BUFFALO, N.Y. — If you live in New York, you’re probably familiar with your utility bill creeping up, with more rate hikes on the way.
This comes as electric equipment, some of which is half-a century-old, gets increasing pressure put on in.
The electric grid doesn’t operate in a bubble, especially evident in times where extreme temperatures increase demand. It’s not just electric, but natural gas too, which is needed to produce the electricity.
With aging equipment, a higher price of natural gas, and fewer supply sources, that all adds up.
The New York Independent System Operator released a white paper looking into these factors. The annual release started after increasing prices brought on by the war in Ukraine.
Afterwards, there was a big drop, but now prices are back up again.
Wholesale prices nearly doubled from 2024 to 2025 — about a third of your utility bill comes from that supply.
“We were experiencing mild winters with a great amount of additional megawatts in the system. That helped drive the price down [and] helped increase reliability. But we’ve lost a lot of generation in the last five years when we retired Indian Point. We’ve retired a number of fossil fuel plants mainly in the New York City area,” explained Kevin Lanahan, senior VP of external affairs and corporate communications at the New York Independent System Operator. “So now we’re having more typical winters, more frequent extreme weather, episodes that we’re experiencing now, and so people are seeing that effect in their bill.”
There’s not much to be done about natural gas prices, which are impacted by national and global issues, but there is a lot being done with renewables, potentially even nuclear. But new nuclear in New York is years away.
According to the white paper, since 2019 about 2,300 megawatts were added and 4,300 megawatts were taken away.
“We really do need an all of the above resource investment strategy going forward,” said Lanahan. “We need as much of the renewables as we can, but we also need to accommodate, when they can’t run, what the consumer wants and needs, especially in weeks like this when it gets so cold that health and safety becomes an issue.”
NYISO says we need to look at things like natural gas turbine technology and other strategic investments to both keep up reliability and lower prices.