Unions and Public Power NY Organize for Public Renewables – Episode 223 of Local Energy Rules

Patrick Robbins:
So I would encourage organizers and policymakers and thinkers on these topics really to just get creative in thinking about where are there flows of finance that are controlled by the public and can be brought into democratic public control, and how can those be an engine for building the renewable energy that we need

John Farrell:
Every year another report out of New York showed that their privately owned utility companies were sliding further and further behind on producing clean electricity. Meanwhile, the transition from fossil fuels to clean energy also provided an opportunity to rethink ownership of clean energy. Fighting a fossil fuel pipeline near his mother’s home in New Jersey gave today’s guest the motivation to find alternatives to both the dirty energy and the private market system that has driven the climate crisis. Patrick Robbins, coordinator of the Energy Democracy Alliance Co-chair of the Public Power New York Coalition and fellow at the Climate and Community Institute joined me in October, 2024 to discuss New York’s Build Public Renewables Act and the forthcoming plan from the New York Power Authority for a clean energy future for all. I’m John Farrell, director of the Energy Democracy Initiative at the Institute for Local Self-Reliance, and this is Local Energy Rules, a podcast about monopoly, power, energy, democracy, and how communities can take charge to transform the energy system. Patrick, welcome to Local Energy Rules.

Patrick Robbins:
Thank you so much, John. Happy to be here.

John Farrell:
Well, let me just start off by getting a little background from you. How did you get into this work on clean energy and particularly on energy democracy?

Patrick Robbins:
Yeah, so I have been an organizer on energy, democracy and climate for a little over 10 years now, and I will share that when I got started, I did not expect to make this my full-time career. I got started organizing, I’d studied the climate crisis in school and I went and got a degree in climate science and policy, but I didn’t really become activated on these things until they started to build a fracked gas pipeline from New Jersey under the Hudson River into my mom’s old neighborhood in the West Village. And I was a very active part of the fight to stop that pipeline that got me thinking about our energy system overall and the enormously destructive, wasteful, inequitable way in which the fossil fuel economy and the fossil powered grid really works. While I was deeply involved in the fight to stop the spread of fossil fuel infrastructure, at some point you have to ask yourself what are we going to build as a replacement and is what we build next going to look like the old economy or is it an opportunity for something new?
And the more I dug into that, the more excited and interested I became in thinking about what the next grid looks like and what the next economy looks like. And I had many, many mentors and helpers along the way. If I sound at all, I know what I’m talking about. It is thanks to the diligent stewarding and work of people like Jessica Ale at the Alliance for a Green Economy, the late Cecil Corbin Mark from WE Act and many, many folks along the way, and I was working with SANE Energy Project for a number of years as the co-director and transitioned from there to my current position with many, many stops along the way.

John Farrell:
That’s great. I really appreciate it and I think it’s so helpful to understand that you come into this both rooted in some academic understanding of the issue, but also having to work personally to oppose fossil fuel infrastructure. So I think probably more so even than a lot of people that work in this space, having that personal experience I think is just so interesting in terms of motivation. So let’s dive into this issue about the New York Power Authority and kind of what comes after fossil fuels. There was a rally at the end of September to demand that the New York Power Authority step up and build 15 gigawatts of clean power by 2030. For starters, what is the New York Power Authority?

Patrick Robbins:
The New York Power Authority is an authority that began during the first wave of New Deal projects back in the 1930s and was established to steward New York’s abundant hydropower resources on behalf of the public and for the public good. So the power from Niagara Falls and the dams there, that is all sold to New York’s public institutions and towns and villages that own their own distribution lines and provides far and away the lowest cost power in the state to those entities and to those towns and villages. So it’s not a huge number by any means. I think there’s something like 50 small towns across New York state, places like Messina that own their power lines. And so the New York Power Authority has a mandate to sell to those places. They also sell power to the MTA and to the CUNYs and SUNYs City University and state universities of New York, but they were prior to the passage of the Build Public Renewables Act, they were forbidden from expanding their ability to sell and expanding their customer base and building and owning more generation assets than the ones that they already owned. So there are so many illustrations of this John, as you well know, but to my mind, this is another example of really a kind of artificially created market for private enterprise when we have this extremely potent public entity at our fingertips. And so the fight to pass the Build Public Renewables Act was really a fight to transform NYPA and take this authority which was created to address a previous crisis from a previous generation and bring that original mandate and that historical mandate up to date for the crisis we’re facing Now.

John Farrell:
I love the history here and I’m kind of curious, I don’t know if you know this, but was the limitation on NYPA about building additional generation in its original charter or something that was added later in order for I assume the lobbyists of private electric companies to try to protect themselves from public competition?

Patrick Robbins:
It’s a great, great question, John, and I don’t know the answer, but I would be super curious to find out. I mean this probably better than most, but I do feel like you can trace this country’s ideological history through the history of its electricity regulations. You have the turn toward deregulation and breaking up vertically integrated authorities and the kind of creation of these artificial markets. So I would be really, really curious to know the answer to that too. I wish I had an answer.

John Farrell:
What I love about it too in terms of the change with the Build Renewables Act is that it’s sort of what we’ve been talking, what we’ve been talking about fixing healthcare in many ways where we have had exclusively private markets in many places and now all of a sudden we’re starting to say, oh, we’ve got public options. There’s a public entity that can come in. I love that there’s that connection there. Do you know if other states have a similar agency like nipa?

Patrick Robbins:
I think that’s a great metaphor because the same dynamics from a political economy perspective are absolutely at play where everybody believes in the free market and competition until you introduce these wildly efficient public entities and then all of a sudden everybody’s like, so I do think that that’s a very apt comparison there. We have been looking into this, and I would say that while there aren’t perfect analogies for NYPA in other states, there are entities that I think show promise. And one thing that’s been really gratifying and really wonderful to see following the passage of the Build Public Renewables Act is I’ve actually gotten this question from organizers and advocates on the ground in many states saying, this is amazing. How do we do this? So I’m really, really hopeful that this can help set off a cascade of more similar legislation to unlock the power of public enterprise in transitioning us away from fossil fuels and toward renewable energy.
I think that a great place to start is public banks and green banks in different states. I know that the Connecticut Green Bank, which I believe is called something else these days, I think it’s inclusive prosperity capital or something like that. That’s one entity that I would pay attention to in thinking through these questions. And then there are these sort of regional players like how our market administrations out west and places like that I think provide a little bit of perhaps a precursor to something like this. So I would encourage organizers and policymakers and thinkers on these topics really to just get creative in thinking about where are there flows of finance that are controlled by the public and can be brought into democratic public control and how can those be an engine for building the renewable energy that we need?

John Farrell:
The first thing that came to mind for me when I was crafting this question, of course, was the Tennessee Valley Authority. And I know that there are other agencies like that that are federal in nature, although they serve regional or local needs. TVA of course has sort of famously in recent years done terrible things like in making proposals to invest in more gas plants and whatnot. And so obviously an opportunity there, I think for reform, but it’s interesting to think about, I love your example of the public bank or the Green Bank focus of kind of going where the finance is already possible and expanding the mandate to focus on building more renewables in a way that’s what they’re doing, right? I’ve seen green banks already that have finance organized around supporting development of small-scale renewable energy on private property, but there’s no reason that they couldn’t also invest in publicly owned energy that they could sell into the wholesale market or that they could sell to utilities or operate independently. I mean, there’s lots of different options there. So I love the creative thinking here about how we could do this

Patrick Robbins:
And there’s so much untapped potential in some of these institutions. I want to give a shout out to Thomas Marwa who has written extensively on public finance. I read some of his writing on this topic and immediately became a zealot for public finance. There’s just so much untapped potential there, I think, and I’d be really, really curious to see what potential exists for alliances between different public institutions and coordination between different public institutions in achieving some of these goals. And the Tennessee Valley Authority I think is also a really interesting example. That’s the classic institution for public power in this country that everybody thinks about. I do think that fights to democratize that entity really run pretty quickly into the federal level, but that’s no argument not to do it. And there’s lots of organizers on the ground doing really great work there. I will share a little bit more of my own personal history since you brought it up. My great grandfather was one of the leading engineers on the Tennessee Valley Authority actually.

John Farrell:
Wow.

Patrick Robbins:
And I remember this family story about how when he was invited to some big party or some big gala or something at the White House that Eisenhower was throwing, he responded that there was a lot of work that needed doing in his garden, so he had to stay home and attend his garden. And in my family when I was young, we always thought that it was just a funny story about how my great grandfather was kind of a curmudgeon. It took me years later in researching this to realize, oh, he hated Eisenhower, the Dixon Yates controversy and the opening up of the TVA A to third party generators. He saw that as a complete betrayal of the ethics and the principles of public power for which the TVA was founded, and this was back in the fifties. And so reading a little bit more about that controversy and some of the history of why he resigned from the TVA in the first place was really this incredible connecting me with some of my ancestors on this work in a very literal way.

John Farrell:
Wow. Public power in your blood, Patrick. I love it.

Patrick Robbins:
Truly, truly. Anyway, I had to just share that since you were talking about the TVA.

John Farrell:
Yeah, I should just note I did a lovely interview with Maggie Schober on a prior episode quite a few months back about the TVA and some of the issues about the governance reform that could be helpful there and the desires of the local communities. Folks are interested in following up on that, but let’s get back to NYPA here. So the power of NYPA to build renewables is based on this build public renewables act that was passed by the New York State legislature in 2023. Can you talk about how that laid the groundwork for NYPA to procure clean power and how else is the legislation going to be promoting energy democracy?

Patrick Robbins:
Exactly. So the Build Public Renewables Act was the culmination of many years of work. It began as a campaign started by the New York City Democratic Socialist of America’s Ecosocialist working group, which I’ve been a member of since 2016. And originally the question was how do we democratize the grid and take the grid entirely under public control? And in breaking down that question and thinking through, okay, how do we sequence this? There was always an understanding that in order to take the grid fully under public control, we would need to have a lot more power than we have now, political power, social power, et cetera. And so we started thinking, what can be an intermediary goal that can help us do tomorrow? What we can’t do today in thinking about this, we were thinking about generation, the different components of the grid generation, transmission and distribution.
Democratizing the distribution grid is enormously tricky to do as your listeners, no doubt know. And so there are really exciting movements toward that in New York State, in particular, in Long Island and Rochester, and now in the Hudson Valley, which I know you’re going to be following up on later on with the Hudson Valley Power Authority. But we were thinking that a good first step would be tackling the generation side, and it was my good friend and comrade, Shae O’Reilly actually, who first had the idea for this saying, okay, we have this public institution in New York. How can we expand this? Since the private sector clearly is not meeting our clean energy goals, I mean it feels like every month if you follow the energy news in New York State, another report comes out just showing how wildly off track we are to meeting the goals of the CLCPA, the Climate Leadership and Community Protection Act, which establishes our legal clean energy goals.
And so the Ecosocialist Working Group formed a collaboration and coalition with different nonprofits across the state, recognizing that if this was going to be a state level fight, it was going to take a lot more power than just New York City. This had to draw in allies from all over New York. And the process of writing the bill and revising the bill was really an excellent exercise in democratic policymaking. Honestly, we had at least a year’s worth of conversations, a year and a half worth of conversations with every constituency you can imagine, environmental justice organizations, labor unions from different sectors of the labor movement, renewable energy advocates, housing and tenant justice organizations, really trying to get as broad a swath of perspectives on this as possible. That’s important, both because it makes for better policy. I do believe that democratic policymaking does lead to more representation of interests at the table, and you learn things that you just simply wouldn’t learn otherwise.
And it also strengthened the political power behind the bill. So it yielded really, really important results and I think is a case study in the importance of democratic process for policymaking as well. Over the course of that time, we were really, really building communities across the state in order to pressure the legislature, and we generated an enormous amount of pressure on that body, and in many cases, our comrades ran primary challenges to make this an electoral issue. And I think that that really, really changed the calculation for the legislature. We also really, really dedicated ourselves to making sure that organized labor was at the table and represented. We want all of the project built by the New York Power Authority to have gold standard labor provisions, so prevailing wage project, labor agreements, applications of those standards to contractors and subcontractors and ample money not just for apprenticeship programs, but pre-apprenticeship and wraparound services and all the things that guarantee that these jobs are good jobs, high standard union jobs, and bringing more and more communities who are not traditionally represented by some of the sectors of organized labor we’re talking about into these opportunities.
I think that that was really, really successful. And you had people like Pat Goody saying that this had the best labor language of any climate bill he’d ever seen. That’s from the IBEW. Now we are at the implementation phase, so the New York Power Authority has had a year to over a year now to consider how it’s going to implement this plan, and they will be releasing their draft implementation plan on October 8th. So we’re all very excited. We can’t wait to see what they’ve been working on. And the final implementation plan will be released on January 31st. I believe that is the timetable that we’re working on, but really there was just years and years of work leading up to this moment.

John Farrell:
That’s great. I really appreciate you giving that broad overview. And I’m especially curious to follow up about labor unions. One of the things that we’ve seen in other states in the efforts of climate and clean energy advocates is that labor has been aligned and very rationally with incumbent private utility companies because they’ve organized that labor force, right? The job pipeline that they see is the jobs that are going to be provided through the infrastructure that that utility builds. And we even have in California, for example, famously there are loyalty pledges in the union contracts that obligate those labor union members to tow the line when it comes to what the utility wants.
We are going to take a short break when we come back. I ask Patrick about the impact of the inflation reduction Act on the proposal to build public renewables. We also talk about the role of host communities, and Patrick offers recommendations for advocates hoping to replicate New York’s work. You are listening to a local Energy Rules podcast with Patrick Robbins, coordinator of the Energy Democracy Alliance co-chair of the Public Power New York Coalition and fellow at the Climate and Community Institute. Hey, thanks for listening to Local Energy Rules. We’re so glad you’re here. If you like what you’ve heard, please help other folks find us by giving the show a rating and review on Apple Podcasts or Spotify, five stars. If you think we’ve earned it. As a bonus, I’ll gladly read your review aloud on the show if it includes an energy related joke or pun. Now back to the program, it’s been a really interesting and politically fraught situation, and I think all the more impressive then in your organizing that you were able to bring in labor early and to work with them and to have in your court on this, given what we’ve seen in other places. So a tip of the hat in terms of that work, and I don’t know if you have any advice to offer others other than what you’ve already said, which is you brought them in early and involved them in the planning.

Patrick Robbins:
Yeah, I mean, in terms of advice that I would offer, there’s a few different things here. So I do think that the climate movement as a whole has a long way to go in building real relationships of trust with organized labor. And so if you’re going to offer something, this sounds basic, but you have to mean it like, and you have to prove that constantly and you have to go to bat for it in every setting, in every meeting that you’re having with legislators. It has to be a part of the equation. And I would be having meetings with developers and I would be very frank that the labor standards are non-negotiable, and that’s a constituency whose interests are historically diametrically opposed to organized labor. When you look at the history of organizing in coal mining and the fossil fuel industry, it’s not an accident that these are comparatively union-dense professions and sectors that come out of generations of a rich history organizing for better working conditions.
And renewable generation at this point simply hasn’t benefited from that history. And when you have seen that kind of organizing happening, then unfortunately, renewable capitalists are just like capitalists of all kinds. When there was the fight to organize bright power in Long Island back in 2019 for better working conditions, installation can be very dangerous, and it can be, if you’re not adhering to rigorous safety standards, it can be very hazardous for the people who are working on those projects. So they were organizing for better conditions and the company just fired everyone, just classic basic capitalist ideology at work there that I think is what we’re up against. And what many leaders in organized labor see when they are looking out for what professions are best for their members, and in many cases they have contracts with private companies and those contracts are hard won, and they understandably, completely, understandably do not want to jeopardize those contracts.
So I say all of this because I think it’s important to think through what is Labor’s perspective and what are their interests, and you have to write the bill so that those interests are protected. And in our case, that means that the public ownership extends to ownership of generation projects, but the construction of projects is still performed by the companies with whom these unions have contracts. So it doesn’t distress or compete with those contracts at all. In fact, it provides a steady stream of new work for those developers and for those unions, which is in everyone’s interest. And the last thing I’ll say is that if you are becoming discouraged, the climate crisis is something that affects everyone. So if you are becoming discouraged in the headway that you’re making with working with labor unions, there were many, many months when we couldn’t get a phone call, couldn’t get a response to emails, but I would encourage folks to think creatively about who has a stake in this and healthcare workers have a stake in the climate crisis and making sure that we’re shutting down toxic, polluting peak power plants, so do educators for that matter, making sure that you’re engaging a broad swath of the labor movement is how we ended up getting to the table with the AFLCIO in the first place.

John Farrell:
That’s great. Thanks for giving that kind of broad overview of the approach, and I think that’s really great advice for folks who are thinking about this, about there’s a lot of different ways in, you don’t have to go immediately to the labor union that may have been the most oppositional in the past. So I want to get back to NYPA here and this idea of building public renewables and especially, especially helpful to know that their draft plan is coming out and will be out by the time this podcast is published. So in your ideal world, what does the NYPA procurement look like? Is it wind and solar energy? How do they get steel on the ground? You already kind of alluded to this. They’ll use private contractors that meet the job and labor standards. Will it include power on rooftops, like small scale stuff? Is it big stuff? What does it look like?

Patrick Robbins:
Well, to use a potentially triggering phrase for this sector, all of the above, we want to see wind power. We want to see rooftop solar. We want to see utility scale solar. We want to see storage and battery technology. We want it all. And there was a great report that we commissioned using models from the Rocky Mountain Institute and working with electricity sector analyst formerly at the Sierra Club, Brendan Pierpont, showing just how this could work given a mix of different technologies for the different load zones in New York state. And what Brendan and his colleagues found was that this is absolutely doable in terms of replacing and completely decarbonizing NYPA’s existing generation fleet without making a dent in NYPA’s existing bond rating. So NYPA absolutely can do this. It’s a matter of political will. I think that the exact mix of technologies, the exact locations and scale of projects to a large extent, that’s not for me to say frankly.
I think that the communities are the ones that should be determining what works for where they are, and there’s certainly no shortage of sites that we can use for generation technologies of different kinds. Now, that’s proven to be tricky in different parts of New York state for sure. There’s a reason why we don’t have more utility scale generation down here. It’s more expensive. There are a whole host of barriers to building storage or rooftop solar at scale when you get into New York City. That said, NYPA has real advantages that private developers do not, which is part of why we’re so excited about this in the first place. NYPA can bundle many different separate rooftop solar projects and contract for all of that work in a single blow. They can do the same with batteries, which means that you can at least in theory, be performing some of the studies and safety studies that are necessary for battery installation, not on an individual project by project basis, but for an entire kind of project, which gets you the benefit of more economies of scale.
So we’re really excited about it. I think that for the first year we want to see generation projects in as much of the state as possible, but particularly thinking about how we can build on public institutions that NYPA already has relationships with. There’s been a ton of interest from CUNYs and SUNYs on this, so working with them to partner with NYPA on their decarbonization plans, I think is a really, really smart move and can be a huge benefit not just to the schools themselves, but to the surrounding communities. And one of the ways in which these communities will benefit, I do want to talk about this. There is a program called the Reach Program that takes the revenue from NYPA projects and credits it to low income residents of disadvantaged communities in the form of money off their utility bill. So returning that revenue directly to the New Yorkers that need it most, and what we are calling for in the implementation plan is making sure that those benefits are really substantial.
So rather than just a dollar off here, a dollar off there, we’re calling for that money to get those New Yorkers half off of their utility bill, which is particularly important in a state like New York where you’ve seen just cascading crises of unaffordability and especially in regions like Central Hudson, which I’m sure your guests who will be talking about the Hudson Valley Power Authority will be talking about this, but just really out of control, electricity bills. So this is a way of addressing that for the people that need that relief the most. We also want those benefits to be concentrated in the communities where projects are built. So I think that there is unfortunately a lot of blame to go around when you see projects being fought by communities. I certainly think that there’s plenty of misinformation out there about the deleterious impacts of renewable energy projects on the environment or to host communities, but also the fact is there’s a lot more that renewable developers could be doing to build better connections of trust and real benefits for the places that are hosting their projects. I think about how year after year you have developers trying to lobby for lower pilot payments, stuff like that. We really want to set a different tone and use the passage of the Build Public Renewables Act as an opportunity for a reset in the relationship between renewable generation and host communities.

John Farrell:
I think it’s worth mentioning to the great work of Michael Thomas on this who has found that so much of the opposition to renewable energy, especially in areas that are more rural, is blatant misinformation funded by conservative activists,

Patrick Robbins:
100%

John Farrell:
100% conservative fossil fuel interests, which isn’t to demean the fact that people are concerned about changes to their community, but that unfortunately a lot of the things that they’re being told are just blatantly untrue.

Patrick Robbins:
I want to flag one resource for your listeners too that we found incredibly helpful. Every year the Sabin Center puts out a summary of resistance to renewable generation and renewable energy projects across the country. So it comes out every year. I think that the one for 2024 just came out and it’s a really, really helpful at a glance survey of where and how that resistance pops up so you can really see patterns, some of the arguments that are being used and some of the trends there.

John Farrell:
Great. I’ll make sure we link both of those resources on the show page. I want to talk a little bit about the impact of the Inflation Reduction Act, the federal law that showers money on clean energy resources before the Inflation Reduction Act passed. Though this one particularly important change was that now public agencies or municipal utilities can get access to federal clean energy incentives. I assume that’s going to be a big part of what makes this work for, but I’m just curious if that’s been part of the calculus in the conversation.

Patrick Robbins:
Absolutely, absolutely. I mean, I think that that was a huge game changer. I have not heard, we have not heard enough from NYPA to be frank about how they plan on taking advantage of those opportunities. There has not been as much transparency as we would like, which is why one of the many reasons we are waiting for the October 8th release with bated breath. But yes, as your listeners probably know, the dominant form of renewable energy financing in this country has been the investment tax credit and production tax credit, and you have to have a certain tax burden that nonprofit entities simply can’t take advantage of. And the IRA really changed all of that in some incredible ways. Now there are still some barriers that we’re seeing. So one thing that we’re looking at is domestic content requirements. That is one thing I should say we have heard from NYPA is that they’re trying to figure out ways to meet the domestic content requirements of the IRA.
There’s also a caveat that direct pay and elective pay eligible projects have to be wholly owned by public entities. So I think that there’s good reasons for that in some ways, but I also think that it means that projects that get built through the Build Public Renewables Act, there might need to be a little bit more creative thinking about how that ultimately works because under the Build Public Renewables Act, NYPA has to own a majority share of each project, but there may be reasons why developers want to have a agreement where they sort of sell off over a certain period of time and just making sure that there’s flexibility there in terms of still being eligible for direct pay and elective pay, that is something that we’re keeping an eye on as well.

John Farrell:
It’s so triggering for me to have to think about talking into the weeds about these tax incentives and tax credits because for so long they’ve been so complex. I still remember learning about what was called the Minnesota Flip, which was one of the early financing schemes between communities and private developers that would capture the tax credits but then get ownership back to the community.

Patrick Robbins:
It sounds like a short-lived dance craze from the fifties or something.

John Farrell:
Yeah, right. Oh my gosh. It seemed like it was some sort of gymnastics workout rather than a financing scheme. They had other ones too that had similarly silly names. Well, I hope that stuff works out. I want to come back to something that you already mentioned a little bit here, which was kind of the impact on host communities. We were talking about the idea that there has been some opposition around renewables before, often with privately owned projects. So can you talk about the implications of a public procurement for host communities or for electricity customers? You already kind of talked about how it’s going to reflect equity aims because you’re talking about making sure that the benefits of these projects are shared with marginalized communities in places where these projects are hosted. I don’t know if there’s anything else you want to add broadly about how equity is reflected in this procurement process and how host communities will be involved.

Patrick Robbins:
Yeah, I would be happy to talk about that. So there’s two further points that I think are important to keep in mind. The first is that we all along have conceived of the decarbonization elements of the bill as very much an equity issue and very much part of meeting our own equity standards. So the New York Power Authority currently owns 10 gas fired peak power plants, and I’m sure your listeners are familiar, but these are power plants that sell into the grid times when there is the highest demand for that power. These are enormously polluting and enormously toxic plants for the host communities where they’re located and all of those peak power plants are located in black and brown communities in New York City. And so when we were organizing with environmental justice organizations, organizations like We Act and up rows and honestly a lot of the healthcare unions as well, the equity issues and the environmental justice issues that the existing generation fleet poses were enormous reason for them to get involved.
And we had OP-eds written by environmental justice organizations. I want to also shout out South Bronx Unite, which has been doing a tremendous amount of work on this in the South Bronx for many, many years, and making sure that those voices were heard loud and clear by the legislature and by the executive was a really important part of the campaign and at least what we’ve heard from NYPA, and again, we’ll see when the report comes out, but I think they understand that those power plants have got to go, and so they have to build enough generation to at least replace this longstanding environmental injustice. And we have heard assurances from the New York Power Authority that that’s still very much their intention as they’re drafting their plans. So that is terrific news and does tie back very clearly, I think, to the equity issues raised by the bill.
Another area I think is by having as much democracy and accountability and transparency and open conversations as possible at every step of NYPA’s planning process. So we really want to embed those values in the way that NYPA is considering its projects, and there are specifics in the bill about how many public hearings NYPA has to have, how accessible they have to be, making sure that those are at times that are accessible to working people, all of that and really trying to make sure that with a public entity, we have opportunities that you don’t have with a private procurement process or with a private development process and setting that standard as well. I will say again that you get what you fight for, so it’s all well and good for us to have this in the bill, but I think that there’s still plenty of ways in which organizers and those of us on the ground are going to have to keep pressuring NYPA just to make sure that those channels of accountability are still open to the communities where projects are being cited and communities across the state.

John Farrell:
I was looking at some social media with the rally that had been held in anticipation of NYPA’s draft plan and got the impression from that that the New York governor who is apparently no fan of other things like congestion pricing that are climate friendly might be playing some role in hindering the public power acquisition. Has that been the case? Are you finding that the governor is also messing around with this NYPA clean power effort?

Patrick Robbins:
Well, it’s a good question. I would say that Governor Hochul has certainly not been the leader that we need on climate. The impression that we get is that this is just not an issue that she cares about. I think that that’s been demonstrated time and time again from the congestion pricing issue, which was a complete disaster. And if there isn’t a solution reached that’s just going to totally blow a hole in the resources that we have available for making an energy transition. There was the short-lived adventure a little while back where her office was proposing changing the way methane emissions were calculated to de facto relax some of the restrictions on particularly fracked gas accounting in New York State. And it took a totally United Climate movement pushing back on that for that to be walked back. And it’s really a shame because we are experiencing climate disasters in the news.
I’m getting texts from friends in the South all week this week and making sure people are okay. We really need leadership on this, and we need particularly a state where you have a democratic trifecta. It’s like, okay, what is the holdup? And that I think is something where we’ll have more information when the implementation report comes out. The governor was able to get her choice for president of NYPA through a kind of loophole that nobody was really aware of that allows whoever is the acting president to just be kind of grandfathered in. This was Justin Driscoll who was not able to secure a majority of votes in the Senate when this was being discussed last year. In part because of his original opposition to the Build Public Renewables Act. He went in public and testified in an assembly hearing that this would not be a good thing for the public or for NYPA.
You could say a lot about the division of power in New York when you have the head of an agency or the head of an authority asking for less power. And there were certainly long standing racial discrimination issues on staff at NYPA that Justin Driscoll had a role in downplaying and covering up. So for many, many reasons, organizers on the ground were opposing his nomination, and it worked in some ways. He couldn’t get the votes in the Senate, but he was able to just be kind of ushered in through this technicality. I think that these are all indicators of where the governor stands on this, but we are hopeful that as we enter a really uncertain terrain at the federal level, it always matters what governors do on climate, but it’s really going to matter over the next several months and years. So I would say all eyes are on the governor.

John Farrell:
What do you think, Patrick, that other states could learn from New York? Could they also be doing public procurement and it doesn’t matter if their for-profit utilities are still vertically integrated where they own power plants and power lines and everything else?

Patrick Robbins:
Yeah, it’s a really good question. I imagine that it would be much more difficult, frankly, in states that have that vertical integration because you’d have to redo a whole lot of the regulatory framework in order to start from scratch. We were not starting from scratch, which was a huge advantage that we had. I think that the recommendations that I would have to other states have less to do with the legal and policy specifics around some of these questions and much more around the political and organizing questions to be asking. The recommendations that I would have are to really think creatively about what institutions exist or what could be created in your area. And the good news is that there are abundant institutions across the country that can provide a model for this. I mean this very well. We have a really interesting and robust and diverse landscape of institutions in the energy sector that could be modified potentially or expanded.
I’m thinking about the incredibly exciting work that organizers in the South do around rural electric cooperatives and making sure that those are genuinely democratic and accountable to their members. So my first piece of advice would be to think creatively about that. The second has to do with tactics and strategy. And my advice there would be, leave nothing on the table. Use everything at your disposal to get this done. And as a nonprofit employee, for example, we professionally could not run candidates or intervene in the electoral arena at all, get involved in the electoral arena at all, but the Democratic socialist of America could. So really think about who you can build with to delegate all of the incredibly necessary pieces of a campaign like this. The other thing that I would say, now that I’m talking about it and thinking about it, one thing that my colleagues and comrades and I all agreed upon when it passed is that every single step of the work that was done was necessary to get us to that point.
The work of organizing sympathetic unions, the work of organizing central staff members and making sure that the people who were actually writing the bill were people that you had a good relationship with and understood and believed in the bill itself, the enormous amount of work that went into popular education and communications and media intervention, it was all necessary. There was not a single part of that that could be skipped. So really, really think about that and think about how you can make sure that there is all of that work being covered. And we were starting from a relatively small room full of people, and it was a multi-year fight. So don’t be discouraged if you don’t have that capacity yet. If you are building with people in a democratic way and around a vision that is inspiring and exciting, you’ll get there.

John Farrell:
I don’t think I could ask you a question that you would finish any better than that. In terms of wrapping up, Patrick, thank you so much for joining me to talk about the effort to get the New York Power Authority, to have the ability to make these huge investments in public renewables. And I very much hope that we will find in a week or two here that their plan, I guess it’s only a week that their plan will be as good as you hope it will be.

Patrick Robbins:
I mean, it’s a really, really exciting moment for this episode to be coming out. I would be a bad organizer if I didn’t encourage people to follow public power NY on Twitter. That’s probably the best way of getting the updates on where the campaign is going and where NYPA is going. But yeah, this is probably the most, in some ways, this is the most exciting moment that people could be tuning in, so definitely follow it and keep watching the skies.

John Farrell:
Thanks again, Patrick, really appreciate you and all the work that you’ve done and for taking the time to talk about it today.

Patrick Robbins:
Thank you, John. This was really fun. Always happy to talk.

John Farrell:
Thank you so much for listening to this episode of Local Energy Rules with Patrick Robbins, coordinator of the Energy Democracy Alliance Co-Chair of the Public Power New York Coalition and fellow at the Climate and Community Institute, where we discussed the New York Power Authority and the opportunity for publicly owned clean energy on the show page. Look for links to the Public Power New York Twitter feed. Background information on the Build Public Renewables Act, research on public finance by Thomas Marois, and data from Michael Thomas and the Sabin Center on Opposition to Clean Energy.
Local Energy Rules is produced by myself and Ingrid Behrsin with editing provided by audio engineer Drew Birschbach. I want to take a brief moment to thank Maria McCoy, our intrepid senior researcher, who you may have noticed is no longer listed at the end of the Local Energy Rules podcast credits. Maria recently left the Institute for Local Self-Reliance for graduate school after five terrific years, and I can’t thank her enough for all she did while working here.
She produced 150 Local Energy Rules episodes, got them published, wrote summaries for the website, and on occasion had to do some gnarly troubleshooting. She hand drew the podcast logo that now shows up in your feeds, which previously looked like the bad marriage of some terrible clip art and a 1995 computer geometry program. And Maria was the person responsible for most of which you see in the energy section of ILSR’S website, including our national Community Solar Tracker, the Community Power Scorecard of State Energy Democracy policies, and much, much more. Maria, we wish you the very best. We hope to keep this podcast and our work up to your standards and we expect great things from you in the years to come. Thank you again. Tune back into local energy rules every two weeks to hear how we can take on concentrated power to transform the energy system. Until next time, keep your energy local and thanks for listening.