The New York Power Authority has named a new executive to guide it into its expanded role as developer of large-scale renewable energy generation.

Vennela Yadhati assumed the new position of vice president of renewable project development last week, several months after passage of legislation that gave NYPA a larger role in the state’s push to carry out a clean energy transition.

She told NetZero Insider that NYPA’s first strategic plan for doing this will be formulated next year, and the process of conferring with stakeholders and state agencies on priorities for that plan is underway now, so she could not be specific about what types of projects NYPA will pursue, or where. But it will entail consensus-building, she said.

The decision to expand NYPA’s development effort grew from the push by some advocates to make the state’s energy sector more democratic and responsible to residents rather than investors. Generation and transmission development is a blend of finding the right technology for a project, convincing everyone affected by the project that it would benefit them and finding a way to pay for it. Yadhati has grounding in all three, and she expects to need it.

“How much of each is something we’ll have to figure out,” she said.

Renewable energy development, of course, is not new at all for NYPA. It was created in 1931 and is now the largest state-owned power organization in the U.S. It operates 1,400 circuit-miles of transmission, two of the largest hydropower plants in the nation and one of the largest pumped-hydro storage facilities. It even operated nuclear reactors at one time.

“NYPA has been doing large energy infrastructure forever,” Yadhati said. “I am in a fortunate and very pleasant spot right now because I can leverage all of what we have built internally.”

Yadhati is an engineer by training, first in her native Hyderabad, India, then at Missouri University. She most recently worked in development for Ørsted, and during a previous stint with NYPA, she was a distributed energy resources manager. In White Plains, where she now lives, she is a member of the city’s Planning Board and a board member of Sustainable Westchester.

All of this gives her a wide basis not only in planning projects but gathering the consensus needed to get them built. The team at NYPA and whatever private developers the agency works with will bring with them an equally varied set of skills, none of which will stand out as more valuable than the others.

“It’s not one taking priority over the other; the ultimate [combination] is consensus and community outreach and engagement,” Yadhati said.

Projects must be emissions-free; they must be acceptable to those around them; and they must be financeable.

“That is going to be key,” Yadhati said. “Because when we talk about best value and best fit, it can’t just be the environmental benefits; it has to come along with the economic sustainability as well.”

The question is posed to her: Will NYPA look for the path of least resistance? For example, the 1,160-MW pumped storage project NYPA built in the Catskill Mountains is already a half-century old, and it will still far outlast any of the battery energy storage systems being built today.

But to build new pumped storage would be an order of magnitude more difficult than to site dozens of battery systems. And one pales at the thought of trying to site a new large-scale nuclear plant in the Empire State.

Does NYPA therefore aim for batteries — or whatever technology easily can get New York closer to its statutory goals of 70% renewable electricity by 2030 and 100% zero-emissions by 2040?

“To me — part of this is coming from the engineer inside of me — they’re not competing technologies per se; they are complementary,” Yadhati said.

There is a growing need for immediate short-duration storage, and electrochemical technology meets this need, she explained. In the longer term, long-duration storage will be indispensable, and that could be hydrogen, pumped hydro, some other technology or, most likely, a combination of multiple technologies.

“They each have their own place,” Yadhati said. “That’s where I say we’re going to keep it technology-agnostic.”

The legislation that expanded NYPA’s role, the Build Public Renewables Act (BPRA), laid out a laundry list of objectives ranging from building power plants to aiding disadvantaged communities, alone or in partnership with the private sector.

The broad range of possibilities is why creating the strategic plan is the first step in the process, and one of Yadhati’s first major duties. She said there are many verbs in the directive — plan, design, develop, construct, own, operate, maintain — but they are not all binding, nor is it clear that they will have equal weight in every region or for every project.

“The conferral process will help us identify where the gaps are in the industry and what best value NYPA can offer,” she said.

Yadhati spoke to NetZero Insider on Thursday, her fourth day in the new position. She laughed at the suggestion that the job would be like herding cats — but she did not protest the comparison.

The BPRA, and the fight surrounding it, is a good illustration of the dynamics at play. It was a darling of the progressive wing of the Democratic Party that controls New York government, but initially it did not gain enough traction for passage.

Gov. Kathy Hochul (D) in her 2023-2024 budget plan included provisions derided as “BPRA Lite,” and the battle was underway, with progressives fighting for stronger measures, and private-sector energy developers opposed to even the weakened measures lobbying just as hard but unsuccessfully.

During the process, Justin Driscoll, then acting president of NYPA, was cast as insufficiently supportive of the stronger measures and was tarred to the point that the Senate refused to hold a confirmation vote on his nomination to be president. (He became president anyway, through a quirk in state law.)

New York is not unique in having a slow, complicated and expensive siting and permitting process, or a long wait for interconnection, but it often seems more so than in other states. With a strong home-rule tradition and some significant regional political differences, many stakeholders need to be pushed or coaxed to the table.

NYPA is not exempt from any of these pressures, nor does it have an endless supply of revenue like the water flowing down the Niagara River.

What it does have in its favor, Yadhati said, is a long history in the communities where it operates — it is a known commodity, whether for the 2.6-GW Niagara Power Project it brought online in 1961, or for the recent distributed solar projects it partnered on that yield a few megawatts apiece.

NYPA expects to continue with small DER projects (up to 5 MW), but the focus of this new push will be large-scale renewables that feed 20 MW or more into the wholesale market.

“The economies of scale do offer additional benefits, another thing we want to leverage and take advantage of,” she said.