Hochul’s Budget Missing Key to Lowering Energy Bills: Public Renewables

FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE: Tuesday, January 20, 2026

Hochul’s Budget Missing Key to Lowering Energy Bills: Public Renewables

Albany, New York – Governor Kathy Hochul’s executive budget proposal did not include any funds for the New York Power Authority (NYPA) or municipalities to build public renewables. Thousands of New Yorkers and elected officials have called on Hochul to include $200 million for public renewables in her budget proposal to address the energy affordability crisis.

Alex Patterson, Campaign Coordinator for Public Power NY, said: “Hochul’s budget is a reflection of her anti-affordability energy plan, which doubles down on expensive fracked gas and nuclear power. New Yorkers are struggling to pay their energy bills, and building public renewables is the only solution to provide clean, low-cost energy. New Yorkers need $200 million for public renewables and a commitment to build 15GW of them–not more pollution and even higher bills.”

A report from the Penn Center for Science, Sustainability, and the Media analyzing Hochul’s energy plan found that it would result in massive increases on already unaffordable energy bills for New Yorkers. The only commercial nuclear reactor project built this century, Plant Vogtle in Georgia, was “the most expensive power plant ever built on earth” and Hochul’s proposal for 5 gigawatts(GW) is more nuclear than has been built in the entire United States in the last 30 years.

NYPA needs to build 15GW of public renewables for the state to meet its legally mandated climate targets and lower energy bills. Instead of leading the nation, NYPA recently backtracked on its strategic plan to implement the Build Public Renewables Act (BPRA), approving a costly 1.5 gigawatt(GW) cut to the amount of renewables it plans to build.

A newly introduced bill, the Public Power Democracy Act, would make sure NYPA is capable of leading the nation to provide affordable, clean energy to New Yorkers by expanding the board of trustees to 17, making it more representative of key stakeholders and constituencies impacted by its work.

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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.