Towers
Solar moves uptown
Local Law 97 has building owners looking up. The retrofit pipeline for tower rooftops is the thickest it has ever been, and the roof is now a revenue floor.
Est. 2026
Lead story · Transmission
The line under the river
The Champlain Hudson Power Express, a high-voltage line running some 340 miles from Quebec, is due to land at a converter station in Astoria. When it does, the city's skyline will be sipping hydropower through a cable most New Yorkers will never see.
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Stories
Grid
Reading the peak
A summer weekday in the city draws a skyline of its own on the load chart. We traced the shape of a peak hour, what the new transmission is expected to shave off it, and what that could mean for summer power bills.
Wind
Empire Wind finds a pier
The South Brooklyn Marine Terminal is being rebuilt as a staging port for offshore wind. A working waterfront is about to work on the fleet.
Policy
How we work
Where our numbers come from, what we count as fact, and why we would rather hedge than guess.
The Grid
A peak shaped like the skyline
Demand in the five boroughs climbs with the afternoon and crests early evening, when towers full of apartments, servers, and air-conditioners all ask at once. The figure shows the shape of a summer weekday: hour by hour, the load rises like a set of towers, holds, and steps back down after midnight.
New wires change that drawing. The two big transmission projects now being built toward the city, together on the order of 2.5 gigawatts, are expected to flatten the worst of the evening climb; the diagram below routes them the way the old subway map would.
After Dark
The night shift of the grid
Between midnight and five in the morning the city runs on a fraction of its peak, and that is when the grid does its quiet work: charging what will be needed at six, balancing what was overbuilt for three, and, increasingly, taking delivery from whatever the wind and water happened to make that day.
Look at the skyline after midnight: every lit window is a meter still turning.
Routes
Two new lines on the map
The Champlain Hudson Power Express comes down from Quebec, much of it buried, crossing Lake Champlain and the Hudson before landing in Astoria. Clean Path NY runs from upstate wind and solar down to the city along its own buried corridor. Neither looks like much from the sidewalk. Both are shown here the way the city draws its subways.
The full story of the Quebec line, with sources, runs as this week's lead story.
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How We Work
Where our numbers come from
NYC Renewable Energy is a small independent publication. We cover the clean-power transition in the five boroughs: the wires and substations, the retrofits on the towers, the wind fleet off the coast, and the laws that push all three.
We write only what we can point to. Figures come from public regulators, grid operators, and project developers, and when those sources disagree or have not updated, we say so in the story rather than round up. Nothing on this page is an advertisement, and nothing here is investment advice.
- Sources first · regulators, ISOs, utilities
- Hedged numbers · "roughly", "at last report"
- Illustrative figures labeled · never passed as data
- No invented quotes · no invented dockets
- Plain language · jargon explained on first use
Latest entry · Policy
Reading Con Ed's Rate Case Without the Press Release
A rate case is where next year's delivery charge gets argued in public.