The New York Public Service Commission has denied the New York Power Authority’s petition to grant the Clean Path New York transmission project priority status, finding that the utility did not demonstrate it would relieve congestion (20-E-0197).
Instead, the PSC said, NYPA relied “on a recitation of the state’s future needs for renewable generation and the presence of a significant amount of proposed projects in the NYISO interconnection queue to justify designating the project as a” priority transmission project (PTP).
“NYPA does not provide any evidence of existing congestion and does not even meet the standard … for establishing a need to unbottle renewable resources,” the PSC wrote in its Aug. 14 ruling. “This approach overlooks the [PSC’s] emphasis” in its criteria for identifying PTPs “on the need to unbottle existing generation, and therefore misses the mark.”
The PSC noted that recent NYISO studies and the Coordinated Grid Planning Process do not show Clean Path being needed “expeditiously.” It cited the ISO’s 2023-2042 System and Resource Outlook, which found that Clean Path would reach only 47% utilization by 2040.
“Even if we assume the project is technically capable of meeting future needs, designating it as a PTP now would mean charging ratepayers for transmission facilities that will not begin conducting significant amounts of generation until a point in the future that may be two decades away,” the PSC wrote.
Clean Path originally was an $11 billion project that included transmission and renewable generation components. In 2024, NYPA terminated Clean Path’s renewable energy certificate by mutual agreement with the New York State Energy Research and Development Authority. In February 2025, it submitted an updated petition for the transmission portion that came in about $5.2 billion. (See NYPA Argues Clean Path Potential Benefits Outweigh Cost.)
The PSC found that Clean Path could not be justified as a near-term solution to the ongoing reliability issues affecting New York City because NYPA’s petition did not identify any new renewable generation that would be delivered through it.
“The record does not show that the project will deliver significant amounts of generation output to the New York City grid until the 2040s,” the PSC wrote. “If reliability issues arise in the 2030-2035 time frame, the project would not provide a solution.”
The project would have included 178 miles of HVDC line between upstate New York and Queens.
The PSC broadly agreed with NYPA that new transmission is necessary but that projects based on “generation to be built in the future” do not rise to the same urgency as unbottling existing generation. The commission also rejected NYPA’s argument that the existing planning processes take too long to develop a solution to New York’s reliability issues.
