The mayor of New York City has limited say over how the nation’s largest metropolis generates its electricity.

But if elected, Whitney Tilson, the former hedge fund investor making a long-shot bid for the Democratic nod for mayor, said he’d use City Hall’s bully pulpit to push for reopening the Indian Point nuclear power plant that permanently closed four years ago.

The power station, located in the suburbs just north of the city in the Westchester town of Buchanan, was the largest in New York, providing 13% of the state’s electricity in its final years of operation. The plant’s three reactors generated one-quarter of the electrons that flowed in the five boroughs, and upward of 80% of the carbon-free power used in the metropolitan area. But environmental campaigners, including now-Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr., claimed for years that the infinitesimal risk of a significant radiation leak from Indian Point posed too great a threat to allow its continued operation. The effort ultimately won over then-Gov. Andrew Cuomo, who owned a home near the plant.

Since the final reactor shut down in April 2021, natural gas has replaced virtually all the lost atomic generation. The closure came the year before the war in Ukraine sent gas prices skyrocketing – a market dynamic made worse by the fact that New York had recently blocked construction of new pipelines to cheaply carry gas from the fracking fields of Pennsylvania into the Empire State. Increased demand and limited supply of gas spiked New York City’s already high power prices.

The city is also facing worsening blackouts. In November, New York’s grid operator warned that the city faced a 446-megawatt electricity shortfall at a time when data centers, air conditioners, and the electrification of vehicles and buildings are driving up demand.

Over iced tea at a Russian café in Bay Ridge, Brooklyn, following a few hours of canvassing at the nation’s oldest Memorial Day parade last month, Tilson, 58, told me he would work with Holtec International – the nuclear company that owns Indian Point – to reopen the facility. He said he would support either restoring what remains of the partially-demolished reactors, if possible, or deploying new ones to make use of the transmission lines and substations already located at the site.

“I’m a big champion of nuclear energy,” Tilson said. “Let’s take advantage of the infrastructure at Indian Point.”

Nuclear power, he said, “is one of the few things I agree with the Trump administration on.” He said he would engage with Holtec and “push them” to restore power generation at the site.

That wouldn't be easy. The decommissioning agreement between Holtec and the state bars additional nuclear power generation at the site. Despite her increasing support for atomic energy, New York Gov. Kathy Hochul (D) signed legislation in 2023 that banned Holtec from carrying out routine releases of treated cooling water from the defunct power plant. The company accused the statute of violating federal law and suggested the state was bending to pseudoscientific fearmongering of nuclear energy.

But Tilson said he’d push for change.

“It’s not clear to me how much the mayor of New York has direct control here, but obviously there’s a bully pulpit,” he told me.

“Beyond the environmental costs of all that methane being released and replacing what was perfectly clean, cheap energy, New Yorkers are getting crushed by utility bills,” he added. “This is contributing to the affordability crisis.”

Tilson – who is polling at just over 1% – declined to criticize Cuomo, his frontrunner rival in the race for the Democratic mayoral nomination, for Indian Point’s demise. It’s perhaps a tactical move. A moderate centrist, Tilson has trained his fire on Zohran Mamdani, the democratic socialist whose charismatic campaign focused on cost of living has fueled a surge to second place just behind Cuomo.

Holtec is currently working to restore the single reactor at its Palisades nuclear plant in Michigan. If successful, it would mark the first time the U.S. has revived an atomic station after what was supposed to be its permanent closure. The Energy Department’s Loan Programs Office provided a $1.5 billion loan to complete the reopening – and the deal remains one of the few with which the Trump administration has vowed to move forward.

Given that the demolition is already underway, it’s unlikely that Indian Point’s existing reactors could come back online.

But in February, Holtec unveiled plans to construct the first of its proprietary 300-megawatt small modular reactors at the Michigan site before embarking on a nationwide buildout.

Indian point only “closed early due to short-sighted political policy that did not value clean, baseload energy,” Patrick O’Brien, Holtec’s director of government of affairs, told me in a text message on Saturday.

Still, he said the site could serve as a home to future SMRs.

The Indian Point “property, with a knowledgeable local community and educated workforce, remains a viable potential source of future clean energy generation should the State of New York look to decarbonize the grid and provide the future power of the growing commercial and consumer demands,” he said.

PROGRAMMING NOTES: On Thursday, I had a new story up on Heatmap about the philanthropy Founders Pledge nabbing $50 million to expand its climate fund, which has focused on center-right groups with influence over Republicans. The piece, if I do say so myself, doubles as a brief history of how climate became such a partisan issue since the 2008 election, when Republican John McCain ran on a more ambitious decarbonization plan than Democrat Barack Obama.

On Friday, Canary Media published my look into how the Trump administration’s cuts to the heavy industry projects deal “a big blow” to efforts to slash emissions from heat used at factories. I talked to a former Energy Department official who also explained why the agency relied on contracts that were easily canceled. The short of it: the Energy Department is “way, way behind” agencies such as the Commerce Department in adopting newer approaches to government financing.

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This edition’s soundtrack is “Sleepwalking” by Leven Kali, the Dutch-born American R&B singer best known for his work with Beyoncé, Drake and Playboi Carti. The track is sunny and silky with an impossibly catchy chorus. A great early summer song for your weekend.

Signing off from a humid Bay Ridge, Brooklyn, where twice this week I have tried my hand at making the Catalan dish fricandó. I made a particularly nice one last night and managed to impress both my wife and my sister by turning the leftovers into a killer sandwich with focaccia, chèvre and arugula baby Eve and I copped at the farmers market this morning.