Zohran Mamdani and Kathy Hochul should look to our power grid — and demand a say in the nonprofit that runs it.
For a year dominated by talk of affordability, electricity costs have not featured prominently in New York’s political debate — unlike elsewhere, like Georgia, where they upended elections this week. Events may soon change that. On the day Zohran Mamdani is sworn in as mayor, Con Edison’s proposed almost $400 annual rate hike will take effect. Both he and Gov. Kathy Hochul are opposed. With nearly 2 million city residents struggling to pay utility bills, and approaching a hundred thousand shutoffs this year alone, skyrocketing electric bills are fast becoming New York’s next cost-of-living crisis. Our leaders should be treating them as such.
If Mamdani and Hochul are serious about confronting a crisis as sprawling as this, they will need to join hands. They should start by shining a light onto the powerful institution that actually runs the state’s electric grid — the New York Independent System Operator (NYISO) — and, specifically, its lack of accountability to the communities it serves. Before rates spike again, the pair should demand reforms giving New Yorkers a real voice in its decisions, organized around a common-sense clarion call: No rate hikes without representation.
So-called grid operators play an underappreciated, behind-the-scenes role, overseeing wholesale electricity markets that determine how resources are paid and managing the power grid. Likened to air traffic controllers, they decide which plants are dispatched to meet demand and run the process for connecting new energy sources as supply.
NYISO is a private, nonprofit corporation — a product of 1990s-era deregulation that shifted grid control from utilities to nonprofits intended to be neutral market actors. In actuality, entrenched interests maintain an outsize role in NYISO’s governance, despite its formal independence. NYISO’s ultimate decision-making body is its board, and it counts as directors several former executives of utility companies in New York and across the country, as well as from other energy industry incumbents.
Directors are selected by the board itself or its external stakeholder committees. Those, too, are chock-full of incumbent industry members. Public interest advocates on these committees are even given less voting power than industry. That’s despite decade-old State proposals to reform NYISO’s governance, which failed to seriously change these dynamics.
No rate hikes without representation.
Grid operators deeply influence electricity prices and, thus, our economic security. Nearly 50,000 megawatts of clean energy projects — enough to power millions of homes — are stuck in NYISO’s process for connecting to the grid. Some have been waiting as long as six to seven years. Experts have called these interconnection queues “perhaps the biggest obstacle to deploying more renewables on the U.S. power grid.”
The Federal Energy Regulatory Commission regulates most grid operators, but the Trump administration has made little secret of its disdain for robust oversight. The State’s Public Service Commission has a more limited, and nonvoting, role.
No New Yorker facing rate hikes in the coming years should be comforted by the idea that their interests can or will be adequately protected by today’s regulators or outvoted advocates.
Instead, Mamdani and Hochul should demand reforms giving New Yorkers voting representation on NYISO’s board. It behooves the next mayor to lead this cause, because the city accounts for the majority of the state’s residents who are having difficulty paying utility bills and a third of electric demand. Yet NYISO’s governance does not reflect these stakes.
The importance of representation in addressing rising electric bills was recently demonstrated just next door. This summer, in the wake of surging prices, NYISO’s mid-Atlantic counterpart, PJM Interconnection, came under heavy criticism from elected officials. Citing an “unprecedented crisis of confidence,” a bipartisan coalition of nine governors wrote to PJM demanding that two board seats be “proposed by the states” — a call they have since reiterated.
Whether and how electric bills add to New York’s affordability crisis will be decided, in part, in a nonprofit’s boardroom.
Other states have passed laws reforming grid operator governance. Following its massive electricity blackout in 2021, and after legislators blasted the board’s “good old boys,” Texas granted its governor and top elected officials control over who selects its own grid operator’s directors.
New York’s leaders should similarly insist on a say in how NYISO is run.
Some may claim that such representation could inject politics into what should be technocratic decisions. Yet NYISO is already making value-laden choices — choices shaped by the incumbent interests privileged in its governance. Moreover, accountability need not come at the expense of qualifications and expertise.
Many factors are driving electricity prices, including demand from AI, extreme weather and Trump’s rollback of clean energy investments. Tackling this challenge will require a methodical, multipronged effort on the parts of Mamdani and Hochul, with both local and state-level reforms. But even the best policies will be blunted by a bottlenecked grid.
Accountability for our grid operator’s decisions is a necessary step on any path that leads to an affordable energy future. Rather than wait for more hikes, or blackouts, to ignite the kind of accountability crises that plagued the mid-Atlantic region and Texas, the mayor and governor should demand immediately that New Yorkers’ interests be represented on NYISO’s board.
New Yorkers have left little doubt about an affordability crisis that cannot wait. Whether and how electric bills add to it will be decided, in part, in this nonprofit’s boardroom. Leaders who take that crisis seriously should insist that New Yorkers be at the table.