New York hasn't built serious grid infrastructure in 25 years, and now it's trying to close that gap while keeping bills affordable and managing demand that keeps shifting beneath it.
Kim Harriman served as a New York state regulator for 16 years, including time as an administrative law judge and later as general counsel overseeing 27 attorneys at the Department of Public Service. She also worked at the New York Power Authority and in the Governor's Office.
Harriman joined Avangrid in 2020 and was named Deputy CEO in June 2025, overseeing government relations and regulatory affairs for the company's electric and gas utilities in New York, Connecticut, Massachusetts, and Maine.
At a moment where energy is everything, Harriman joined the Standard & Works Show to make the case for investing now.
Zach Silber
Editor-in-Chief
Standard & Works
1. 💵 The Affordability Math
Harriman starts with the number that dominates every rate case: the bill itself.
Delivery – poles, wires, people – is 30 to 40% of a customer's bill. Power itself, the electrons, is another 40%. The rest is the makeup of public policy.
Her case for investment: spending more on the delivery side pulls the price down on the supply side, because more transmission capacity lets power move from where it's cheap to where it's needed.
The proof point is NECEC, the high-voltage line Avangrid built from the Canadian border into Maine. The line has produced a $40 swing in the unit price of energy, visible in real-time on regional pricing maps.
"You invest your way to affordability," Harriman said. "That's what we're focused on."
2. 🏗️ The Backlog
Two substations anchor Avangrid's current rate case, and Harriman uses them to make a broader argument about what deferred maintenance looks like in reality.
South Perry substation, in service since the 1950s, and Meyer, a substation from 1948, together serve almost 20,000 customers.
The case for funding the rebuild: reliability for a customer base shifting to heat pumps and EVs, a stronger pitch to businesses evaluating a location, thousands of union and contract jobs, local procurement, and property tax revenue for host municipalities once a fully depreciated asset gets rebuilt.
"We're stewards of our customer dollar," Harriman said. "Every dollar we propose for an investment has got a need, it's got a value, and we're showing the purpose of it."
3. 🔌 The Transmission Gap
Harriman traces the region's underinvestment back two decades, and points to Texas as a state that got it right.
The Northeast spent the early 2000s living off two windfalls: selling utility generation plants at roughly 2.5x book value, with proceeds passed back to customers as rate cuts, and the discovery of Marcellus Shale gas, which flooded the market and pushed prices down.
"We haven't done a lot in 25 years," Harriman said.
Texas took a different path.
A policy called CREZ built transmission capacity across the Lonestar State, making it possible to site power and move it where it was needed.
The result: Texas now has more wind and solar capacity than any other state – a byproduct of infrastructure planning, not ideology.
New York’s Public Service Commission has since ordered a coordinated transmission build-out across the state’s utilities, with costs shared because the benefits cross territory lines.
"The forethought of investing early in the infrastructure that is needed to move the electrons in a cost-effective manner is what distinguishes some areas of the country from the Northeast," Harriman said. "But here's the good news: we're on that path in New York."
4. 🖥️ The Data Center Reality
The gap between delivery and supply is now the live policy fight, and data centers are its sharpest edge.
We asked Harriman to walk us through the reality of what data centers mean to bills and energy planning.
Standard interconnection rules across New York ISO and PJM alike require a new large customer – a data center, a chip plant – to pay for any grid upgrade needed to prevent a negative impact on the system.
Those rules never addressed the supply side: what happens to prices when that same customer starts drawing 100 megawatts more. "We didn't have a policy that addressed the consumption of the supply side and its impact on customers," Harriman explained.
The fix now under discussion: "bring your own generation" – new large loads build power on-site or contract for it directly, rather than drawing off the shared grid.
The catch, per Harriman: contracting for power pulled off the merchant market still tightens supply and raises prices for everyone else.
"Everybody is working on trying to create solutions that allows a very needed part of the economy, global economy, which we want to grow in the US, to continue while protecting customers," Harriman said.
Zoom out: New York just passed the first-in-the-nation data center moratorium this legislative session. Depending on what the Governor does next, the energy map may get redrawn again.
5. ⏱️ The Timeline
Avangrid's parent, Iberdrola, has committed $20 billion nationally to grid investment over the next decade. We asked Harriman what determines the pace.
Harriman says Avangrid is targeting 2026–2028 for the fastest upgrades, then 2028 through 2031–2032 for the rest.
The constraint is supply chain – transformer lead times from major vendors currently run around five years.
Harriman is urging regulators toward a long-term rate plan that would let the company order equipment in bulk rather than year to year.
Avangrid's advantage: Iberdrola's scale across multiple countries, 40,000 employees, and millions of customers gives it global buying power a standalone New York utility wouldn't have.
"If I have to go and buy a transformer and I can only buy for what I need this year, I am missing an opportunity for economies of scale on pricing and efficiency in delivery time," Harriman said.
🗽 Why New York
We closed by asking Harriman what she'd tell a CEO deciding where to invest, or a family deciding whether to stay.
She starts with New York's higher education institutions ("I'll challenge Massachusetts, who always likes to claim that") and – in her words – "a spirit here of not running away from challenges."
From there, the pitch turns to geography: upstate New York, her home region, has power capacity to spare and space to build more, regardless of fuel source.
She credits Governor Kathy Hochul with prioritizing upstate growth, pointing to Micron's chip investment as proof of concept, with more expected to follow.
"We will solve the challenges, because frankly, like myself and other families, we want our kids to be able to graduate college and stay here and raise their families here," Harriman said.
"We're going to do that by building out the grid and creating jobs. Whether my company hires them, or companies like Micron do, we will have prosperity going forward."
