Bloomberg Talks
National Grid New York President Sally Librera Talks Energy Demand and Costs
15 Dec 2025
Transcript generated automatically by AI and may contain errors.
Chapter 1: What is the main topic discussed in this episode?
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It was a report in the Albany Times Union, and they said over the weekend, national grid and other utilities are spending billions of dollars to prep New York's electric grid for a generational shift, and it includes things like all those AI data centers that are being built in the state and across the country, really.
Yeah, the paper went on to note that New York utilities are spending that much money to modernize the grid for those facilities. Their investments for New Yorkers, many of them are already struggling with utility costs, are going to have to pay for that in the coming years. But the idea is that we're prepping it for the future.
Exactly. Exactly. But so how uncomfortable as the build out happens and the stress on the grid continues. Let's see what our next guest has to say. We've been looking forward to this. Sally Librera is president National Grid New York. It's a subsidiary of the publicly held electricity, nat gas and clean energy utility National Grid Foundation. PLC serving millions in New York and Massachusetts.
National Grid ADRs trade in the US. They've got about a $75 billion market cap. They're up more than 27% year-to-date. So nice to have you here. How are you? Great to be here. Thanks, Carol and Tim, for having me. Well, it's great to have you here. How would you describe power demand today and how that demand is growing, surging? Use whatever word makes sense so that we understand.
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Chapter 2: What is the current state of energy demand in New York?
How would you quantify that demand, though? Give us some idea, because we're talking nonstop about deals of AI data centers, whether it's New York or elsewhere. Give us an idea. How stressed is the situation?
So we work with our New York independent system operator, the NISO. And NISO manages what we call the large load queue. So it's essentially the companies that have indicated wanting to hook into the New York grid that have large power needs.
And they estimate that the cumulative power need across those companies that are essentially in line to connect sometime over the next five or so years is about 10 gigawatts of energy. And so just to give you some context, at our peak in New York, we demand about three times that across the entire state. And another really important point is that one year ago, that queue was one third the size.
It literally tripled in just one year.
All data centers?
No, not all data centers.
What is it then? Because it does seem like for many years, we thought that power demand across the country would actually stay relatively flat. And it did stay relatively flat. But just in recent years, we've seen so much of an uptick in demand. What are you seeing on your grids?
Well, there definitely is the impact of data centers. But New York is also very attractive to manufacturing and large scale manufacturing, particularly some of the modern manufacturing we see around semiconductors and computer components. It's very energy intensive and companies with big power needs are drawn to New York.
And we are working to make sure that they have the power that they need, not just today, but well into the future.
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Chapter 3: How are AI data centers impacting energy consumption?
The president has been outspoken about his disdain for certain renewables, especially wind power. Your investment in renewables or sourcing energy from renewables, has that changed under this administration?
Well, we certainly support the all of the above energy approach and are pleased with the most recent version of the state energy report that's just come out today that leans into an all of the above approach.
Given the rate at which demand for energy is increasing, we need to be utilizing all of those opportunities, from renewables to natural gas to nuclear, to make sure that folks have the energy they need.
But is that more difficult if the federal government is not supportive of certain renewables?
We are working on the infrastructure to move power from point A to point B. So while we support projects like, say, the Nessie Pipeline, that's a supply project. It's not our project, but we support it because we know how critical it is to the downstate
community and how reliant New York City and Long Island are on natural gas and how thin that reserve margin is and their energy is demand for energy is growing as well. So we support Nessie for those reasons. The other side of our business is about building transmission. It's about building the highway over which the power moves. So the sourcing as to where it's coming from is
isn't a national grid decision. We work with generators of all kinds.
You know, bottom line, though, does this potentially, as you guys are very careful about when you invest so that power prices don't go up, but are there going to be moments where prices are just going to go up just because of the environment and it's hard to kind of predict everything? And forgive me, just got about 30 seconds.
There are moments, and now is one of those moments where customers are seeing increases on their bills, and that's for a number of reasons, but primarily it's to be investing in infrastructure that is necessary. Those investments are necessary to make sure that folks continue to have the safe and reliable energy that they need. And those investments include renewables, green, all of it.
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