Bruce Blakeman visits the state Capitol to rebut Hochul's 2026 agenda

And environmentalists have a new top priority for this year's legislative session.

Good afternoon — It’s Wednesday and World Logic Day.

In today’s CapCon:

• Nassau County Executive Bruce Blakeman visited the state Capitol Wednesday. Here’s what he said to reporters, including his requirements for a running mate.

• With the 100-ft. rule repealed, environmentalists are turning their attention this year to a new challenge: data centers.

• The state Senate has new chairs for the Judiciary Committee and Economic Development Committee.

• On The Bill: The Rent Emergency Stabilization for Tenants Act.

• A new bill would prohibit someone’s wages from being set using algorithms and other automated decision-making tools.

Names in today’s CapCon: Bruce Blakeman, Liz Moran, Kathy Hochul, Kristen Gonzalez, Didi Barrett, Anna Kelles, Michaelle Solages, Donald J. Trump, Ronald Reagan, Lee Zeldin, Luis Sepulveda, Brad Hoylman-Sigal, Kristin Brown, April Baskin, Sean Ryan, Brian Kavanagh, Sarahana Shrestha, Rachel May

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(Erik Isakson/Getty Images)

⚡ Environmentalists will target data centers in this year’s legislative session

As artificial intelligence tools like ChatGPT and Gemini become more widely used, the need for more data centers will become more urgent.

Data centers are physical locations where data is stored and processed by the companies that provide it. Every time you ask an AI chatbot a question, the data it uses to form a response has to come from somewhere.

There are downsides that come with data centers. They’re loud, they take up a lot of space and, most importantly, they consume massive amounts of energy.

That’s why lawmakers held a public hearing on data centers last fall, though it turned more into a discussion about the state’s need for energy and how it should be produced. The growth of data centers is a big part of that.

There are already more than 100 data centers in New York. They collectively consume 3% of the state’s supply of electricity and more have been proposed.

The more energy that they use, the less that’s available to residential ratepayers. That drives up the cost of electricity to those ratepayers, who often subsidize the cost of energy for those entities, said Liz Moran, the New York policy advocate at Earthjustice.

“What we’re seeing is these users will often get sweetheart deals on their energy rates because they consume so much energy,” Moran said. “But that’s not fair for everybody else.”

That’s part of why environmental advocates, including Moran, consider data centers and the energy they use to be a top priotity for this year’s legislative session.

Those advocates consider Hochul’s record on energy and the environment to be a mixed bag, particularly since she began adopting an “all-of-the-above” energy approach for New York over the past year.

But they received good news Tuesday, when Gov. Kathy Hochul unveiled a proposal targeting data centers in her State of the State.

Hochul wants to flip the script on data centers. Instead of allowing them to be offered lower rates because of their strong consumption of energy, Hochul wants to require that they pay higher rates because of the strain they place on the grid.

The only way the companies that own those data centers would be able to get around the higher rates is if they supply their own energy onsite.

“A lot of it depends on how things are shaped,” Moran said. “But it is encouraging to see her acknowledge the impact they could have and the reality that these entities are not job creators.”

Advocates are now waiting to read the details of Hochul’s proposal, which is expected to be unveiled as part of the legislation that will make up her executive budget proposal. She’s expected to present that next Tuesday, Jan. 20.

But this is also something that members of the state Legislature have thought about and crafted their own proposals related to energy used by data centers.