Sep 16, 2026 · 10 min · 7 segments
The demand for electricity is increasing, and New York's aging energy infrastructure is struggling to keep up. As data centers line up to connect to the power grid, New York is reassessing its clean…
Molly AndersonHost
So think of data centers as housing the central computing infrastructure for technologies like AI.
Long story short, they need a lot of power to process everything AI is asked to do.
This summer, New York Governor Kathy Hochul signed a statewide pause on new large-scale data centers that, quote, threaten to hike up utility bills, deplete our natural resources, and create uncertainty for New Yorkers.
Hundreds of applications going in all across the country.
And right here in New York, there's 30 applications for these hyperscale, massive data centers.
And take one county like St. Lawrence.
There are applications for five data centers.
And I did a quick analysis that if we allowed this to go forward with all five, the amount of power that they would consume would exceed what I could generate with one nuclear reactor.
So right now it's sort of in pause mode.
The reason people are so concerned about the project proposals right now is that they're so much larger than data centers in the past.
We're talking about hundreds of megawatts of electricity demand.
And that translates to really the equivalent of whole towns.
Even NYISO is concerned about how the proliferation of data centers could impact the grid.
All the data centers that are in our queue that we can see sort of lining up, we're not modeling those in yet.
So think of data centers as housing the central computing infrastructure for technologies like AI.
Long story short, they need a lot of power to process everything AI is asked to do.
This summer, New York Governor Kathy Hochul signed a statewide pause on new large-scale data centers that, quote, threaten to hike up utility bills, deplete our natural resources, and create uncertainty for New Yorkers.
Hundreds of applications going in all across the country.
And right here in New York, there's 30 applications for these hyperscale, massive data centers.
And take one county like St. Lawrence.
There are applications for five data centers.
And I did a quick analysis that if we allowed this to go forward with all five, the amount of power that they would consume would exceed what I could generate with one nuclear reactor.
So right now it's sort of in pause mode.
The reason people are so concerned about the project proposals right now is that they're so much larger than data centers in the past.
We're talking about hundreds of megawatts of electricity demand.
And that translates to really the equivalent of whole towns.
Even NYISO is concerned about how the proliferation of data centers could impact the grid.
All the data centers that are in our queue that we can see sort of lining up, we're not modeling those in yet.
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