July 8, 2026 • By Catherine Chen
60,000 New Yorkers Lost Power. Five Days Later, a Court Said Every New Home Must Be All-Electric.
On July 2, Con Edison reduced voltage by 8 percent across portions of Queens and Brooklyn and asked customers to stop using washers, dryers, microwaves, and electric vehicle chargers because underground cables in southwest Queens had failed from the load. Roughly 60,000 customers lost power over the following days as temperatures hit 101°F and the heat index climbed past 112, and Mayor Zohran Mamdani set air conditioning to 78°F in all government buildings while calling it the most extreme heat wave the city had seen in over a decade.
The stress was not confined to New York. PJM Interconnection, which operates the country's largest regional power grid serving 67 million people across 13 Mid-Atlantic and Midwest states, hit 162,700 megawatts of peak demand on July 2, within 1.8 percent of its all-time record, and said it would have broken that record without emergency demand-response measures. Energy Secretary Chris Wright ordered data centers in the PJM territory to switch to backup generators rather than draw from the public grid, a measure he called a last resort before rolling blackouts.
Five days after the lights went out in Queens, the Second Circuit Court of Appeals cleared New York's All-Electric Buildings Act for enforcement.
Nobody coordinated the calendar.
What the Law Requires
Governor Hochul signed the AEBA as part of the 2023 state budget, prohibiting gas and propane hookups in new residential buildings of seven stories or fewer starting January 1, 2026, with the ban extending to all new construction regardless of height by 2029. In Mulhern Gas Co. v. Mosely, a coalition of gas companies, trade groups, and labor unions filed suit under the Energy Policy and Conservation Act, arguing federal preemption, and they had reason for confidence: the Ninth Circuit killed Berkeley's municipal gas ban on exactly those grounds in 2024.
A district court in the Northern District of New York disagreed and upheld the state law, after which New York agreed to a stipulation pausing enforcement pending appeal. That appeal is now decided, and every new residential permit filed in the state will require all-electric mechanical systems.
What 15 Kilowatts Per Home Adds Up To
A gas-heated home draws roughly 15 kilowatts at peak electrical demand, according to DOE residential energy survey data, because gas handles the heating, cooking, and hot water while electricity covers only air conditioning, lighting, and appliances. Swap in a heat pump for HVAC, an induction range, and an electric water heater, and peak draw climbs to roughly 30 kilowatts, a delta of 15 kilowatts per home that the gas system previously absorbed and the electrical grid must now carry.
New York State issues approximately 40,000 residential building permits in a typical year, per the Census Bureau's Building Permits Survey. At 15 kilowatts of additional peak demand per unit, that is 600 megawatts of new annual load, compounding to 3,000 megawatts over five years.
New York City's grid is managed by NYISO, not PJM, so the comparison is not apples-to-apples, but it illustrates a regional pattern: PJM was 2,900 megawatts from its all-time record on July 2, and Con Edison was simultaneously cutting voltage and shedding customers on the city's own grid. Both systems approached their limits under the same heat dome, and the mandate adds load to the one that was already failing at the neighborhood level.
Meanwhile, data centers are claiming grid capacity across the entire Mid-Atlantic corridor, and PJM projects more than 40,000 megawatts of new demand by 2030, enough to prompt the Energy Secretary to intervene personally during a single heat wave. Building electrification and data center growth are competing for capacity on infrastructure that demonstrated its fragility last week. This is addition, not speculation.
Why the Counterargument Is Half-Right
Heat pumps are two to three times more efficient than electric resistance heating, which means total annual energy consumption drops even as peak electrical demand rises, and homes built to current energy codes carry substantially better insulation and air sealing than existing housing stock. Battery storage and rooftop solar can reduce grid dependence for homeowners who invest in systems that currently run $15,000 to $25,000 on top of the electrification premium itself. And the cost of inaction is large: every new gas hookup locks in thirty years of fossil fuel infrastructure, and the climate arithmetic eventually makes grid stress look like a rounding error.
All of this is true, and none of it answers the question of whether the grid can deliver 30 kilowatts to a new apartment on a 99-degree Thursday in July when Con Edison is already cutting voltage to the apartments next door.
A Mandate Without a Grid Clause
AEBA requires every new home to be all-electric, but it does not require the grid to be ready for it. Mike Fazio, executive director of the New York State Builders Association, put it directly: "The infrastructure is simply not ready for all-electric mandates."
NYSERDA estimates that 40 to 50 percent of existing homes need panel upgrades to 200-amp service for full electrification, at $3,000 to $5,000 each, and while those homes are not covered by the new-construction mandate, they compete for the same electricians, the same interconnection engineering hours, and the same utility capacity planning resources that new all-electric buildings will require. Heat pump installer demand already outstrips supply, and the training pipeline to produce qualified technicians runs one to four years.
New York's Department of Public Service proposed an exemption allowing fossil fuel equipment if grid upgrades would take 18 months or longer than electric service connections, but the Environmental Defense Fund argues that exemption is too broad and risks gutting the mandate's purpose. They are probably right about the risk, though whether the alternative serves residents better remains an open question when the grid is already shedding load at current demand levels.
What to Do If You're Filing a Permit
If you are filing a residential building permit in New York State right now, budget $15,000 to $25,000 above the gas-heated baseline for the all-electric package: 200-amp panel, heat pump HVAC, induction range, and electric water heater. Confirm with your utility whether the local transformer can handle the additional load before you break ground, because the grid readiness clause the mandate does not include is now your due diligence problem, not the state's. Schedule your heat pump installer early, as wait times are extending statewide, and ask whether the DPS exemption framework applies to your jurisdiction before committing to a design that assumes fossil fuel alternatives are off the table.
Limitations
My 15-kilowatt delta is a rough industry average, and heat pump efficiency varies significantly by climate zone across a state that spans ASHRAE Zone 4 on Long Island to Zone 6 in the Adirondacks. Peak demand calculations assume worst-case simultaneous load across all new units, which overstates real-world coincidence factors, and not all of the 40,000 annual permits represent new construction covered by the AEBA's seven-story threshold. Permit volumes themselves fluctuate with interest rates, housing policy, and economic conditions in ways that could push the actual number well above or below that figure in any given year. Nothing here accounts for demand-response programs, distributed solar installations, or utility-scale battery storage that could absorb a meaningful portion of the additional load if deployed at sufficient scale and funded through mechanisms that do not yet exist.
If grid investment materializes alongside the mandate, the arithmetic changes entirely, and that conditional is doing all the structural work in the policy's theory of operation.
This week a federal appeals court ruled on the constitutionality of the mandate. It did not rule on the physics. Two thousand nine hundred megawatts of headroom sounds like a lot until you calculate who else is claiming it.