The New York State Public Service Commission has commenced a proceeding to evaluate new energy loads from transportation and building electrification to proactively identify and develop future grid infrastructure needs.
As part of this new proceeding, the commission will direct New York’s investor-owned utilities to develop a framework for proactively planning for infrastructure needs driven by transportation and building electrification and to determine how to address today’s infrastructure needs.
“The commission is establishing a statewide, collaborative planning framework to ensure that the utilities are ready to support New Yorkers who are increasingly choosing electric vehicles and heating for their homes, business, and transportation needs,” said commission Chair Rory M. Christian. “The purpose of this effort is to identify timely electric grid upgrades to support electrification across a number of sectors of the economy.”
The rate at which consumers are electrifying buildings and vehicles has the potential to outpace the existing grid planning processes, the commission said. The new planning framework directed by the commission is designed to proactively identify grid infrastructure needs so that utilities can expand the system in a cost-effective and timely manner. The new planning framework will also ensure that the utilities leverage shared, “best-in-class” information and techniques in an effort to ensure that each utility is coordinating across geographies and service territories.
The commission stressed that an important part of the new equation is accounting for the increased load related to the electrification of vehicles, which will be “significant” and is expected to be a major driver of the load forecasts used to identify transmission and distribution upgrades in the newly established Coordinated Grid Planning Process (CGPP). The more granular and local load forecasting process developed in the proactive planning framework will complement and integrate with the CGPP. Ultimately the commission argues merging granular electric vehicle (EV) planning with the CGPP will enable it to evaluate the totality of upgrades necessary to meet the clean energy and greenhouse gas emission targets in the Climate Leadership and Community Protection Act.
The commission identified another issue: the largest and most complex utility upgrades can take over seven years to complete, while the speed at which fleet owners can order electric cars and trucks that drive such upgrades can happen in a matter of months. Thus, the commission argues that a proactive planning process is necessary to ensure the grid is future-proofed.
Adopting an approach from the transmission planning proceeding, the commission is directing the major utilities to file a proposal for a long-term coordinated planning process to study and identify necessary upgrades to support electrification. In this proposal, the utilities are expected to account for new electrification loads beyond the transportation sector, including, but not limited to, electrification of buildings, such as housing or industrial loads related to economic development that can similarly drive system upgrade needs. The commission stressed that proposals should, at a minimum, include assumptions and methods that will underlie the process, as well as identify necessary data and timelines needed to carry out the study.
Given the importance of the load forecast and demand expectations on model outputs, the commission said special attention will be given to these assumptions in the filing, including how a less granular forecast may be scaled to a given utility’s territory and load areas. The utilities’ proposals should include at least two options related to load forecast development: utilities must consider the option of relying on load forecasts developed in other proceedings, including the work produced by the CGPP, and the option of developing their own bottom-up forecast of granular electric demand, the commission said.
The commission notes that the development of integrated planning processes, along with the studies and regulatory approvals, will take a “significant amount of time.” There may be upgrades that, due to load growth expectations or construction time, need to be planned or fully constructed in advance of the implementation of the integrated planning process.
Therefore, the commission stressed that there is a need to address urgent upgrade projects on an earlier time frame, while a statewide proactive planning framework is developed. Specifically, the commission is directing the major utilities to submit filings in three months outlining the urgent upgrades required in their territories, and a filing in four months describing the needed long-term planning processes.
Overall, New York State electric grid is experiencing rapid change, including wide-ranging electrification, resource retirements, and project delays, all of which threaten reliability in the future, according to the state’s grid operator. In June, the New York Independent System Operator (NYISO) released its annual Power Trends report, which aims to address the key issues and challenges facing the electric grid.
Strong reliability margins contribute to the ability of the power system to meet peak demand or respond to sudden disturbances and avoid outages. NYISO first identified rapidly declining reliability margins in its 2021 Comprehensive Reliability Plan and restated those concerns in its 2022 Reliability Needs Assessment.
Last year, NYISO identified a reliability violation beginning in the summer of 2025 in the New York City area. The grid operator identified and announced the retention of certain peaker plants in New York City as a short-term solution to the reliability violation. Beyond 2025, NYISO found that New York City’s reliability margin would improve when the Champlain Hudson Power Express transmission line from Quebec to New York City is completed. CHPE is expected to enter service in the spring of 2026.
While NYISO identified a short-term solution to the New York City reliability violation, reliability margins are also observed to be narrowing across the grid in New York, which poses significant challenges for the electric system over the next ten years.
