Hochul Pitches 5 Gigawatts of New Nuclear Power for New York, Still Won't Reopen Indian Point

Kathy Hochul inherited a New York energy landscape already reshaped by the closure of Indian Point, the state's largest source of carbon-free electricity, which shut down its final reactor in April 2021 under a 2017 agreement struck by her predecessor, Andrew Cuomo, months before Hochul took office. Five years later, she's asking the state to build 5 gigawatts of brand-new nuclear power from scratch.

According to Canary Media, Hochul is calling for at least 1 gigawatt of new nuclear capacity to be developed by the state-owned New York Power Authority, on top of a separate 4-gigawatt initiative. "Expanding our nuclear energy capacity will play a key role in my all-of-the-above energy strategy to ensure we have enough reliable power to keep the lights on and costs down for New Yorkers," Hochul said, according to Canary Media.

No technology has been picked yet. ZeroHedge reports the likely candidates are Westinghouse's large AP1000 reactor and GE Vernova Hitachi's smaller 300-megawatt BWRX-300.

A Reversal Years in the Making

Canary Media frames the shift plainly: this spring Hochul diluted New York's decarbonization law, one of the most ambitious in the country when it passed in 2019. The state has struggled to deliver large-scale renewable projects, and the Trump administration's moves against offshore wind have added pressure, according to ZeroHedge.

Nuclear gives Hochul something renewables haven't: a politically convenient trifecta of round-the-clock power, construction jobs, and a shot at lower bills, all wrapped in a re-election year message. Eight upstate communities have already expressed interest in hosting a project, including Jefferson, Oswego, and Schuyler counties, according to ZeroHedge, all places that lean Republican. A Democratic governor building megaprojects in red counties ahead of November is not a coincidence worth ignoring.

The Grid Operator's Warning

NYISO's 2026 Power Trends report lays out the math problem underneath all this. The state is on track to retire more than 4 gigawatts of nuclear-scale, always-on generation while adding less than 3 gigawatts of renewables that aren't reliably available, according to ZeroHedge's summary of the report. NYISO also flags a transmission bottleneck: most of the new nuclear would sit upstate, while most of the demand is downstate. Building reactors doesn't solve the reliability problem if the power can't get to where people actually live.

Indian Point Is Still Sitting There

Energy Secretary Chris Wright has pushed to revive Indian Point's roughly 2-gigawatt capacity, and there's already precedent for this kind of restart elsewhere, most notably at Palisades in Michigan. Hochul opposes bringing Indian Point back online even while pitching brand-new construction that will take years, maybe a decade, longer to deliver the same power.

If the state's real concern is baseload reliability, as NYISO's own numbers suggest it should be, walking past an existing 2-gigawatt facility to build new reactors upstate is a strange way to prioritize speed. Building new nuclear from the ground up in New York is not a fast process, and every year spent waiting on new construction is a year the state leans harder on fossil generation, which is exactly what happened after Indian Point's last reactor closed in 2021.

Opposition Has a Real Argument Too

Not everyone in Albany is on board. State Senator Kevin Parker has pending legislation that would impose a 30-month pause on taxpayer and ratepayer support for new or restarted nuclear facilities while a task force studies the costs and alternatives. Opponents like Parker argue that nuclear spending, which tends to run over budget and behind schedule on big projects nationwide, could crowd out cheaper, faster fixes to the grid. This is a legitimate fiscal question worth scrutiny before ratepayers are on the hook for any multi-billion-dollar public buildout.

Whether Parker's pause becomes law, and whether Hochul's 5-gigawatt pitch survives past November's election, remains unresolved. So does the bigger question NYISO raised: how New York gets power from wherever it builds these reactors to the downstate customers who actually need it.