In 2022 California decided to keep PG&E's Diablo Canyon plant running past its planned 2025 retirement. The bill has come due in three places: the U.S. Treasury, the state general fund, and every utility customer in California — including customers of two other utilities who get nothing from the plant.

New York got here first. In 2016 the Public Service Commission created "Zero-Emission Credits" — a surcharge on every electric bill in the state, paid to the owner of the four upstate reactors: Ginna in Ontario (Wayne County), FitzPatrick, and Nine Mile Point 1 and 2. All four now belong to Constellation Energy.¹⁶

Ginna has been bailed out before

Wayne County ratepayers have seen this movie. In 2014, with low-cost natural gas undercutting it, Ginna's owner (then Exelon) said the plant had lost more than $100 million since 2012 and would close unless RG&E customers paid to keep it open. The utility asked for $17.5 million a month; the PSC-approved "Reliability Support Services Agreement" settled at roughly $15 million a month — about $175 million a year — paid by RG&E customers from April 2015 to March 2017, adding about 4% to a residential bill and 1.5–9% to businesses. NYISO then found the grid didn't need Ginna past March 2017; the payments ended only because the statewide ZEC surcharge took over the next month.¹²⁴ Twice in a decade, the same plant, the same argument, the same payer. When the plant loses money the public covers it; when it makes money the owner keeps it. This is the market privatizing the gains and socializing the losses.

What Ginna means here

Ginna is a 580 MW plant with about 357 direct jobs and a 10-year PILOT agreement worth $51.5 million total to Wayne Central schools, the county, and the Town of Ontario — an agreement that steps down from $7.5M a year in 2019–20 to $2.25M in 2028–29.^{27 28} Its federal license expires in September 2029; Constellation has applied to run it to 2049, and said that depends on the ZEC extension.²⁹ Nothing in this brief proposes shutting Ginna down tomorrow. The question is where the next public dollar goes — and whether it should go to a company that just told Wall Street it expects "combined market plus ZEC revenue" of $115.75 per MWh by 2049.²⁴

Lazard's annual levelized-cost study is the industry's standard yardstick. Unsubsidized, in dollars per megawatt-hour, for plants built today:^{30 31}

The one new nuclear plant America has actually finished this century is the benchmark: Vogtle 3 & 4 in Georgia was estimated at $14 billion in 2008 and finished in 2024 at about $35 billion, seven years late — roughly $15,000 per kilowatt. Georgia Power customers pay about $14.39 more per month for it.^{32 33} Utility-scale solar installed in 2024 cost about $1,600–1,900 per kilowatt; onshore wind about $1,900; a four-hour battery about $1,340.^{34 35}

Solar's true cost includes a lower capacity factor — in New York, about 17–19% versus Ginna's 94–99% — so the honest per-kilowatt-hour comparison favors solar by a smaller margin than the per-kilowatt one. That is what Lazard's numbers above already account for, and new nuclear still costs two to four times as much per unit of energy.^{36 21}

Paid twice for the same fuel

Here is how the waste bill lands on taxpayers. The industry supported the Nuclear Waste Policy Act of 1982, a bipartisan bill signed by President Reagan, which made the federal government responsible for taking every utility's spent fuel starting January 31, 1998. In return, utilities collected a fee from their customers and paid it into a federal Nuclear Waste Fund — which now holds about $49.5 billion of ratepayer money.^{125 126} When 1998 came and no repository existed, the same companies sued the government for breach of contract and won. But the courts also ruled that the Waste Fund can be spent only on building a repository, so the damages come instead from the U.S. Treasury's Judgment Fund — ordinary taxpayer money: $12.2 billion paid so far, $500–800 million more every year, and $38–45 billion projected as long as the fuel sits where it is.^{44 127} Ratepayers paid once into a fund that can't be touched; taxpayers pay again, every year, for the same casks — and every new reactor adds to a pile that has no destination. That is the contract the nuclear industry wrote, and it is why "the government will take the waste" should never again be accepted as an answer. In the industry this has a name: cost externalization — make someone else pay for what you don't want to cover. It is another form of privatizing the gains and socializing the losses. This is the market privatizing the gains and socializing the losses.

Installed capital cost is the fairest way to answer "what could we buy?" Using 2024–2026 U.S. installed costs and New York capacity factors, each $1 billion of public money buys, outright and owned by the public:^{34 35 51 52 53 54}

The battery race we are losing

Storage is what turns cost-effective solar into round-the-clock power, and it is the fastest-growing energy market on earth. Stationary storage was a $67 billion global market in 2025 and is projected to reach $526 billion by 2035.⁵⁷ China built "well over 80%" of the world's batteries last year; the United States has about 5% of global cell capacity.^{58 59} In 2025, for the first time, more U.S. battery-factory investment was cancelled ($11B) than announced ($8B), after Washington rolled back the manufacturing credits and stacked tariffs of up to 156% on Chinese cells.⁵⁹ Chinese storage makers shipped 298 GWh of orders overseas in the first half of 2026 — up 83% — while North American orders collapsed to about 5 GWh.⁶⁰ Every public dollar New York routes into nuclear credits for a company buying back its own stock is a dollar not building the storage, solar, and manufacturing jobs that the rest of the world is racing to build.

Batteries belong at more than the substation. Put them in homes, on farms, in schools and in town and county buildings, and a distributed system does two things a central plant can't: it keeps the lights, the well pump and the furnace running for the hours or days after an ice storm or a lake-effect blizzard takes the lines down, and it builds the local market for a product the whole world is racing to make. Every public dollar we route into nuclear credits is a dollar not spent creating the demand that brings that manufacturing here. America designing and building those batteries — and leading the world in it — is what keeps America great. As John F. Kennedy put it in 1962: we do these things "not because they are easy, but because they are hard."

The Diablo Canyon and ZEC stories have one thing in common: the public takes the risk and the shareholders take the return — the gains privatized, the losses socialized. Anyone who calls public power "socialism" should look at who has been paying the nuclear industry's bills for forty years: every taxpayer, so a very few can capitalize. Public power flips that: the public takes the risk and keeps the return.

Fairport's advantage isn't magic: it buys NYPA hydropower at about a penny a kilowatt-hour and charges a flat $4.67 delivery fee, while RG&E — now a subsidiary of Spain's Iberdrola, which earned €6.3 billion in 2025 — charges $22 a month plus 5.3¢/kWh for delivery, and is asking the PSC for a 26% electric increase ($33/month).^{61 64 65} The PSC fined RG&E $8 million this year for failing customer-service standards two years running, and its 2025 management audit found the company couldn't reliably say which of its 13 affiliates costs were going to.^{66 67}

New York already has the tool. The Build Public Renewables Act (2023) directs NYPA to build and own renewables; NYPA has a 5.5 GW plan and $1.2 billion allocated through 2029, with output from its first solar project going straight to low-income bill credits.^{68 69} The shortfall is money and urgency: as of July 2026, not one BPRA project had broken ground.⁷⁰ A single year of ZEC money would triple NYPA's renewables budget — and that record is exactly why the money has to come with a mandate: build it here, and own or contract it here.

Locally, solar means PILOT payments to towns and schools ($1,700–5,000 per MW per year is the NYSERDA benchmark in RG&E territory), lease income that keeps family farms in the family, and — when the array is publicly owned — power sold to residents at cost. Wayne County's IDA has already approved a 5 MW farm in Arcadia; Walworth is reviewing another. Cornell finds 84% of New York's solar-suitable land is farmland, and that sheep grazing, berries, and leafy greens work under panels.^{71 72 73}

Who really took the money

For forty years we have been told who is taking our money: the immigrant, the family on assistance, the neighbor who won't work. Look at the receipts on this page instead. The nuclear bailouts alone — $4 billion in surcharges, $12 billion in taxpayer damages, a $1.4 billion "gift" in California, $175 million a year for Ginna — went to a handful of multinational corporations posting record profits. The same pattern runs through our health care bills: a New York family now pays $27,188 a year for employer coverage, the highest in the country, while UnitedHealth made $19 billion in operating earnings last year and Webster's school health plan was told its premium could jump more than 50% — a cost that lands straight on the property-tax levy.^{128 129 130} That is where the money went. It was never the people we were told to resent; it was the corporations and the politicians they pay for, pointing at someone else while their own hands were in the cookie jar. Private gains, public losses, and a story about who to blame so we would look the other way. Stop listening to the story. Follow the money.

Let every resident produce — and get paid

Right now a Wayne County homeowner, farm or school that wants to make more power than it uses runs into a wall of rules the utilities asked for. New York caps a home system at 25 kW and a farm system on a residential meter at 100 kW.⁸⁸ NY-Sun, the state incentive program nearly every installer uses, will not fund a home system sized above 110% of last year's usage — build bigger and you lose the rebate.⁸⁹ Since 2022 every new rooftop system pays a Customer Benefit Contribution of $1.31 per kW every month in RG&E territory — about $126 a year on a typical 8 kW roof — a charge the PSC adopted after the utilities argued that solar owners shift costs onto their neighbors.⁹⁰⁹¹ And the credits you earn for extra power never turn into money: under today's rules they roll forward for twenty years and expire; under the old rules you were paid once a year at the wholesale price, a few cents.⁹²⁸⁸ The message from Albany is: make enough for yourself, and not a watt more.

Other states treat a resident's surplus as a product worth buying. Massachusetts pays solar owners for every kilowatt-hour they generate, not just the surplus, for 20 years on top of net metering; its first-round rate was 31–34¢/kWh, worth about $1,500 a year to a typical home, with a 6¢ bonus for farms that keep growing under the panels.⁹⁶⁹⁷ Rhode Island runs a feed-in tariff that mails small producers a check at 31.55¢/kWh for 15 years.¹⁰² Connecticut lets a homeowner sell all their output at a fixed 32.9¢/kWh for 20 years.¹⁰³ Vermont pays dairy farms 8¢/kWh for digester power through Green Mountain Power's Cow Power and up to 19.9¢/kWh under its farm-methane standard offer.¹⁰⁴ Colorado raised its sizing cap from 120% to 200% of usage in 2021 so families could size for the EV and heat pump they'll buy next; Minnesota allows 120%.¹⁰⁵¹⁰⁶ New York's own numbers show what's possible: Avon Central School District's 1.5 MW array saves about $64,000 a year.¹⁰⁷

The savings elsewhere are not theoretical. Massachusetts towns that buy power together through municipal aggregation have beaten the utility's default rate 79% of the time, saving $138–165 per household per year — Boston alone credits its program with about $200 per resident per year and $260 million since 2021.⁹⁸⁹⁹ Massachusetts' 52 publicly owned municipal light plants typically charge about half the investor-owned rate: Belmont Light bills 11¢/kWh against Eversource's 25.8¢.¹⁰⁰ And its Green Communities program has put more than $191 million into 298 towns for efficiency and local generation.¹⁰¹

How to make it better in New York. Amend Public Service Law §66-j to bar any usage-based sizing cap and raise the residential limit so a family can build for the electric car and heat pump they will own in 2030 (Colorado's 200% rule). Exempt systems of 25 kW and under from the Customer Benefit Contribution. Pay out surplus credits at the retail or Value-Stack price instead of letting them expire — S1553, which passed the Senate 52–3 in April, is the vehicle and needs an Assembly sponsor to strengthen it.⁹³ Create a New York feed-in tariff on the Rhode Island model so a farm, a school district or a homeowner with a big south roof can sell surplus power under a 15-to-20-year contract, and let a farm pool its meters. Sign the SUNNY Act so a renter can plug a panel into a balcony outlet.⁹⁴ Give host towns first call on discounted community-solar credits under the Community SOLAR Act.⁹⁵ Do that, and solar, wind, digesters and small hydro stop being a way to cut a bill and become a second or third income for any farm, school or household in the 130th.

Put solar over the parking lots

The 130th has thousands of acres of asphalt — school lots, plazas along Ridge Road and Route 104, county and town buildings, the Webster and Wayne Central campuses, church lots, park-and-rides. A canopy over a parking lot makes power, shades cars in July, keeps snow off them in January, carries the EV chargers, and uses no farmland. New York has already proved it: JFK's new carport is 12 MW with a 7.5 MW battery, feeding 6 MW of community solar to low-income Queens households; the Rochester airport put a 75,000-square-foot canopy over its lot in 2017; White Plains has 6.8 MW over four garages; Maryknoll in Ossining runs 874 kW over 12 canopies.^108109110 Elsewhere, Rutgers covers its lots with 23 MW and calls the projects "cash-positive from the get-go"; Michigan State's 10.5 MW over 5,000 spaces saves more than $10 million over 25 years and was built specifically to keep panels off farmland; the Cincinnati Zoo's two canopies save it $300,000 a year.^111112113 France now requires canopies on every lot over about 1,500 square meters — 7 to 11 GW of new capacity — and a Yale study found Connecticut's parking lots alone could supply 37% of that state's electricity.¹¹⁴¹¹⁵

Canopies cost more per watt than a field ($3.62/W versus $2.96, per EnergySage) but they pay for something a field can't: grid capacity where the load is.¹¹⁶ Con Ed's Brooklyn-Queens program spent $200 million on local solar, storage and efficiency to defer a billion-dollar substation; NYSEG and RG&E's own Stillwater battery put off a transformer upgrade by ten years.¹¹⁷¹¹⁸ A canopy with a battery at a Webster plaza or a Wayne County school is exactly that kind of "non-wires alternative" — it adds capacity to our end of the grid without a rate case. Albany's job: pass S8696 (canopies on 75% of SUNY parking by 2040) and A4701 (canopies on new state-funded lots), extend NY-Sun's canopy adder — currently offered only downstate — to upstate, and let NYPA finance canopies on school and municipal lots owned by the districts and towns that host them.¹¹⁹

New kinds of wind, honestly assessed

A new generation of propeller-less wind units is aimed at rooftops and industrial sites where a tall turbine can't go. Aeromine's motionless rooftop airfoils, developed with Texas Tech and Sandia National Laboratories and piloted at a BASF plant in Michigan, claim 50% more energy than rooftop solar for the same cost and are built to survive 120-mph-plus winds; Vortex Bladeless in Spain oscillates instead of spinning.¹²⁰ They matter here because a conventional turbine shuts down at about 56 mph — right at the gale-to-storm line off Lake Ontario — while these designs are engineered to keep running through weather that idles blades.¹²¹ The honest caveat: none has yet published an independently certified power curve, several "amplified wind" ventures have failed, and no vendor lists a price per kW.¹²² The right posture for the 130th is a pilot, not a purchase: a NYSERDA-funded test on a county building or a Wayne County farm, with the data made public, so we know before we spend.

The work in Albany — street power, people power, electoral power

None of this happens because one Assemblymember files a bill. It happens when three things push in the same direction: organized residents in the district, a coalition in the Capitol, and a member with the votes and the stubbornness to carry it. Here is the work, and who does it.

Street power gets the town board vote and the PSC comments. People power builds the coalition that outlasts one session. Electoral power puts a vote in the Assembly that can't be lobbied away. The 130th needs all three, and this is the plan to use them.