Meredith Angwin and the Two Grids in Hurley

Inside of New York, there are two grids.

There are two electric grids: the physical one and the policy one. For New Yorkers, these two grids have been working against each other for a long time. The result is electricity and infrastructure that is increasingly more expensive and less reliable. Understanding this, and demanding better policies, is the only way to fix the problems that our two grids are facing.

And there’s no more important place for people to learn about these issues than in the Hudson Valley, which has always been a bellwether for the nation’s infrastructure and energy issues. And so, last week, we hosted Meredith Angwin, a celebrated energy researcher, chemist and author of 2020’s Shorting the Grid, for an audience of about 30 residents, some of whom traveled from over two hours away for the talk at a historic church in Hurley, NY.

Because this event was about learning, our original idea was to hold the event at a local middle school. Our unincorporated, citizen-led group made arrangements with the Kingston City School District that included purchasing liability insurance, printing and distributing flyers, and of course paying for Ms. Angwin’s speaking fee. On July 23, we received word that the event was fully approved by the district; but just a week before the event, we received a letter that alleged that because we’re a “for-profit” group (we’re not), we’d be prohibited from using the middle school auditorium.

We received no answer to our response, which factually stated that we’re neither a non-profit or a for-profit group, and that the event itself would not result in any kind of leftover funds. We have filed a FOIL request with the school district to find out more information about what led to the abrupt cancellation.

With that said, the change in venue didn’t thin the crowd, and by the end of the night, an audience that included battery-plant opponents, a county legislator from an environmental group, a New York City sustainability official, and a man responsible for keeping Central Hudson’s lights on had all shared their thoughts.

Ms. Angwin’s presentation was contained to three slides:

There Are Two Grids

Angwin’s first slide made the distinction the whole evening kept returning to: there is a physical grid and a policy grid, and almost everything you read in the newspaper or from politicians is about the policy grid.

“There’s the grid you can see out your window; transmission, distribution, substations, dispatchers, linemen, generators, and it’s limited by physical laws,” she said. “The policy grid is net metering, net zero, renewable portfolio standards… you could say the policy grid is about how the physical grid is paid.”

Shuffling paper doesn’t move power. When Vermont utilities stopped buying from Vermont Yankee, she recalled, activists argued the plant could close because “we’re not using its power” but the electrons kept flowing to whoever the dispatchers sent them to.

“The electrons don’t read,” Angwin said. “They just go where Ohm’s law and Kirchhoff’s laws send them.”

The physical grid has one non-negotiable rule: it must balance at every moment. She walked through the Texas near-collapse of February 2021, with plants offline in the cold, demand spiking, grid frequency sagging toward the threshold where cascading failures begin. Operators instituted blackouts because “it’s much easier to reopen an area where you instituted a blackout than to watch the whole grid collapse.”

What is Baseload?

Her second slide was a New York State electric load chart.

The point: even in the most rural corners of New York, roughly 70% percent of the gigawatt-hours consumed are consumed around the clock.

“Do you think your grocery store turns off the refrigerators at night?”

The Fatal Trifecta, and a Boom for Lawyers

Angwin wrote Shorting the Grid because explaining grid governance requires a breakdown of RTO auctions, FERC rules, and capacity payments, which she called “a wonderful payment scheme for lawyers.” She told the story of PJM clawing back roughly $200 million from “efficiency providers” who had been claiming capacity payments by, among other things, calling big-box stores to ask how many Energy Star refrigerators they’d sold; efficiency the providers had nothing to do with.

She walked the audience through five-minute auctions and clearing prices, and the arithmetic that lets a wind project bid negative, i.e. paying the grid to take its power, because production tax credits and renewable energy certificates pay it more than the market does.

“The wind turbine is making bank like crazy,” she said, while a giant, faraway company somewhere buys the RECs to tell regulators they went renewable.

And then we got to the Fatal Trifecta, which is how grids like New York’s have gotten into a lot of trouble:

The fatal trifeca consists of an over-reliance on renewables that start and stop on their own schedule; backing them with just-in-time natural gas delivered by pipeline, where homes have priority over power plants; and counting on imports from neighbors who are usually having the same weather you are.

Norway halts exports to Britain when the reservoirs run low, she noted: “Every now and again Norway says: sorry. We don’t have it, so you can’t have it.”

On batteries, she pointed to our recent charging-mix work: New York’s batteries are not filled by wind and sun, because there isn’t remotely enough of either on the grid. They’re filled by the ordinary mix, with extra gas firing up on the margin, and lose energy on the round trip.

“Was There a Crossroads Where We Went Wrong?”

Jillian Fried, a Hurley resident who has been organizing her neighbors to understand the three battery storage plants proposed for the neighboring Town of Ulster alone, conducted the interview portion, and asked about when things started to go wrong for American grids.

“We were building nuclear plants quite vigorously in the ‘70s and ‘80s, and then all of a sudden we stopped,” said Angwin. “Renewables backed up with natural gas was the way we went. I think we made a mistake. Renewables and nuclear baseload is a fabulous idea.”

Angwin said that France, scared straight by the 1973 oil embargo, went in the opposite direction as the United States, and now has a grid that is about 70 percent nuclear and is exponentially cleaner than ours:

Angwin shared stories from fighting to keep the Vermont Yankee nuclear plant open in the 2010s, describing public meetings where activists physically surrounded the Public Utilities Commission, a night when manure was thrown at the plant’s representatives, and the moment she turned around mid-meeting to find a row of plant employees behind her empty, as their security detail had quietly pulled them out. “I was very naive about exactly how disruptive things can be.”

Fried’s final question was “what does the grid truly need to be resilient?” Angwin provided the evening’s thesis in one sentence: “Enough steady baseload power, with fuel stored on site.”

The second hour of the event was left for questions from the audience, and as always, there wasn’t enough time to get to everything. Here are some of the highlights:

Why was my Central Hudson bill $750?

Jim from Newburgh said his electric bill had run $200 to 300 a month for years and recently hit $750. What happened?

A woman named Melissa also stated that her bill feels “very opaque, very non-transparent.”

We joined Angwin up front to answer: About half of the increase is fuel: when Indian Point’s 2,000 carbon-free megawatts closed in 2021, the void was filled not by “cheap renewables” but by two new gas plants, Cricket Valley and CPV Valley, which now run at 75–80 percent capacity factors, so Hudson Valley bills ride the gas market.

And this is not for a lack of trying: the Central Hudson territory has had the fifth fastest rooftop and community solar buildout in the country since the passage of the climate law in 2019.

The other half is that we are paying for two grids at once: the aging poles-and-wires grid we have, plus the “grid of the future” being litigated in Albany right now, which will pay back people who can purchase rooftop solar, home batteries, heat pumps, electric vehicles and more.

The fixed costs of all of it are being spread over a customer base that has no new industry, houses hollowed into Airbnbs, and fewer full-time ratepayers chipping in.

Since the climate law passed, Central Hudson has had the fifth-fastest-rising bills in the entire country.

An audience member who works for Central Hudson also pointed out that one dollar on a bill covers roughly 42 cents delivery, 36 cents supply, and 22 cents taxes and state mandates, with some mandated programs buried in delivery rates rather than the state budget, where they would be visible as taxes.

Angwin recalled asking a colleague on the New England grid’s consumer liaison committee why he had joined: “He said, ‘I joined the day I realized I could be taxed through my utility bill, and I couldn’t do a thing about it.’”

The grid wobbled and nobody noticed

The most remarkable moment of the night came from an audience member who runs system operations at Central Hudson, speaking personally, he stressed, not for the company.

The previous day, he told the room, a major transmission line in New York had tripped, causing a frequency excursion. The system rode through it because of inertia, the sheer rotating mass of the large generators online, including a Roseton unit and one of the small Danskammer units, which got the call to pick up reserves. Frequency was stabilized within a couple of minutes. “None of you saw that. I can guarantee it.”

His point was Angwin’s point: solar inverters are switches, not machines. “Nobody’s against the aspirational idea of renewables, but you need large rotating machines online to ride through a disturbance like that… nuclear’s got to be part of the equation.” Angwin mentioned her most-read Substack post, The Switches in Spain, as covering exactly these physics in depth.

The climate crisis

Barry, identifying as being part of New York City’s sustainability department, said that he heard no acknowledgment of the climate crisis, and that “the transition,” however hard, has to happen.

There are disasters in the news every day, he said, and he paid a thousand dollars a month heating his own home in Westchester last winter. He then brought up the infamous Three Mile Island and Chernobyl nuclear incidents, claiming that “nobody’s really addressed the safety issues.”

These views of minimizing fossil fuels without embracing nuclear is, in essence, the playbook of the 100-percent-renewables grid fantasy in New York, promoted by Robert Howarth and Mark Jacobsen in their 2013 paper Examining the feasibility of converting New York State’s all-purpose energy infrastructure to one using wind, water, and sunlight. This paper was influential in shaping New York’s banning of fracking, denial of the Constitution Pipeline, closure of Indian Point, the 2016 goal of 50% renewables by 2030 and 2019’s goal of 70%.

By now, New York’s grid operator has priced it out: its their recent draft 2025–2044 System & Resource Outlook, NYISO found that relaxing the zero-emissions requirement “even by a small threshold” of 95% clean energy by 2044 instead of 100% cuts the required new build by a factor of two to three, because the final five points forces “upwards of 30 GW” of hydrogen-fueled generation that would sit idle more than 95 percent of the year, using a technology the study describes as “not commercially available today.”

And when NYISO let its model reach 100 percent zero-emissions with nuclear substituted partially for renewables, it built a smaller, more affordable system with more nuclear. Under current policy, the Outlook notes, “zero-emissions resources, such as nuclear, are not able to substitute for offshore wind.”

Angwin answered the question: Chernobyl’s RBMK technology exists nowhere in the Western world, and the Three Mile Island incident is remembered as a disaster where there were zero casualties. “My favorite kind of disaster,” she said. “The plant is destroyed, but people aren’t hurt.”

A real disaster, she said, was the parked oil train that rolled into a Quebec town near her Vermont home and exploded, killing “forty, fifty people,” the 2013 Lac-Mégantic derailment, 47 dead.

“It killed far more people than Three Mile Island did, and you’ve all forgotten about it, because you don’t care about it. You only care that nuclear could maybe someday kill people.”

The panel’s answer to the broader challenge was about pace and method, not destination: an uncontrolled transition doesn’t decarbonize; cutting down Catskills forests for solar that displaces no baseload doesn’t decarbonize; and battery plants charged from a gas-marginal grid don’t either.

The batteries next door

Patty from Hurley, said she lives less than a mile from the proposed Hurley Avenue site, bought Angwin’s book to educate herself and asked directly about the author’s opinion of battery storage.

“If the batteries were always being filled by renewables, you could say maybe it’s worth it,” Angwin said. “But it isn’t. So it’s a waste of money, an extra thing that takes up energy in the grid system, and it’s dangerous. I’m not a fan.”

Terra-Gen markets the Hurley Avenue project in question as “a renewable energy project,” and the PSC’s 2024 storage order justifies the state’s 6 GW battery mandate as critical to “100 percent renewables by 2040,” which is not even what the climate law says (the law says 100 percent clean energy by 2040).

Terra-Gen is proposing to construct and operate a 250-megawatt lithium-ion battery energy storage system (BESS) facility to provide state-of-the-art renewable energy.

Terra-Gen, from UlsterCleanEnergy.com

What about geothermal?

Kathy Nolan of Mount Tremper, a Catskill Mountainkeeper staffer and county legislator, speaking for herself, asked why nobody had mentioned wind or geothermal, “potentially the balancer here.”

Without evidence, Nolan previously derided a past New York Energy Alliance event as a “marketing presentation by an organization that promotes oil, gas, and nuclear interests.” Despite this baseless and lazy slander, we allowed Nolan to attend the event.

Angwin’s answer questioned the scale that geothermal could really work at, except in ideal conditions. Efforts to expand geothermal to more places require a process that is identical to fracking, which is banned in New York.

Angwin worked in the geothermal field at the Electric Power Research Institute, so her answer came from personal experience. She said the hot-dry-rocks fracking experiments above the Los Alamos caldera failed because hot silica-rich rock reseals its own fractures; EPRI’s closed-loop Heber project in the Imperial Valley worked, but places like Heber are rare.

“I would really like to see breakthroughs in geothermal,” she said. “I just don’t know whether they’re going to happen.”

The Fatal Trifecta Continues

Using Angwin’s framing of the fatal trifecta and the tension between the policy grid and the physical grid is helpful for evaluating the latest news in New York State.

The just-in-time gas leg is quietly getting oil tanks bolted onto it. For the 2026–27 winter, the owners of 18.3 of the 22.8 gigawatts of gas and oil-fired capacity from the Capital Region on down have made “firm fuel” elections with NYISO, committing to firm pipeline transportation or fuel stored on site, according to NYISO data prepared for the New York State Reliability Council’s winter fuel review.

On Long Island, 89 percent of the fleet has elected for firm fuel; in New York City, 82 percent. The Hudson Valley is the weak link at 67 percent, and per EPA facility data, the two plants in our region with no backup-fuel capability at all are Cricket Valley and Danskammer, meaning the valley’s newest gas plant and its oldest both run entirely on just-in-time pipeline delivery.

“Fuel stored on site,” as Angwin suggested, is becoming the grid operator’s official winter policy.

Danskammer, the 1950s plant that helped catch the grid on August 19, is not allowed to retire. Its four units filed to deactivate on August 1 of this year, but NYISO’s short-term reliability assessment responded by declaring a formal “Lower Hudson Valley Generator Deactivation Reliability Need,” requiring them to remain in service until at least January 15, 2027.

NYISO will solicit replacement solutions in September and pick winners in a December report, while a “reliability-must-run contract” is the last resort.

New York’s biggest foreign import leg leg runs through Quebec, and this month it flickered. The Champlain Hudson Power Express was built to carry 1,250 megawatts of Hydro-Québec power to New York City; through the third week of August it was averaging as little as 161 megawatts.

Since Hydro-Québec is a reservoir system, its exports depend on water levels and its own customers’ conditions, to say nothing of politics: in March 2025, Ontario added a 25 percent surcharge on electricity exports to New York during the tariff fight, and shutting off exports from Canada is becoming a common political threat.

And as for renewables, our recent analysis on New York’s net metering found that parts of New York have had the fastest small-scale (rooftop + community solar) buildouts in the country:

This buildout has done nothing to curb New York’s status as having the third-most expensive electricity prices in the country.

That is the state of the trifecta: the gas fleet is stockpiling oil, the old plant can’t retire, imports are wobbling, and the renewables that the policy grid has incentivized are getting paid handsomely while not lowering system costs.