Another Voice: Nuclear power solves New York's clean energy problems like no other source

Gov. Hochul has announced a major shift in New York’s energy plan, calling for the development of zero-emission baseload nuclear. Nuclear creates generational highly paid employment, has a tiny land footprint, is as safe as solar or wind, and has the lowest environmental impact of any energy source. Nuclear reactors can sit on the existing grid, unlike solar and wind which will need miles of new transmission lines. According to NYISO’s 2025 Power Trends, since 2019, four gigawatts (GW) of dispatchable high-capacity-factor resources were decommissioned while two GW of intermittent resources were added. NYISO is concerned that policy mandates undermine reliability.

The “reserve margin,” meant to buffer us from outages, has been halved, dropping from over 4,000 MW (2019) to about 2,000 MW (2