Hochul Is Ready to Start Weaning New York Off Gas

Over the past year, a once-obscure corner of state law has become the center of attention for New York’s climate movement. Public service law, which governs utilities and the regulators who oversee them, requires those utilities to extend a new gas line to any building in the state that asks for it — and, as long as the building is within 100 feet of an existing main, to spread the cost across all of its customers, rather than charging the owner. A bill called the NY HEAT Act, first introduced in 2022, aims to overhaul this system, which effectively subsidizes the expansion of fossil fuel infrastructure even as the state’s climate law dictates that it be scaled back.

In recent days, the push for reform won a crucial supporter: Governor Kathy Hochul, who included key tenets of the HEAT Act in her budget proposal last week. Hochul’s version, dubbed the Affordable Gas Transition Act, notably scraps the “100-foot rule” that pays for new gas lines. Moreover, it ends utilities’ “obligation to serve” gas to every household — and could eventually allow the state to shift entire neighborhoods off fossil fuels, provided it can ensure reliable service. The current rules, the governor argues, are a “major obstacle” to achieving the targets of the climate law.

It was a surprise to the HEAT Act’s own sponsors that Hochul included any of it in her budget at all. Just the day before the governor gave her State of the State address, previewing her agenda for the year, Senate sponsor Liz Krueger and her Assembly counterpart Patricia Fahy told New York Focus they weren’t expecting it.

“I’m very pleased that she basically took, word for word, most of the NY HEAT Act and put it in her budget proposal,” Krueger said after the budget came out.

“We’ve met with the governor’s office repeatedly, we just [thought] it wasn’t going to happen, because she felt a little bit burned... that two years ago, we made no progress on HEAT,” Fahy said. Hochul first sought to repeal the 100-foot rule in her 2022–23 budget proposal, but both the Assembly and Senate rejected the idea at the time. The governor did not revive the idea last year, when a gas ban in new construction dominated climate discussions during budget season.

Since winning on new buildings, the environmental movement has massed behind the gas transition bill, with groups ranging from the mainstream New York League of Conservation Voters to scrappier anti-fossil outfits like Sane Energy Project rallying behind it.

It’s not the first time New York’s environmental movement has formed a broad front behind a bill in recent years. The all-electric buildings push enjoyed similar support last year, as did efforts to block an overhaul of the state’s greenhouse gas accounting system and, the year before that, a moratorium on new fossil-fueled cryptomining, said Liz Moran, northeast policy advocate at Earthjustice. All of those campaigns were successful. (Efforts to decarbonize transportation and tackle the state’s mountain of waste have been more polarizing.)

But the gas transition push has the potential to be far more sweeping than many of those earlier bills.

“It’s not just tackling one issue kind of in a silo. It is thinking on a systems level,” said Jessica Azulay, program director of Alliance for a Green Economy. Shifting households off of gas will also impact residential demand for electricity and shape New York’s buildout of renewables over the coming decades. As long as utilities are still required to serve gas to anyone who wants it, it’s impossible to plan a larger-scale transition, Azulay said.

Despite pushback from some corners, momentum appears to be on the climate movement’s side, including in the Assembly. The recently amended HEAT Act has 74 sponsors in that chamber, including two-thirds of Assembly leadership, outpacing last year’s All-Electric Buildings Act.

Even some non-sponsors are receptive to the governor’s proposal, at least in its broad strokes.

Monica Wallace, a Buffalo-area Assemblymember who chairs the chamber’s Majority Steering committee, told New York Focus she supports eliminating the 100-foot rule. “At the same time, we can’t compromise reliability and affordability,” she said, noting that in upstate and western New York especially, “we have to be very mindful of [the fact that] if the electricity goes out, people could die.”

In past years’ budget talks, some climate initiatives have faced resistance in the Assembly on the grounds that the budget should leave out “policy” issues that don’t affect revenue and spending. But Wallace and other assemblymembers reached by New York Focus argued that the gas transition bill was fair game.

“We’re talking about subsidies,” said Deputy Majority Leader Michaelle Solages, a sponsor of the HEAT Act. “The 100-foot rule is a subsidy. And so that really intertwines with the conversation with the budget.”

Solages stressed that the bill was as much about New Yorkers’ pocketbooks as about the climate.