Energy Bills To Go Nuclear Under Hochul’s ‘Anti-Affordability’ Plan

FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE: Monday, January 12, 2026

Energy Bills To Go Nuclear Under Hochul’s ‘Anti-Affordability’ Plan

New Yorkers call on Hochul to include $200 million for public renewables in budget

Albany, New York – Governor Kathy Hochul is expected to announce she will direct New York State to plan for 5 gigawatts (GW) of costly nuclear energy, a massive 4GW expansion from the 1GW she proposed last summer.

A report from the Penn Center for Science, Sustainability, and the Media analyzing equivalent projects found that Hochul’s plan to rely on costly new nuclear and gas plants for an increasing portion of the state’s energy would result in massive energy bill increases for New Yorkers. The only commercial reactor project built this century, Plant Vogtle in Georgia, was “the most expensive power plant ever built on earth.”

The support for an increase in nuclear power comes as Hochul’s New York Power Authority (NYPA) backtracked on its strategic plan to implement the Build Public Renewables Act (BPRA) last year, approving a costly 1.5 gigawatt(GW) cut to the amount of renewables it plans to build.

The Public Power NY Coalition released the following statement: If a governor wanted to make it as hard for New Yorkers’ to afford our energy bills as possible, their plan would look like Kathy Hochul’s. Dropping gigawatts worth of affordable and reliable public renewables while pushing gigawatts of the costliest and least likely to get built form of energy possible is just another way to enrich wealthy corporations at the expense of our wallets and futures. Hochul should fund public renewables, not engineer her own private energy crisis.

New Yorkers are calling on Governor Hochul to include $200 million for public renewables in her executive budget proposal this year and to build the 15GW of public renewables necessary for the state to meet its legally mandated climate targets.

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Note to the editor:

About Public Power NY

As chronicled in the new book “Organize or Burn.” Public Power NY is a movement fighting to ensure New York effectively carries out the Build Public Renewables Act by building 15 Gigawatts of public renewables by 2030. Hailed as the first statewide Green New Deal law, BPRA was written by PPNY and passed in 2023 thanks to four years of organizing by a multiracial, multi-generational movement of climate and advocacy organizations, labor unions representing millions of New Yorkers and tens of thousands of New Yorkers who have taken action from upstate, downstate, and everywhere in between. With federal climate action off the table, BPRA has enabled NY to not just play defense against Trump, but lead the way the way FDR created NYPA to do.