Fred Stafford has put together a comprehensive look of the New York State (NYS) renewable development process administrated through the New York State Energy Research & Development Authority (NYSERDA). He shows how the state’s renewables developers dumped their project risk onto the backs of ratepayers but without the open scrutiny that the state applies to utilities. He also provides a comprehensive look at renewable projects in New York.
I am convinced that implementation of the Climate Leadership & Community Protection Act (Climate Act) net-zero mandates will do more harm than good if the future electric system relies only on wind, solar, and energy storage because of reliability and affordability risks. I have followed the Climate Act since it was first proposed, submitted comments on the Climate Act implementation plan, and have written over 650 articles about New York’s net-zero transition. The opinions expressed in this article do not reflect the position of any of my previous employers or any other organization I have been associated with, these comments are mine alone. I acknowledge the use of Perplexity AI to generate summaries and references included in this document.
Background
NYSERDA’s renewable procurement role looks like a neutral administrative function on paper, but it has turned into a highly centralized process that papers over the practical risks of New York’s climate agenda while shifting cost and execution risk onto ratepayers. The Clean Energy Standard and subsequent orders anoint NYSERDA as the “central clean energy procurement agency,” steadily increasing its annual targets even as an uncomfortable share of its contracted portfolio never makes it to commercial operation. That structure suits the Hochul Administration and activists because it allows big press releases about “nation‑leading” awards while the messy details of cancellations, repricing, and cost escalation disappear into a complex tangle of Renewable Energy Credits (REC) and Offshore Wind Renewable Energy Credits (OREC} contracts.
To its credit, NYSERDA is fairly candid in some filings and interviews about underlying structural problems. There can be a three‑ to six‑year lag between a bid and the start of a contract during which global cost conditions can swing wildly. A bid that looked “cheapest” in year one can be hopelessly underwater by the time a project is ready to build, at which point everyone faces an ugly choice between swallowing higher costs or losing the project. Instead of rethinking this model, the state has chosen to pile on larger annual procurement targets and give NYSERDA more discretion to tweak terms, hoping better central planning will overcome siting bottlenecks, NYISO interconnection constraints, and macroeconomic headwinds.
While NYSERDA has admitted in some instances that there are issues with renewable procurements, they have not provided a detailed assessment of the programs and their status. Fred Stafford details what has happened to renewable contracts over the last three years. In short the developers threatened to cancel their projects unless NYS coughed up more money. He also has compiled the first comprehensive look at what happened to each of the 86 projects that the renewables industry cited in its threat of cancellation.
Renewable Development Shakedown
Stafford describes what has happened in NYS:
Back in June 2023, the trade group representing New York renewables developers, Alliance for Clean Energy New York (ACE NY), warned the state that, due to post-COVID supply chain issues and inflation, their 86 wind and solar projects under development were facing cancellation. That amounted to about 7.5 GW of new power generation at risk.
Each of the projects held a contract with NYSERDA, the state’s energy procurement agency, to receive subsidies in the form of renewable energy certificates (RECs), a project revenue stream on top of the actual sales of power. Having all competed for, and won, these contracts in annual auctions between 2016 and 2021, the developers were concerned the subsidies wouldn’t yield enough return on investment for their shareholders. The developers of four offshore wind projects and the ill-fated Clean Path NY transmission project all followed suit: our competitively won subsidies need to be increased.
To remedy their financial predicament and to save the projects, ACE NY requested that the state renegotiate their contracts by adjusting the REC prices with an inflation index. If the state refused their request then many of the developers would be forced to terminate their projects. But without these projects, ACE NY argued, not only would the state’s statutory climate goals be in jeopardy, so too would its electric reliability. After all, the only significant new power generation winning investment in New York these days is renewable.
The ACE NY petition fleshes out the threat to reliability posed by the cancellation of their projects. Here’s an example: “… [D]elays in renewable energy development would only exacerbate the reliability risk already implicated in recent reports and undercut the State’s commitment to developing the resources necessary to effectively combat climate change.” NYPSC Case 15-E-0302, Petition of the Alliance for Clean Energy New York to Address Post COVID-19 Impacts on Renewable Development Economics and Contract Considerations (filed June 7, 2023, revised June 12, 2023), pp. 34-35.
New York needed the developers’ projects and therefore needed to increase their subsidies beyond the competitively determined contractual prices. The developers had the state under their thumbs and both sides knew it. Other trade groups and nonprofits that push renewable energy even backed them up in demanding inflation adjustments, as did labor unions, whose members’ livelihoods were predicated in part on building the projects.
In October 2023 the state’s Public Services Commission nonetheless voted unanimously to refuse the request for inflation adjustment to existing contracts. In a statement, ACE NY’s director Anne Reynolds painted a picture of doom and gloom. “Unfortunately, today’s action by New York is not a sign that our state is really committed to the climate change action mandates that exist in law, and it is not a day that has moved us forward in giving future generations of New Yorkers a healthier and safer environment,” she said.
But the state wanted to preserve competitive procurement as the way to develop new electricity resources at lowest cost to ratepayers. “By rejecting this relief, we signal to every vendor that our contracts, our commitments are worth the paper they are written on,” PSC Chair Rory Christian stated at the time. “We signal that ratepayer funds are not an unlimited piggy bank for anyone’s disposal.”
Instead, the PSC ordered a new, expedited 2023 auction for renewables subsidies, held shortly before the regularly scheduled 2024 auction. The new auctions also included an optional inflation adjustment index that would apply to the final strike price once the project was finished with construction. This was a major ask from the ACE NY petition, and they largely got it. Any of those 86 projects that wouldn’t pencil for their investors under existing contracts could be cancelled, and developers could simply re-bid for subsidies in the new auction. Since they’re organized politically into a trade group that presses the state on the need for higher subsidies, they could be sure that the subsidies in the new auctions, a result of all their competitive bids, would be higher.
And that’s exactly what happened: a majority of these projects’ developers ultimately cancelled their contracts, re-bid in the subsequent auctions, won even higher subsidies from ratepayers, and continued with the projects.
The fate of the offshore wind projects that issued the same demand is better understood, given the smaller count. Each of the four cancelled their contracts and two of them won contracts for higher prices than what they’d won back in the 2018 auction. Empire Wind 1 gained a 27% increase in its subsidy, while Sunrise Wind scored a 32% increase. See Table 5 in this research on offshore wind for a clear presentation of the New York offshore wind solicitations timeline and increase in strike prices. Hansen, Tyler A., et al. “Institutional learning in the energy transition: The case of offshore wind in the United States.”
Contract Tracking Analysis
As is the case with anything associated with NYSERDA documentation for the Climate Act there is NYSERDA data available but getting it all together is not straight forward. I cannot over-emphasize my admiration of the work Stafford did to put together a spreadsheet documenting the fate of the 86 projects. He explains:
Projects show up with slightly different names, perhaps different developers, in periodic reports. One must use their NYISO interconnection queue positions and their state siting cases, both of which are included in state data, to track their progression over time.
Even determining the actual list of 86 projects requires some footwork, as ACE NY’s petition didn’t list them out.4 ACE NY characterized the 86 projects as the subset of the 117 Tier 1 land-based wind and solar contracts, from 2016 to 2021 procurements, that were considered “Under Development” as of June 2023. See Table 14, NYPSC Case 15-E-0302, Petition of the Alliance for Clean Energy New York to Address Post COVID-19 Impacts on Renewable Development Economics and Contract Considerations (filed June 7, 2023, revised June 12, 2023), Attachment A, pp. 23.Because NYSERDA’s data hides earlier snapshots, I had to rely on lucky Archive.org snapshots of it to reconstruct that list. They’re all the land-based wine and solar Tier 1 projects from 2016 through 2021 auctions that were, at the time of the June 2023 petition, still listed as under development. See the “project roster” tab in my spreadsheet.
Results Overview
Stafford summarizes the results:
Of the 86 wind and solar projects that ACE NY demanded higher subsidies for, totaling 7.5 GW, a majority of that capacity, 4.1 GW, consisted of projects that eventually re-bid and won contracts in the subsequent auctions that NYSERDA ran.
- 20 of them (2.0 GW) won contracts, at much higher prices (see next section), in the late 2023 auction.
- 18 of them (2.1 GW) won contracts in the 2024 auction, whose price outcomes are not yet public.
- 8 of them (650 MW) submitted bids for contracts in the 2025 auction, which is still being evaluated.
- 6 of them (357 MW) continued to completion on their original NYSERDA contracts.
- 34 of them (2.4 GW) were simply abandoned by their developers, so far.
The ones that won contracts in 2023 scored subsidies that were 20 to 64% higher
He explains that the project status is still evolving:
Note that we can’t argue yet that a majority of the 86 projects won contracts after rebidding. The 2025 procurement auction is currently ongoing, so we don’t know which of the 8 projects from the petition set will actually win contracts based on their bids. In the 2023 auction, 48 of the 86 submitted bids but only 20 won, and in the 2024 auction, 25 of the remaining 86 submitted bids but only 18 won.
Discussion
The NYSERDA bidding process is rigged against consumers. While PSC Chair Rory Christian said that “We signal that ratepayer funds are not an unlimited piggy bank for anyone’s disposal.” The facts show that the renewable energy lobby led by ACE-NY blackmailed NYS into re-bidding renewable energy contracts and that when the contracts were re-bid the piggy bank was cracked open. The lawmaker advocates for the Climate Act did not require a feasibility analysis to determine whether an electric system that relies on wind, solar, and energy storage can maintain current reliability and affordability standards. Instead they opened up NYS to renewable developers to build as much as they can, as fast as they can and in the process documented By Stafford essentially guaranteed rates of return that represent a regressive tax on all utility bills.
NYSERDA’s procurement responsibilities are not a neutral back‑office function; they define how risk, cost, and accountability are distributed across the entire Climate Act build‑out. By keeping so much of the action behind the curtain of complex contracts, the current setup enables a steady stream of “bold” announcements about new renewable and offshore wind awards, even as the roster of operating projects grows more slowly and the affordability and reliability implications become harder to ignore. That gap between promises and projects is not a surprise failure of an otherwise sound system; it is an entirely predictable outcome of a procurement model that prioritizes optics and statutory compliance over realistic timelines, durable contracts, and transparent evaluation of costs and benefits.
Conclusion
Stafford concludes:
The whole point of moving from utility monopoly to competitive markets for electricity generation was to lower costs by putting project risk onto investors and not onto ratepayers. Here we have a fully competitive procurement system and yet the investors managed to collectively exert some political pressure and shift the project risk back onto ratepayers. All it took was canceling their contracts, waiting for later auction processes, and acting collectively to bid much higher prices for those subsidies.
That’s because New York’s electricity system is not some testbed of pure competition, pure price signals, and autonomous, uncoordinated agents. The state has a grid that desperately needs new generation and it has climate goals that desperately need new renewable projects. The renewables developers have demonstrated their capacity to work collectively, through ACE NY, to push a narrative about their common industrial and financial situation. Of course it’s in large part true: COVID did create major new supply chain snarls and inflationary pressures.
But unlike in the old electricity market, where investment in generation came from the state’s utilities, the New York Public Services Commission has no corporate books to look at, no ability to regulate profits to ensure that investors aren’t making out like bandits. Instead, they can only trust the developers and read the tea leaves of the market, and hope that these iterations of competitive procurement aren’t producing huge windfalls for the projects’ ultimate investors. Maybe there was something important lost in that old way of doing things.
Pragmatic Environmentalist of New York 