This policy brief was written by Urban Green Council. Read the full brief here.

New York State’s nation-leading climate targets require an unprecedented greening of the state’s electric grid over the next two decades. The grid is now more important than ever to buildings in NYC: the emissions caps in Local Law 97 will soon make building owners accountable for carbon emissions from electricity use.

Fossil fuels dominate the current sources of NYC’s electricity. Building large-scale renewables nearby is challenging, and the current transmission bottleneck limits how much upstate clean energy makes it to NYC. In the near term the grid will also get dirtier: Indian Point nuclear facility—which historically provided a quarter of NYC’s electricity—is fully closing by April 2021.

Cleaning the grid will require dramatic changes to electricity generation, transmission and distribution to NYC buildings, all while maintaining grid reliability.

Read more on the Urban Green Council website.