore wind subsidies they’re receiving from the state; it defeats the competitive ethos behind the meticulously designed auctions to solicit project bids.

But last Monday, another offshore wind project — Coastal Virginia Offshore Wind, the largest one in the country — reached an important milestone. The American-made ship to deliver and install the hulking turbines set sail from the Texas port where it was freshly constructed. The turbines this ship was designed to install are not the result of competitive bids for state-designed subsidies in state-run auctions. Instead it’s a project of Virginia’s regulated monopoly utility Dominion Energy, in accordance with a legislated demand for such a project from the state.

It’s exactly this distinction in how we finance and build clean energy infrastructure that is the subject of mine and Matt Huber’s latest essay, “The Utility of Utilities,” for Damage magazine’s second issue. What if that old-fashioned monopoly utility model is actually better suited than newfangled markets for the clean energy growth we need?

Readers might be familiar with mine and Huber’s many leftwing arguments for public power, especially of the Big variety like the Tennessee Valley Authority. Our preference remains in the public power camp, preferably with major projects funded with progressive taxation rather than the regressive tax of rates. But the “public utility” model itself, even when investor-owned like Dominion, embodies the core institutional model we think is needed.

Please head over to Damage magazine’s website to read “The Utility of Utilities.”

Climate activists are no fans of electric utilities. But the market-based alternatives that they often prefer—for rolling out renewable technologies faster than utilities—will not deliver infrastructural change at the scale we need.

Editor’s note: This is the second article in a two-part series. For part 1, “Was This a Labor Victory?” click here.

In May, the New York State passed budget legislation that included an initiative to allow the New York State Power Authority (NYPA) to own and operate renewable energy projects across the state. This new law built upon previous legislation drawn up by Public Power New York (PPNY), a campaign of environmental groups and Democratic Socialists of America chapters across New York State under the name the “Build Public Renewables Act” (BPRA). (Disclosure: I campaigned in this coalition as co-chair of our local DSA chapter’s ecosocialist committee from 2019 to 2021.)

Much of the sympathetic reporting and analysis in progressive outlets simply assumed BPRA was a win for the climate and will necessarily lead to decarbonization. The logic goes that since the private sector is failing to advance decarbonization at the necessary speed and scale, the public sector, with its lack of profit motive, can do better. Another product of the hype surrounding the victory was that a campaign  for “public power,” i.e., public ownership of parts of the increasingly important electricity sector, was elevated into a model for a “Green New Deal,” a much broader, more aspirational political project, perhaps undermining the significance of the former.

Is the BPRA a climate victory? And does it serve as a model for a Green New Deal? Progressive and socialist accounts — as in In These Times, The New Republic, The Nation, and Jacobin — seem to unite in a resounding and uncritical affirmation. This essay pours a little cold water on both these widely broadcasted claims in the wake of the successful campaign to Build Public Renewables.

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Will BPRA Spur Rapid Decarbonization? 

While I think the win is significant and might lead to a significant increase of the role of public power in the generation of electricity, I also think too many are heralding BPRA as a victory or model for climate organizing before we can assess whether it succeeds at the ultimate goal: spurring rapid decarbonization. I’m very skeptical this legislation will actually lead to that (though I hope I’m wrong) for four big reasons. 

Public Up Against Private

This is not a public takeover of the energy production or ‘generation’ business, which is currently a market dominated by private capitalists, or ‘independent power producers’ buoyed by their own powerful lobbying organization, who all compete to sell electricity in NY’s deregulated wholesale market. It is these capitalists who were most vocal in opposing the legislation: “There’s no shortage of private companies” to develop renewable energy, and “a lot has to play out” before 2025 when BPRA takes effect, their President argued.

The new law only gives NYPA the ability to build renewable projects if it is determined through a public planning process — a process that only happens once every two years and was pushed for by the same independent power producer lobby, and accepted by the PPNY coalition — that the private sector is not moving fast enough to build renewable energy to reach the state’s decarbonization goals. (The Climate Leadership and Community Protection Act mandates that 70% of electricity generated in New York comes from renewable sources by 2030 and 100% of it from emissions-free sources by 2040.) You can bet that the private renewables sector will argue vociferously in this planning process that they have the energy transition covered. There are simply lots of veto-points that will not only prevent NYPA from leading this process, but will more likely ensure NYPA plays only a marginal role in the renewable energy market moving forward. In an interview with David Roberts, energy expert Jesse Jenkins argued private investors are very comfortable — using words like “vanilla” and “mature” — in the renewable energy sector: “People are used to these projects, there's a lot of them, they're smaller.” Even with the direct pay tax credit options in the Inflation Reduction Act, public power entities might be less convinced they can get a foothold in such a market.

Compounding New York state’s penchant for private renewable development is a recently announced Department of Energy Loan Program Office collaboration with the New York State Energy Research and Development Authority (NYSERDA). It is highly likely that only private developers will be able to take advantage of this program (the Tennessee Valley Authority, for example, has concluded that, as a public entity, it cannot take DOE loans).

Short-Term, Renewables-Only Focus

A recent report shows many on the inside of NYS’s electricity planning apparatus are increasingly convinced we cannot reach our decarbonization goals with renewables alone. Fred Stafford and I have already argued NYPA would be better served to direct its efforts toward areas in which it already has significant ownership, expertise, and capacity (like transmission), or in what the public sector excels at developing: less proven, riskier technologies like green hydrogen or small modular nuclear reactors. For example, two jewels of historic public power, the U.S.’s Tennessee Valley Authority and Canada’s Ontario Power Generation, are collaborating on developing small modular nuclear reactors.  As we’ve also argued in Catalyst, it’s worth noting that industrial/electricity unions also promote a much broader vision of decarbonization beyond just renewables and explicitly promote nuclear power (and this aligns with the state of the art models on what is required as well).

While the PPNY campaign claims the focus on renewables is because of the 70% by 2030 goal, this ignores the 100% emission-free 2040 goal — a goal that will require many other kinds of technologies, as the state’s grid operator warns. The fixation on renewable energy is a product of the coalition’s ties with environmental organizations like the Energy Democracy Alliance, Food and Water Action, and Alliance for a Green Economy (AGREE), all of which tend to promote unrealistic visions of 100% renewables. When I used to participate in statewide Zoom calls with the coalition, full time staffers from these organizations were huge players driving the organizational goals and strategy. 

Tangentially, it was many of these same organizations that waged campaigns to close the Indian Point nuclear power plant outside of NY city. That sad closure angered the unions in the sector, putting hundreds of their members out of work. And emissions have only gone up as a result, since its power was replaced with increased combustion of natural gas. When the campaign starts with a coalition including these anti-union greens, how are you going to build a labor-centered movement? 

Eroded State Capacity

Like most public sector entities under neoliberal austerity and privatization, NYPA stands today as a mostly forgotten institution whose state capacity has been eroded for decades. As an example, in 2013 NY State implemented the “Charge Program,” which directed NYPA to build 3,000 charging stations across the state (in 2018 that was revised to 10,000). As of last year they had only built around 500. The question is how it will revive its own state capacity to become a major player in the renewable energy market? It’s only because of the Inflation Reduction Act — allowing public power entities to take advantage of “direct pay” tax credits for the first time — that NYPA welcomed the possibility of investing in renewable energy. (The CEO Justin Driscoll famously opposed BPRA in a July 2022 hearing, right before the IRA Passed, because he felt NYPA could not compete with the tax credit-subsidized private sector.)

How does the PPNY campaign plan to change the institutional culture at NYPA itself, to proactively build? One of the ‘losses’ for the campaign in the negotiations was the scrapping of a proposal to restructure NYPA’s board and governance. And, after the coalition agitated to get Justin Driscoll’s nomination as CEO scrapped from the Senate, it appears Hochul-aligned forces have rammed him in anyway. It’s worth pointing out that the campaign tried to claim that unions opposed Driscoll, using allies from an UAW local, but the building trades actually vocally supported him in the face of this opposition.

But a success of the campaign was a mandate in the final law to build, in accordance with that years-long planning process. The question is what they will do with that mandate. 

An Arm of the Executive

Another thorny problem is that NYPA is an extension of executive power: the governor appoints the board. Thus, serious reform of NYPA would likely require a public power champion in office, and it’s very clear that champion is not Kathy Hochul, who just won another four-year term. My reading of the BPRA “win” is that Hochul put her version in the “budget” negotiations so she could have more control on the final version (rather than let it get debated in the legislative session after, where it nearly passed in 2022). See Fred Stafford’s overview of how her version actually improved on the original. It’s his view that Hochul forces aligned with experts in NYPA to write a version that made more sense from their standpoint with expertise in the power sector — and with the new context of the IRA in play. Now with Driscoll as the CEO, Hochul has an ally leading NYPA.

The July 2022 hearing also demonstrated that other entities in NY state like NYSERDA, NYISO, and the New York Public Services Commission, all seem confident the state’s goals can be mostly met with the private sector. This, in my view, is Hochul’s vision as well, and I don’t see her pushing for NYPA to vastly expand their role. And in NYSERDA’s recent 10-point action plan to expand the state’s renewable energy industry, NYPA’s potential role is limited merely to coughing up “just transition” funds for the state to use — a result of BPRA.

Given my hypothesis that BPRA will not lead to significant decarbonization (at least not led by NYPA), I really worry about how this will affect the armies of progressive activists and volunteers who committed themselves to this campaign, along with everyone whose doors they knocked, on the basis it would accomplish such ambitious goals. 

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Is This a Green New Deal? 

Once the law was passed, organizers from the Democratic Socialists of America (DSA) have heralded this as a model for a “Green New Deal” — and recommending other DSA chapters and states take up this model. There are a number of problems with this idea. 

No Green New Deal Without Federal Spending

In my view, the entire Green New Deal idea is based on the unique fiscal flexibility of the U.S. federal government’s spending capacities. State and local governments must abide by a de facto austerity and balanced budgets (interestingly, the PPNY campaign always made the case the legislation was revenue neutral since NYPA can raise its own capital via bonds). A real GND could never be possible at the state level. And, on cue, warnings from the Hochul appointed Budget Director on the need to acknowledge “our fiscal constraints” and looming “multi-year budget gaps” are increasingly shaping NYS politics today in 2023.

Another reason for bringing in the fiscal power of the Federal Government is the electricity system largely relies on a highly regressive “rate-base” financing model where needed investments in greening the grid will be paid by ratepayers’ consumption. Federal spending financed by progressive taxation could make needed public investments in the electricity sector without relying on this regressive rate base. 

Universal Material Gains vs. Means Testing

The key theory of change behind a GND was to create a broad, popular coalition for climate action by delivering material gains to the working class as a whole. Because BPRA was focused entirely on the generation side (how we produce electricity) and not the distribution side (who sells electricity), it was always hard for the campaign to argue credibly it would lead to lower rates for the whole working class (but they still argued this!). And, unfortunately, in the proposed legislation that barely failed in 2022 and the accepted version in 2023, there are “means tested” utility bill credits only for “low and moderate income” groups — not residential consumers across the board. Many socialists have argued why we should be fighting for universal benefits because means tested programs are frustrating and hard to access — and they also create divisions within the working class. Imagine if you were someone who fell just above the “low and moderate” income threshold and thus gain no price discounts from this legislation? It is a recipe for resentment politics.

The Road Ahead for Public Power

In closing, I want to be clear that this campaign won not because of the strategic brilliance of Green NGOs, but because of the volunteer organizing of masses of socialist and other progressive activists to create pressure for the legislation, and that previously got socialists elected to the legislature. To be sure, this impressive and important feat created a credible primary threat to all Democrats in New York State. 

But passing a law does not guarantee the advertised good outcomes. Public power advocates in New York remain at an impasse: despite the important new law, NYPA’s hands are still tied and the organized labor that powers them don’t seem on board.

We do actually need public investment and public power, or else we cannot expect private capital to align its profitability expectations with decarbonization at the scale and speed required. 

Currently in New York and elsewhere, the organized workers within the central sector of decarbonization, electricity, oppose public power for legitimate and structural reasons. What we can win without them, BPRA, is weak and compromised, but unfortunately, where those structural barriers exist, a worker-and-union-led path to public power and effective decarbonization seems closed for the time being.

This stalemate, for me anyway, reaffirms the necessity of a much broader political shift at the federal level, as in the original spirit of the Green New Deal. Such a federal shift would have the capacity to actually realize the scale of industrial investment needed — and desired by unions looking for realistic, long-lasting good work — and might achieve the kind of sweeping structural reforms of the legal landscape, like the PRO Act, that could make those unions more open to publicly owned utilities in general.

Even before such a transformation, public power advocates must stop basing their organizing and coalition building on Green NGOs and their narrow, infeasible technical visions of decarbonization, and start listening to what the actual skilled workers in this sector see as a viable path to good union jobs, reliable electricity, and decarbonization.

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In May, the New York State passed budget legislation that included an initiative to allow the New York State Power Authority (NYPA) to own and operate renewable energy projects across the state. This new law built upon previous legislation drawn up by a campaign of environmental groups and Democratic Socialists of America chapters across New York State under the name the “Build Public Renewables Act” (BPRA). (Disclosure: I campaigned in this coalition as co-chair of our local DSA chapter’s ecosocialist committee from 2019 to 2021.)

According to its proponents, BPRA is the culmination of a “Green New Deal” campaign that leverages the public sector to embark on a rapid buildout of renewable energy and will offer cheaper utility bills for the working class. Some accounts — from reporters, prominent socialist commentators (see, e.g., here and here), and campaign activists — additionally make the claim that the legislation was won with a labor union coalition. As an oft-repeated campaign message goes, the legislation, and now the law, is a clear win for the state’s electricity workers, containing “gold standard” labor language focused on a “just transition” for fossil-fuel-related jobs that need to be phased out in favor of cleaner technologies. This unambiguous win for these climate activists and their Democratic Socialists of America (DSA) caucus in the legislature has led prominent commentators to claim their method of organizing is a key model for how the left should orient toward climate politics generally (as opposed, rightly, to the prospect of blowing up pipelines). 

Amid all the hype, this essay (in two parts) is an attempt to critically assess these claims. This first part examines the labor question and argues the BPRA win is a product of DSA’s impressive electoral success and power in the New York legislature. That’s despite the campaign’s inability to gain traction with the highly organized workers in the electricity/utility system — a reality obscured by much of the hype surrounding the victory. Part 2 next week will assess similarly dubious campaign claims that BPRA is a climate victory, i.e., that it will use the public sector to spur rapid decarbonization, and more broadly that it represents a model for a “Green New Deal.”

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Correcting the record on labor’s involvement

One of mine and Fred Stafford’s original criticisms of the campaign is that it was a coalition driven by Green NGOs and lacked any organic linkages with the unions and workers in the electricity sector. To their credit, the Public Power NY (PPNY) campaign has been highly cognizant of this problem — and I know there was real effort among the organizers to reach out and build linkages with the relevant unions. That effort was likely hampered, however, by the fact the BPRA legislation was already written and introduced before much if any contact was made. Companion legislation drafted by the coalition, the NY Utility Democracy Act, which would take over the state’s distribution utilities entirely (ConEd, National Grid, etc.), likewise had zero input or buy-in from the highly unionized employees of those utilities.

This real shortcoming of the campaign has led to a kind of “revisionist history” where a selective use of facts is used to claim they did in fact win over “labor” to the legislation, and the claim continues to reverberate throughout left media. For example, in a retrospective interview with key campaign leaders in the Democratic Socialists of America journal Socialist Forum, they claim Senate leaders were key in “bringing the labor unions around to the bill.” The American Prospect published a purported explainer, “How New York’s Democratic Socialists Brought Unions Around to Public Renewables” — an article whose only sources are public power campaign activists themselves, not any workers.

The evidence to corroborate industrial union support is murky at best. So I’m going to try to lay out what I consider the more complicated story of labor as it unfolded chronologically from around May 2022 to the passing of the legislation. 

May 2022: Electoral road to the AFL-CIO’s ear

In the final days of the 2022 legislative session — the second of three sessions in which BPRA was introduced — the only public union support the coalition was able to muster from unions was from the President of the New York State United Teachers (NYSUT) and the President of a local of the Professional Staff Congress of CUNY, the American Federation of Teachers. These are hardly the relevant unions at stake in the legislation (see here where the two union statements are outnumbered by eight from what could be seen as Green NGOs).

However, the coalition did make significant inroads with the highest levels of the union bureaucracy very late in the legislative session in 2022. According to the organizers, State Senator Michael Gianaris was so concerned he would be primaried by DSA forces that he personally pushed unions to connect with the coalition on BPRA. This led to negotiations in late May of 2022 that pushed the AFL-CIO from opposition to “neutrality” — and neutrality means the coalition did not win over labor to their side. The AFL-CIO also added strong labor language to the bill, but one might ask why it took over two years to include strong labor language?

The organizers say Gianaris’s pressure also led to a meeting with IBEW Local 1049 on Long Island, whose President Pat Guidice is President of the Utility Labor Council of NY, an entity that historically opposed the public power campaign. (In a 2020 published letter to the editor in the New York Daily News, the previous President of the Utility Labor Council flatly said, “we disagree with the suggestion that our employers move from the private to the public sector…To date, the government and climate activists have demonstrated that creating good paying union jobs is a low priority.”) The organizers claim they have a personal relationship with Guidice now. This is all impressive, if the claim is taken as fact, but (a) it is clearly a product of NYC-DSA’s electoral power and pressure on elected Democrats and (b) it is predicated on closed-door brokering of relationships for which there is zero public evidence of support. That’s not a great basis for labor’s involvement in political campaigns.

The campaign had enough power to gain the attention of these unions, but in no way did the campaign win over or integrate these unions into a labor-centered public power campaign. The new union language was part of a last push to pass BPRA in the legislative session in 2022. It did pass the Senate, but Speaker Carl Heastie refused to bring it to vote in the Assembly. Ever since this moment, the PPNY campaign has consistently claimed unions wrote “gold standard” labor language that workers support. 

July 2022: A public hearing for the labor perspective at last

The campaign’s success in generating public pressure led Heastie to schedule a public hearing on the legislation in late July 2022. Again it is a credit to the campaign for creating tremendous pressure around the legislation that led to this important political event in the first place. The hearing featured testimony from key union leaders in the utility/electricity sector in which they opposed the legislation. This opposition took place after the supposed breakthroughs with labor in May 2022. During the hearing, Guidice did praise the labor language as “the best I’ve ever seen.” The PPNY coalition took this statement as evidence of support (and repeated it constantly in its promotion for the legislation), but they failed to acknowledge that Guidice opposed the legislation in his testimony. See the hearing transcript p. 289, where he clearly says, “we're opposing the concept of having State authorities, particularly the New York Power Authority, having a critical role in achieving the State's renewable energy generation and transmission goals.”

In the Socialist Forum interview campaign representatives say, “At first, people like [Guidice] were not into BPRA. It took a while for them to come around, but we were able to convince them once the just transition language in the bill was going to stay in the bill.” The interview ends with the proposition that Guidice will now aim to win over the rest of the utility unions to BPRA. If Guidice turns into a vocal advocate that would surely be impressive, but I’ve seen no evidence of his support yet.

The other key testimony from the hearing comes from the President of Utility Workers Union of America Local 1-2 James Shillitto — a union whose members include over 7,000 utility workers in the NYC/Westchester area, including some who work for NYPA. In his testimony, Shillitto articulates the main reason these workers oppose BPRA: it has been “extremely difficult for the workforce to negotiate a contract with this government run authority [NYPA], often working years without a contract.” This is because of New York State labor law for public sector workers: “The workers that work for the New York Power Authority are covered under the Taylor Act… And that's what gives cause to our issues with negotiating contracts. There's no incentive for NYPA management to come to an agreement.”

Unless I’ve missed it, the PPNY coalition has never significantly addressed how this concern from electricity workers will be rectified if NYPA were to really massively expand their role in building renewable energy projects across the state. Yes, the legislation does have good labor provisions, but it does not change public sector labor law, the Taylor Act, nor NYPA’s egregious history as a bad bargainer with electricity workers.

The labor law issue is not unique to New York, it must be said, and has created rifts with unions across the country, including currently in Maine.

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February 2023: The governor and NYPA offer their version

Finally, in February, Gov. Kathy Hochul released her version of the legislation, dismissed as “BPRA Lite” by the campaign but praised in Public Power Review by Fred Stafford. Hochul’s exclusion of the strong labor language extracted from the AFL-CIO in May 2022 — the collective bargaining requirement — allowed the coalition to (admirably) organize around making sure the language was put back in.

In the same month, the reporter Lee Harris from The American Prospect ran the first story I’m aware of that bothered to actually speak to the utility unions/workers most affected by the legislation (not to be confused with the aforementioned dubious article in the Prospect). The report reaffirmed that these unions do not support the legislation. It also demonstrated the tensions between the campaign and utility workers. “If utility workers have misgivings about the climate activists’ proposal, the frustration has run both ways,” Harris writes. “They’ll say one thing, and then they’ll tell us other things,” campaign organizer Lizzy Oh told her.

Quoting Shillitto of UWUA Local 1-2, Harris also reported that the union was pushing NYPA, unsuccessfully, to include “just transition” language in their contract negotiations for workers at a fossil-fueled NYPA power plant in Astoria, Queens. It’s quite amazing this is literally at the heart of NYC-DSA territory, yet no one in the coalition has ever mentioned it or even seemed aware of it. Although the BPRA legislation itself has “just transition” language in it, it’s not clear how this will inform actual union contracts that NYPA signs with workers.

The campaign also aimed to include a provision that changed the composition of NYPA’s Board of Trustees, which theoretically could have ameliorated their poor behavior vis-à-vis unions. Harris reported that utility workers supported the idea of labor representatives on the Board. But this provision was scrapped in the final negotiations.1

May 2023: The campaign wins labor language but not labor

The PPNY campaign negotiated the inclusion of another labor protection in the final bill: the explicit assurance that NYPA renewables projects would require project-labor agreements on top of the same law that applies to private-sector projects. (That preexisting law for private projects was the result of an earlier victory of the Climate Jobs NY coalition, which indeed included the public support of labor unions in the industry, but it requires only prevailing wages.) This additional labor protection, as one of the positive reports alleges, “allayed” union concerns about NYPA. But still no industrial unions praised the incorporation of this labor provision.

The final passing of the NYS Budget legislation led to an outpouring of celebratory reporting and boosterism from left outlets and climate writers to designate the law as a massive victory for socialist climate politics. And amid their lofty rhetoric of winning with a labor coalition, none of them clarify that this labor support came only from unions of teachers, nurses, clerical, and service workers — not any electrical or utility workers.

A final note: as Liza Featherstone’s positive portrayal of the organizing campaign suggests, much of the “labor” support for BPRA is assumed into the future. “BPRA creates thousands of well-paid, green, union jobs...” As we’ve argued previously, this claim was always based on dubious NGO modeling: “This group ran a software model that claims the legislation would create ‘between 28,410 and 51,133 good jobs,’ a wide range that includes new indirect jobs upstream of projects, direct jobs on the projects themselves, and induced jobs created by consumption.”

Will they come?

If BPRA won over unions and represented a victory for labor with “gold standard” labor language, it is strange that none of the key industrial unions — the International Brotherhood of Electrical Workers, the Utility Workers Union of America, or the building trades — have publicly voiced support for the legislation. Nor has the AFL-CIO of NY, previously moved to “neutrality” in May of 2022, shifted to public support for the legislation. The positive labor language might represent a classic case of a leftwing “class focused” appeal to industrial electricity workers, but not one that is “class rooted” in the unions and among the workers themselves. 

In Part 2 next week, I’ll assess some different pervasive claims around the successful campaign to Build Public Renewables: whether it can truly be called a climate victory and whether it serves as a model for a Green New Deal. Stay tuned and subscribe to Public Power Review.

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