A Question About Tomorrow

In 1963, a journalist looked across the East River from Midtown Manhattan and saw the future. The largest nuclear reactor in the world, one million kilowatts of uranium-powered steam electricity generation, hovered just unrealized at the river’s edge, posing, provocatively, “a saucy landmark . . . a question about tomorrow.” It was a question of vision and danger. “If New Yorkers will accept fission for profit as a neighbor, most city-dwelling Americans may expect to do so one day,” Richard Hunt wrote. “But if New Yorkers banish it to the countryside, the cities of tomorrow may be bypassed by the industrial development of the atomic age. Which risk shall the city take?”

From the perspective of Consolidated Edison, the nuclear plan was — in Hunt’s words — a “simple business proposition.” The company wanted to generate power nearer its customers, and “Ravenswood [was] the center, where the power lines converge.” Con Ed had begun developing a power plant on the site already and could, through the miracle of nuclear fusion, increase its potential by orders of magnitude. Why on Earth would they not? But as the proposal wound its way through regulatory jurisdictions and into public consciousness, it became clear that for New Yorkers the stakes could not have been higher, and extended well beyond the limits of the electrical grid. Within a year, the utility found the question was no longer worth the headache. Con Ed conceded the battle for atomic urbanism, in favor of the world’s largest steam turbine generator, powered by oil and coal instead.

Speeding down the FDR Drive three years later, John V. Lindsay, too, saw a future above the red-and-white-striped stacks. Lindsay had made air pollution a central issue in his 1965 mayoral campaign, and now, to the white knight, the dark clouds filling the sky over the Ravenswood generating plant signaled a belching dragon to engage in combat. (From the car, the mayor radioed his complaint to the Department of Air Pollution Control; an inspector, already on his way to Ravenswood, issued a summons.) The plant’s importance was more than symbolic, and Lindsay’s victories were, too. In six years, his administration cut the sulfur content of the oil used to power the city’s generators by seven-fold, then ushered in the transition to natural gas. But to this day, the dragon is yet unvanquished.

Ravenswood remains the largest power generation plant in New York City, sprawling across three long blocks and claiming 27 total acres of waterfront. Its four red-and-white stacks tower over passing ferries and adjacent Queensbridge Park as four turbines fired by a combination of oil and gas churn out 20 percent of the city’s power. (The 1965 turbine, plus two smaller ones that predated it by two years, were joined by a fourth, more modern, combined-cycle generator in 2004.) Central as well as massive, it is the most visible of the city’s power sources, and as the enduring perils of fossil-fuel-powered generation have only become clearer since the 1960s — and the stakes for the plant’s neighbors only more acute — Ravenswood has continued to matter as much for what it signifies as for what it produces. As goes Ravenswood, so goes New York’s energy future.

That future could be bright. In 2022, a coalition of local tenant activists and a new power company founded on the promise of a profitable renewable energy economy unveiled a program to convert the majority of the generation plant into a “renewable energy hub.” Under the Renewable Ravenswood plan, new infrastructure on site would receive high-voltage, “green” power generated upstate and at sea, then convert and feed it into the distribution grid for ratepayers’ use throughout the city. The proposal is epic in scope, a total transformation of site and system on scale with the plant and the historical harms it seeks to correct.

Before, energy arrived at Ravenswood in the form of bargefuls of coal, barrels full of oil, and gas piped and shipped in from further territories — Pennsylvania, Canada, the Gulf Coast. In the future, an 18.5-mile submarine transmission line could deliver home-grown, high-voltage current, generated by wind turbines in the New York Bight or solar arrays upstate. Before, a ceaseless inferno boiled a reservoir of steam to spin generators in a hall the size of an airplane hangar, transforming the fossilized life force of ancient plants and animals into the buzz of incandescent lightbulbs almost through brute force. In the future, converters on site would pull off a more elegant magic trick, turning high-voltage, long-distance transmission into the kind of power consumed by electric vehicles and induction ranges in 2 million New York City homes. Before, seventeen fossil-fueled “peaker” generators sat unused most of the year, roaring to life in a cloud of toxicity during periods of high demand. In the future, a field of lithium-ion batteries would hum peacefully in their place, charging up with clean energy for challenging days. The plant would also power a clean thermal energy system for Ravenswood’s immediate neighbors, including thousands of public housing residents. The same riverfront that once received fuel shipments could be reconfigured as a staging ground for wind power developments out at sea, which would juice the local economy, along with workforce development programs delivered in conjunction with the CUNY system and the utility workers’ union.

It was a vision of clean air, green jobs, and abundant renewable energy for all, and it was a long time coming. Renewable Ravenswood promised a victory for generations of local activists, and a resolution for residents who have long suffered in the “asthma alley” of Western Queens. Both for the neighbors it sickens and for the rest of us, who face rising sea levels, lengthening heat waves, intensifying storms, and pressing questions about the future of energy, the plant today represents a slow-moving but urgently concrete crisis, as well as a symbol of the future and how we’ll get there. But now, as the countdown to climate catastrophe ticks away, the plan’s future is uncertain; the transformation, symbolic and actual, has stalled. What’s happening on the waterfront in Queensbridge — or not happening, as the case may be — concerns us all.

The Ravenswood site has been used for energy since the 1890s, its riverfront position ideal for access to shipped coal and oil. But the vision of the 1960s was a new, thoroughly modern power station, scaled to match the city’s growth and potential. At midcentury, more electricity, generated closer by, would allow New Yorkers to keep up with the changing times. Journalists of the era hailed it as a monument to industry, sketched it in breathlessly material detail: the 1965 turbine, still in use today, was a 47-foot, 288,000-pound rotor, turning on steam from a 17-story-tall boiler, 360 miles of tubing coiled in its guts, a machinery so massive that its thermal expansion could break apart the structure housing it. (The boiler therefore was — is — suspended several inches above the ground.)

Modernist visions and modern living diverged. Once operational, Big Allis — the bawdy nickname derived from the manufacturer of that colossal turbine — was an awe-inspiring but somewhat hapless character, inviting plant workers and the reporters who interviewed them to shake their heads ruefully as she trembled and shook and failed tests and “conked out.” (To this day, Big Allis is so singular and so outdated that an on-site machine shop provides custom parts and specialized maintenance workers devote whole careers to her upkeep.) She declared herself to the city through impetuous absences, as when she lost fourteen out of fifteen bearings during the Northeast Blackout of 1965; rather than a great leap forward, she came to stand in for blundering inconsistency. By the end of the century, repeated blackouts and brownouts prompted the construction of a field of “peaking” generators, smaller turbines fired with dirtier fuel that could rev up on shorter notice. Repeated power failures also justified the state divesting Con Ed of the site in the 1990s, as part of an industry-wide restructuring; it has been passed between several owners since.

But for generations of its neighbors, the plant has been an all-too-consistent presence, announced by the shriek of bad parts during outages, the roars and rumbles during tests and construction — and by the loud horns that for decades were a daily reminder of the pollution of the air surrounding the plant. For the 7,000 tenants living just across Vernon Boulevard from Ravenswood at Queensbridge Houses, and roughly 10,000 more living within a two-mile radius at Ravenswood, Astoria, and Woodside Houses, the colossus behind a red-brick wall topped with razor wire has become an obvious antagonist in a familiar story: the harms of necessary but toxic infrastructure falling wholly on the poor, the non-white, the disenfranchised.

The Houses, too, were built in a flurry of modernist imagination. The three-year-old New York City Housing Authority (NYCHA) broke ground in the sparsely-populated manufacturing district in 1937. Queensbridge Houses opened two years later as the largest public housing complex in North America, with Y-plan superblocks designed to maximize sunlight and community-oriented features like a commercial center and daycare services. But here, again, vision and reality diverged. Today, the median income in Queensbridge Houses (around $24,000 per year) is less than half the city average. Whereas about 20 percent of the people in New York City are Black, 47 percent of Queensbridge Houses residents are. And if the Houses were public works intended to alleviate the environmental harms of slum housing, the power plant made them a trap. Ravenswood and Queensbridge Houses report more than 235 annual asthma-related hospitalizations per ten thousand K-through-12-age children, versus roughly 115 in all of Astoria and 75 in nearby Hunters Point, Sunnyside, and Maspeth. Kids in the Houses miss a month of school, on average, due to respiratory illness. At the height of the Covid pandemic, people infected with the virus in Queensbridge died at twice the rate as in the city overall.

For resident activists, these numbers, and the plant looming in the background, speak for themselves. They speak to a sense that power — the ability to define the terms of one’s own life at a level as basic as the air one breathes — has been located across the street, behind a brick wall and a locked gate. The juxtaposition is an environmental injustice on scale with the plant and the Houses.

In August 2023, NYCHA resident leader Claudia Coger reflected that the clouds from the stacks had been “beautiful” to her when she was younger — before she knew how to read them. Daniel Taylor, a lifelong Queensbridge resident, perceived the plant as a bogeyman from the start. “I was always afraid of those stacks over there, they were like monsters to me,” he told an interviewer that same month. “I used to hear the noise that the power plant made, but little did I know that it was spewing out the kind of environmental stuff we know about today, the pollution that impacts our home.” Like many of his neighbors, Taylor, now almost 70, has struggled with respiratory disease — in his case, lung cancer. Taylor’s wife suffered too. “She developed asthma, very bad, to the point where it almost took her life,” Taylor said, “She was in a coma for almost twelve days.”

But in summer 2023, Daniel Taylor and Claudia Coger were telling stories of victory and survival. After decades of organizing for other forms of environmental justice like the right to repairs in NYCHA apartments, tenant leaders had helped bring the Renewable Ravenswood vision to the brink of reality.

At that point, sixteen of Ravenswood’s seventeen “peakers,” the smaller, as-needed, gas-fired generators that were most to blame for the higher rates of air pollution and associated illnesses around the site, had already been shuttered, with the last slated for retirement alongside two of the four main generators. The State had approved a plan to install battery storage in their stead, to meet spikes in demand with the help of cleaner power. Perhaps most importantly, a proposal for offshore wind power development to feed the renewable energy hub was only months away from winning a bid for state-subsidized offshore wind power development projects managed by the New York State Energy Research and Development Administration (NYSERDA). Daniel’s wife April, a former President of the Queensbridge Houses Resident Association, was one of a host of local NYCHA tenant leaders, including Coger, who vocally supported the plan in media releases and at public events — alongside a who’s who of progressive electeds at every level.

By the following spring, April Simpson-Taylor had died from illness likely worsened — if not caused — by air pollution. She was only 61 years old. “If she was here, she would blame it on [the power plant],” says Bishop Mitchell Taylor, a local faith leader and CEO of the Queensbridge economic development organization Urban Upbound, which threw its weight behind the proposal at the outset. “She always said she was born in her bed in Queensbridge Houses breathing the Queensbridge air.” A month after her passing, the sponsoring developers had withdrawn the offshore wind bid; the “renewable energy hub” downgraded from a vision of the future to a dream deferred.

“Why is it always jumping through all these hoops when it comes to making neighborhoods better for poor people?” Bishop Taylor asks, rhetorically. To him, the clouds that continue to emanate from the stacks are of a piece with the ongoing struggle to get adequate attention from the Department of Sanitation, the Department of Transportation, or the NYPD. Why is this neighborhood that one that absorbs the costs of the broken systems? “Don’t we have enough?” he asks.

It wasn’t supposed to be like this. Renewable Ravenswood was going to clear the air. It was going to be a different kind of infrastructure project, a testament to the power of partnership between industry and community — and proof of concept for a new way to make power, profitably and pro-socially at once.

Industry’s representative, in the Ravenswood case, is Rise Light & Power, the plant’s owner and a subsidiary of LS Power, a private equity firm focused on the energy sector. LS Power bought Ravenswood from TransCanada in 2017, and created Rise in 2019 to begin planning for the retirement of Ravenswood’s fossil-fuel generators. New York State had just passed the Climate Leadership and Community Protection Act (CLCPA), which set targets and created financial incentives for decarbonization. Renewable energy generation and storage could be good, clean business. “Without a willing partner at the power plant, there is only tension,” says Costa Constantinides, former City Councilmember representing the Ravenswood district and present CEO of the Variety Boys & Girls Club of Queens, as he recalls the company’s initial entree to local leaders. “These guys come in and they say, look, we’re not responsible for what happened, but we’re responsible for how we move forward. We recognize the legacy of environmental injustice and we want to change that.”

Wil Fisher, Director of External Affairs for Rise, says the company is committed to a program of “radical transparency.” It hasn’t been easy to build buy-in around as big a swing as Renewable Ravenswood. “Folks get promised things all the time,” Fisher acknowledges. “There’s a lot of suspicion around any big development project, which is merited, particularly, in New York City. But we keep showing up.” Through an engagement tour organized with Hester Street — workshops, conferences, community listening sessions, and visits to the plant — Rise methodically built enthusiasm for what came to seem like a perfect match between “a community that has consistently been frustrated with the status quo” and a small, responsive company offering a “mature and viable and reasonable way to change it.”

With the state racing against the clock to meet its own decarbonization goals, this would be a new approach for a grand, green new era — comprehensive and conscientious, designed to tackle every angle of a just transition at once, from generation to transmission to storage, with close attention to neighborhood conditions, buy-in, and benefits. The plan seemingly marked an end to the era of half measures. For his part, Bishop Taylor recalls being impressed with what he saw from the Rise team early on — their approach to community engagement and their commitment to, effectively, “decommissioning their own asset.”

For a proposal so vested with hard-won trust and so tasked with averting a slow-moving environmental catastrophe, the stakes of success could not be higher. So what happened? “Needless to say, it’s been challenging,” Fisher allows. Bishop Taylor put it bluntly to a Gothamist reporter in March: “At every turn, what I’ve seen since the genesis of this project, is that there has been less and less cooperation from the powers that be.” But which powers those are, and whether cooperation is the missing element, remains a more complicated question.

A lot has changed at Ravenswood since 1963: not just the fuel mix powering the generators, but the pathway that energy follows to move out of the environment, through pipelines and transformers, and into the grid. The present question about tomorrow — where will the renewable grid of the future come from? Who will make the transition just? — is not simply a question of turbines and wires. It’s also money, and power, in the sense of ability to do one thing or another.

When Ravenswood first rose over the East River, states already largely delegated power provision to investor-owned utilities. But whereas in 1966 a single company owned the generators, the stacks, and the cables running to Queensbridge and beyond, today, a different company holds each link in the chain, from fuel extraction and transportation to wholesale electrical power generation to the long-distance transmission and local distribution of electricity. This diffuse energy infrastructure is the product of what academics term “deregulation,” but which might more descriptively be called something like “everybody incorporated gets a piece.” Since the 1980s and ’90s, the reigning theory holds that a free energy market drives down consumer costs, ensures system efficiency, and combats a dangerous concentration of power by inducing “competition” and providing “choice.” (In practice, energy sector deregulation increases costs for rate-payers thanks to markups at various points along the line.)

Today, if a state wants to reshape its “deregulated” power sector to be, say, less poisonous to the people living around power plants, or more in line with a continuously habitable planet, its main tools to do so are carrots, not sticks. Rather than build and own renewables themselves, governments create “investability” for socially-preferable energy production. New York’s 2019 Climate Leadership and Community Protection Act promised net-zero emissions by 2050 and required the distribution of benefits from a new green economy to historically disadvantaged communities like Queensbridge. Setting some of the most ambitious benchmarks and deadlines in the country, the law attempted to meet them by guiding private investment through incentives and disincentives.

In the effort to weave a web of renewables across vast territories, investment is key. Each offshore wind farm or solar array or long-distance transmission cable presents a Whitmanesque litany of material demands: Where will the steel come from, the concrete, the lithium and the silicone and the fiber-optic cables, the manufacturing workers and the installation workers and the operators, the engineers and the marine scientists, the barges to send the parts down the river, the floating platforms to host their assembly, the dredgers and the drillers and the drills? Then there are the financial and legal structures to be built, to coordinate all of these literally moving pieces. Would-be developers must raise billions of dollars in debt and equity and commitments from potentially dozens of individual contractors, then corral everything into a single offering for approval by state regulators. Developments — that is to say, their financial viability — come to life through tax credits and purchasing agreements with the state. But they can die when any piece of the puzzle falls through.

In 2023, the prospect of making Renewable Ravenswood a reality hinged on one such partnership: Attentive Energy. In exchange for a 56 percent stake, the French developer TotalEnergies, one of the seven largest energy (read: oil) companies in the world, committed hundreds of millions of dollars, plus the lease to the territory in the New York Bight, 54 miles south of Long Island, where the actual turbines would be built. Corio Wind Generation traded its experience developing offshore wind for 27.7 percent. Rise offered vision, plus the physical plant of Ravenswood and its centrality within New York City’s power grid — access to New York City ratepayers — and kept just 16.3 percent. Crucially, the energy technology development firm GE Vernova had promised to supply 18-megawatt turbines, the largest at that point conceived for the American market, which would make the whole thing work.

It was a convincing package: Attentive Energy was announced as one of three projects selected for development by NYSERDA, the New York agency managing the state’s subsidy of renewable energy. All three awards relied on GE Vernova’s promised massive turbines. But promises can be broken. Shortly after Attentive’s win, GE Vernova announced that it would not be producing those turbines after all, and the provisional awards were cancelled.

What, specifically, went wrong is shrouded in layers of nondisclosure agreements. Perhaps access to adequate steel and concrete, needed in unthinkable quantities to erect turbines the size of skyscrapers, was made impossible, or impossibly expensive, by two global wars. Perhaps the American factories, vessels, ports, and workers necessary to fabricate, deliver, and assemble those behemoths were simply not up to snuff. Clint Plummer, Rise’s energetic and undeterred CEO, notes these industry challenges pre-existed Attentive Energy’s bid, but the global run of bad luck since 2020 surely exacerbated them. Further, Plummer blames European developers’ unrealistic expectations. Rather than take the time to recover prior investments in smaller turbines and supporting infrastructure like ports, factories, and vessels, as had been possible over 20 years of industrialization in the European offshore wind sector, in the US, developers had focused on pushing forward as quickly as possible in the arms race for ever-bigger generation technology. Meanwhile, rather than build out the sector through an abundance of smaller developments, states concentrated their eggs in fewer and fewer baskets. That such a fragile scaffold came crashing down due to material scarcity, technological failure, or workforce struggles could not be a surprise.

The theory of a gold rush holds that where one attempt fails, another quickly takes its place. Indeed, from the perspective of those who believe in a “market-based solution,” this is crucial: to meet the existential deadlines posed by the exponential dynamics of atmospheric warming, the industry must fire on all cylinders. Slow-moving and massive though these projects may appear to be from a certain vantage point, from another, it’s a squeaker of a race. A year after Attentive Energy’s NYSERDA bid was cancelled, Total and Corio announced they were planning to develop their offshore lease area into a wind farm to feed the New Jersey grid. From the Queensbridge waterfront this abandonment of the Ravenswood question could look like a betrayal; but from a remove it was a natural correction in the energy ecosystem, another of a thousand flowers blooming while Rise went back to the drawing board.

But then, something unexpected and unnatural, an ecosystem disturbance: Donald Trump.

In late November 2024, the CEO of TotalEnergies told an industry conference that he was putting the New Jersey project “on pause.” The presidential election had only just concluded, but the writing was on the wall. Since then, executive orders, cancelled lease auctions, stop-work orders, and specious environmental reviews have thrown the renewable energy industry into chaos. Many development projects have sought temporary reprieves from procedural deadlines, while other developers announced their intention to withdraw from US projects altogether, indefinitely. Key players have proven only fair-weather allies in the climate wars. Concerns about reliability, anticipation of growing demand, and fears about federal interventionism give cover for a pivot back to fossil fuels. TotalEnergies is “unapologetically focused on growing its legacy business,” namely oil and liquified natural gas; GE Vernova has doubled down on gas turbines, while withdrawing from its long-troubled offshore wind business. Given the circumstances, it makes good business sense. Given the curve of emissions increasing, it may be murdering the planet. Meanwhile, electricity demand increases steadily, and the day approaches when aging infrastructure will need to be retired and replaced — either with renewables or with a new investment in fossil fuels. As New York lags on its decarbonization goals, the grid edges ever closer to a point of no return.

Where some industry observers see their worst fears confirmed — the era of US offshore wind over before it got off its starting blocks — Clint Plummer sees a temporary setback: “Election uncertainty is just part of this business,” Plummer told Gothamist back in March. It could take ten years to move the proposal through permitting and construction under the best of circumstances. Presidencies end; the need for clean, affordable, just energy will remain. Wil Fisher puts it bluntly: “We’re powering nearly a quarter of the city with technology from the Kennedy administration. This investment is going to be made. It has to be.”

To hold steady through turbulent waters, Rise has continued to pursue the two-circuit, 2.6-gigawatt, 18.5-mile transmission line known as the Queensboro Renewable Express, which would run, buried in submarine trenches, from the federal lease area in the New York Bight, through the Lower Bay, past the eastern shore of Staten Island, between Governor’s Island and the southern tip of Manhattan, and along the East Side before landing at the dock in Queens. Bishop Taylor, who railed against uncooperative “powers that be,” sees (potential) progress on the transmission line as a crucial indicator of local alignment. “I would like to see something be released saying that Renewable Ravenswood is on track,” Taylor says. “[That] we got out of each other’s way, and now we just have to wrangle with the federal government.”

The transmission line was planned through months of underwater surveys. Permit applications were filed in 2022, even before Rise won its NYSERDA bid to build offshore turbines. Three years later, even after the bid’s collapse, it remains the case that without the cables it will simply not be possible to deliver electricity from any offshore wind plant to transformers, batteries, and distribution cables housed in the Renewable Ravenswood hub.

Rise’s somewhat tautological approach to the offshore turbines — it will be because it must be — extends to the permitting process for the transmission cable as well. “It’s a project that is critical for delivering clean energy into New York City,” Plummer asserts. It is fated, intuitive. It has the weight of justice. (It represents, by Wil Fisher’s estimate, $30 or $40 million of Rise’s funds invested, at risk, in the legal and engineering work to support the permit application.)

But if the permitting agency’s own record is anything to go by, it is far from a done deal. In January 2025, the New York Public Service Commission demanded that the cable developer explain which offshore wind project would be producing the power that the cable would transmit — knowing full well that Rise’s offshore generation plans are, for now, dead in the water. More recently, the Commission refused to fast-track a different, upstate-to-downstate transmission cable, which — like the Queensboro Renewable Express — lacked a clear source of renewable energy. And even when regulators don’t say no, their yes may come too slowly; environmental justice advocates who pushed for the passage of the CLCPA have been dismayed at the state’s apparent inability to meet its own deadlines and benchmarks.

To some who envision a clean, green future for Ravenswood and the city as a whole, the State’s actions (and inaction) may resemble regulatory blockage of the sort that has recently drawn the ire of leftish policy wonks yearning for a past when it was possible to build things in this country. Fisher makes the intuitive connection to Ezra Klein and Derek Thompson’s buzzy Abundance: “All of these individual processes exist for very good reason, to build these projects in a responsible way, and we have a public review process that is specifically designed to avoid the kind of decisions that built [Ravenswood] in the first place. [But] that’s also one of the biggest hurdles to get over in changing these historic decisions.”

To others, for whom the transition to renewable energy is a matter of life and death, the lack of progress on this and other renewable energy projects are features, not bugs, of the current privately-driven development system. For the coalition of climate, community, and advocacy organizations organizing for state- and community-developed and -owned power generation and transmission under the banner Public Power New York, unblocking the investment tap is not enough. In the slowing of the renewable energy gold rush, Public Power sees proof that a just transition cannot be entrusted to investor-owned utilities. “Private developers need to expect a certain rate of return, and if they feel that these projects aren’t going to meet that rate, they will simply cancel them. They don’t have the same responsibility to people that the state does,” argues Michael Paulson, Associate Director of the Sane Energy Project and a former lead strategist for Public Power NY. In contrast, Paulson says, “the New York Power Authority’s mission is to serve New Yorkers. It does not have to serve shareholders.”

The coalition won a landmark victory when the Build Public Renewables Act became law in 2023, making the state’s climate benchmarks binding and empowering the New York Power Authority (NYPA), the largest public utility in the country, to directly develop and own renewable energy generation and transmission. NYPA could leverage its institutional stability to raise capital, Paulson says, through bond issues like those previously used to build dams and long-distance transmission lines. Or, it can revive abandoned private projects as public-private partnerships. Direct appropriation remains an option. After all, Paulson points out, “if it’s not NYPA building all of this renewable energy, who is going to? Because the majority of projects that have been planned by the private sector over the last decade have been canceled at this point.” The point is: with a bit of vision and a sense of urgency, the capital could be found — it has been before. Historically, when the energy system has required a wholesale transformation — the build out of hydroelectric infrastructure, long-range transmission lines, and rural distribution — the state has proven able to see, and actualize, futures that appeared unviable in the eyes of private investors. If New York State agencies are reluctant to summon that same vision this time, to the Public Power coalition, that reluctance simply must be overcome.

Back in Queens, the generators are spinning. The city’s power grid has come through another summer season but looks ahead to busier ones: increasing vehicle and building electrification, along with booms in power-intensive industries like AI and advanced manufacturing, put ever more pressure on the winnowing margin. State regulators have floated the possibility of reviving previously retired fossil fuel generators to meet the projected future demand. With Ravenswood’s “vintage” generators approaching their 65th anniversary — retirement age — their owners may eventually find themselves facing a painful decision point: whether to risk brownout, or invest millions to make the fossil fuel-powered equipment fit for continued service.

This is not the future anyone wanted to contemplate on July 17, on the sidewalk in front of the plant. It was the launch of a planning study highlighting economic and community development “opportunities” in the neighborhood potentially reshaped by the Renewable Ravenswood transformation. Representatives from Rise, local and state government, and community groups took a tone of accomplishment and resolve. “There’s going to be a lot of struggle here in the days ahead,” acknowledged Queens Borough President Donovan Richards. But there seemed no question about whether the plan could come to pass. “We’re here today because we finally are righting this wrong. We’re here today to celebrate environmental justice for the families of western Queens and for our climate as a whole,” Richards said.

The Reimagine Ravenswood study lays out the by-now-familiar story of the site and its surroundings. The future sketched in its pages seemingly embodies the ethic of transparency Rise has touted all along. A full build-out would see much of the extant infrastructure turned over to renewable energy uses. But a new relationship to the surrounding neighborhood, inspired by other reuse projects like the Brooklyn Navy Yard, would see the site permeated with public accessways. Short-term, the report proposes “complementary uses” to spruce up the Vernon Boulevard boundary: tree planting, public seating, murals, and events. Long-term, a linear park could connect Vernon Boulevard with the waterfront. But who knows.

One thing is known, as much as the future can ever be known: if carbon emissions continue on their current trajectory, then within a century the water lapping at the edge of Queensbridge Park will be six feet higher. Summers will be unbearably, dangerously hot. And if the boilers at Ravenswood continue to burn gas and oil, then a child born today, in a bed in Queensbridge Houses breathing Queensbridge air, is more likely to develop and die of heart disease, respiratory illness, or cancer than a New York City child born breathing elsewhere. If the paths forward are shrouded with uncertainty, the consequences of choosing the wrong one could not be clearer.