George Borello wants you to spend hundreds of millions of dollars for electricity you don’t need.

NRG shut down the Dunkirk plant in 2016 because there was no market for the expensive electricity it generated. George now wants to re-power the NRG plant but his recent editorial promoting the idea was filled with half-truths and misinformation.

His claim that then Governor Cuomo bowed “to political pressure from the advocates on the far left” ignores the fact that the original repowering project was placed on hold in 2015 when another power company, the Entergy Group, filed a lawsuit challenging the subsidies approved by the New York Public Service Commission. As a result of the delay, NRG lost their interconnectivity rights to the electrical grid. NRG determined in 2016 that re-establishing those rights and making the necessary upgrades would have cost them $114 million. Facing those costs, they made a decision to abandon the repowerment. The ‘far left’ had nothing to do with that business decision. Unless by ‘far left’ he means the people of New York who thought that giving millions to a private business to produce electricity that no one really needed was not in their best interest. If then Governor Cuomo was to blame, then George is admitting that the plant was too expensive to operate and that government handouts were required to make it profitable. (Don’t let George’s MAGA voters know his political philosophy is closer to Mayor Mamdani than they think.)

Western NY has a decreasing population, we don’t need more electricity and are a net exporter of electricity downstate. Increasing demand elsewhere could be an opportunity for NRG. There is nothing standing in their way if they can meet that demand at a price people are willing to pay. No socialism for the rich is required. The problem with generating electricity in Western New York is that there are insufficient transmission lines to get the power from here to where it is needed. Adding transmission capacity is a critical need in the state and is where George could be spending his time rather than beating the NRG dead horse.

George claims that fossil gas is clean, but scientific studies have clearly shown that from well-head to smokestack, fossil gas is almost as polluting as coal. Drilling for and burning it emits large amounts of nitrogen oxides, carbon monoxide, carbon dioxide, volatile organic compounds, sulfur oxides, particulate matter and methane. It also creates hundreds of tons of toxic radioactive waste. George really needs to stop repeating the lies the fossil fuel industry has been spreading for 50 years. What other industry creates such pollution without having to clean it up?

George claims New York is “importing power from outside New York, largely from coal-fired power plants.” This statement too, can easily be fact-checked. According to the US Energy Information Agency’s 2025 New York Electricity Profile (specifically table 10, Supply and Disposition), the state gets from 16% to 19% of its electricity from interstate and international imports. In 2024, New York imported less than 16%, lower than in many recent years. The vast majority of those imports since 2015 have come from clean and green Ontario and Quebec hydro. Ontario shut down its last coal power plant in 2014. New York also imports electricity from PJM (about 10% of our total supply in 2024) but only 14% of PJM’s electricity is generated by coal. We also import a much smaller amount from ISO New England which gets only 0.5% of its electricity from coal. So where does this “largely from coal-fired power plants” come from? My math says 14% of 10% is 1.4% from coal. Does George not know what he’s talking about or is he misleading us?

George claims NYISO warned of power shortages and rolling blackouts this year. This is only half-true and another misleading statement. NYISO’s 2025 Quarter 3 Short-Term Assessment of Reliability report warned that New York City could be 650 MW short by summer 2026 but only if critical infrastructure projects, such as the Champlain Hudson Power Express (CHPE), are not completed on schedule. CHPE is on schedule to be completed in May and is designed to deliver 1250 MW of clean and green Canadian hydro to New York City. That is almost twice the worst-case potential shortfall predicted by NYISO. So George’s ‘hair on fire’ warning is already being addressed, twice over. Repowering Dunkirk wouldn’t help anyway.

Much of the increase in electricity demand is for datacenters. One of every five data centers was implementing behind-the-meter (on-site) power generation by the end of 2024, with 62% of data center operators exploring on-site generation to manage high energy demands. By 2030, over one quarter of data centers are projected to run entirely on on-site power. If NRG is such a good opportunity for repowerment, why aren’t Google, Meta, or Microsoft offering to buy the plant to get the electricity? What do they know that George doesn’t?

Over the past 5 years, solar and wind have supplied 75% of the new electrical generating capacity in the US. In 2025, it was 93%. Texas alone (home of the fossil fuel industry) has added approximately 19 GW of solar and 14 GW of wind since 2019, along with 6.2 GW of battery storage. In 2025, 40% of the state’s electricity was generated by solar and wind. An additional 30 GW is planned for installation in the next couple of years. Wind and solar are projected to become ERCOT’s largest generation resource in 2026, surpassing natural gas in capacity. The market is clearly signaling that solar, wind, and storage are now among the least expensive sources of new power generation and the fastest to deploy.

George (and PJ Wendel) need to accept the reality that fossil fuels are a fading resource and repowering NRG with outdated technology is just a bad idea and a waste of taxpayer money. The steam turbines they plan to repower were built in the 1950s and have been sitting idle for the past 10 years. In 25 years, a short timespan for a power plant, they will be 100 years old. Installing new, more efficient turbines would be even more prohibitively expensive. There is such a shortage being built these days that you can’t even place an order with GE Vernova, the largest turbine manufacturer in the US, till 2030. Restarting NRG will be costly, inefficient, and will just lead to another “devastating negative impact of a power plant closure” 10 or 15 years down the road. George needs to learn from the past then work toward a future with honesty and fact-based decisions that are good for all New Yorkers.

Tom Meara is a Jamestown resident.