State officials are banking on New York being the future of semiconductor research and manufacturing. While investments in the space give the state some juice, it stands to squeeze a lot too.
An early estimate from the Empire Center showed the expected Micron facility will eventually use enough energy to power the state’s second-biggest city – Buffalo – for more than six years.
The question now is can New York’s power grid keep up with that demand?
When we flip a light switch on or turn on the A/C this summer, we don’t often think about how that energy is supplied, or how much power is in that supply. But that could change soon. New York’s electric grid is undergoing a dramatic transformation.
“We are trying to essentially clean up the grid, replace a lot of the high-emitting resources, high-polluting resources, with cleaner, renewable resources,” said Richard Dewey, the president and CEO of New York Independent System Operator, an organization dedicated to planning a reliable electric grid.
As part of that clean-grid initiative, New York is phasing out what some have called finite power sources (like fossil fuels) quicker than it can implement new ones (like wind and solar energy).
“Because of geopolitical and economic forces, we’re not building as many renewables as we had hoped we should,” Dewey explained. “So that margin that we have, the sort of surplus, is shrinking. So that leads to tight conditions on the grid.”
As the supply shrinks, the demand only continues to grow.
“Whether people convert to electric vehicles, people convert their houses from fossil fuel heat to electric heat, and we’ve seen tremendous economic development from, you know, new factories, new data centers, which is really just going to drive up demand,” Dewey said, “And that’s where we’ve got to make sure we’ve got the right kind of resources available.”
New York Independent System Operator’s 2025 Power Trends Report predicts thousands of additional megawatts needed across the state by 2035. A little over a thousand megawatts of that rising demand will come from Central New York as a result of the Micron project and the area’s coinciding population growth.
“We’re gonna need more power in the future than we have today,” Dewey said, “So we’re going to have to be sensible about the way that we have that new supply.”
The New York Power Authority said it’s working to ensure it can meet that demand.
“We will always continue to work hard to make sure that the state is ready for all opportunities that come its way, and to make sure that the lights stay on 24/7 on this grid as much as we can,” said Brian Saez, the senior vice president of Power Generation and Waterways for NYPA.
Although the state has a goal of being emissions-free by 2040, NYISO says a possible way to meet the demand now is to take some steps back and repower old fossil fuel generators.
“It might mean building new fossil fuel generation that’s cleaner and lower-emitting than some of the existing older assets,” Dewey suggested, “You know, as a bridge to that cleaner future that we all want.”
Regardless of how, something must be done to meet the growing need for power across the state.
“It is vitally important for the economic, sustainability and growth in New York state, that we prepare and are ready to meet the demands of the industry when the time comes,” Saez said.
NYISO says there’s plenty the public can do to help with the power supply when the grid is stretched thin, like safely and comfortably cutting back on AC use, doing laundry or dishes in the middle of the day and turning off anything that’s not in use, like lights or the TV.