Sean Ewart grew up surrounded by a major backbone of upstate New York’s energy grid in the north country, and now as deputy secretary for energy under Gov. Kathleen C. Hochul, he’s helping to push that system and the state into a new electrical era.
As the governor’s deputy secretary for energy, Ewart serves as Hochul’s chief adviser on energy policy, a topic that has dominated much of her agenda in recent years. As the state rebuilds its industrial base and seeks to benefit from the latest technological boom, state officials are looking to revolutionize the energy grid, make it more reliable and more eco-friendly and prepare for a future with much higher demand for electricity.
Ewart, a native of Potsdam, St. Lawrence County, grew up in the shadows of the high-tension power lines that funnel energy from the Moses Saunders Power Dam down to central New York. He said that was his first entry point to thinking about electrical power and how they keep the lights on.
“It’s something that you pay a lot of attention to when you grow up there (in Potsdam),” he said. “It’s all around you.”
His family also has a history in the energy business; his great grandfather was chief system project engineer for the first nuclear reactor at Nine Mile in Oswego County. He said that as he grew up, he was always aware of the infrastructure around him, and as he moved through his professional life he found himself returning again and again to the topic of energy policy.
Ewart first worked as a staff writer for the Ogdensburg Journal, a publication of Johnson Newspaper Corporation. From 2012 to 2014 he covered state and local government for the newspaper; besides passing underneath the power lines every day on his commute from Potsdam to Ogdensburg, Ewart said he started to see how energy policy was so important to his hometown and the local community.
Ewart left journalism to work elsewhere in St. Lawrence County, got involved in with the local Democratic party committee, and then joined the staff of then-Assemblywoman Addie Jenne. He worked as her communications director and later as her legislative director. That experience, he said, was the real key to his involvement in energy policy.
“Just because of the nature of the geography, we were interacting with the energy industry a tremendous amount,” he said. “She was on the energy committee, and our location in the north country meant the energy companies were really interested in talking with us, because that’s where they were building.”
After Jenne lost her bid for reelection in 2018, Ewart briefly returned to the private sector to work for StateWatch, a sort of news and intelligence service targeting Albany insiders. But he was quickly recruited to another Assembly office, former Assemblyman Michael J. Cusick of the Bronx, who was then the chair of the Assembly Energy Committee. Ewart joined his team to focus specifically on energy policy, which he said exposed him to hundreds and hundreds of people who are focused on energy policy specifically.
“I had hundreds of people who would come through the office on a given day,” he said. “What I appreciated was that, I never claimed to know everything, and when I was in that position I was learning so much. I had an opportunity to have an office full of people whose whole purpose was to educate me.”
From there, Ewart said it was clear he would be focused on public energy policy into the future.
Since he started tracking the sector in 2015, Ewart said things have changed significantly. Now about a decade on, New York state is no longer seeing year-over-year decreases in energy demand, and he said it’s become clear that a new approach to managing the complex system of generation units, transformers, power lines and demand hubs is needed.
He said he saw that long arc of demand decreasing from his own perspective in Potsdam; across upstate New York, large, power-hungry manufacturing centers were closing down, jobs were moving offshore. General Motors left Massena, Frink Plows had long been closed in Clayton, and across the region it looked as if more and more manufacturers were headed for the highway south or across the ocean.
“You could be forgiven for, during the 2010s, thinking that the state was going to achieve its decarbonization goals by just having industry leave,” he said.
He said the differences today are twofold; firstly, manufacturers are returning to upstate New York, something Ewart gives credit to Hochul for.
“The governor has really overseen this tremendous turnaround in terms of enthusiasm for companies like Micron who want to come to New York and build really big,” he said.
Across upstate New York companies are planning large manufacturing centers; the largest is the four-factory Micron plan being developed in Onondaga County, which by itself is expected to demand the equivalent energy load of the states of New Hampshire and Vermont combined, according to analysis from the Empire Center.
The goal is to power these projects with renewable, or at least carbon-emission-free power, but even though New York is ahead of the curve on building out new solar facilities and is embarking on an ambitious plan to build 5 gigawatts of new nuclear power, the state is now relying on carbon-emitting facilities more than ever before, with demand on those expected to go up in the near term.
That leads to the second major change Ewart said he’s seen in the state’s energy sector: officials are now focused more than ever on building new facilities and expanding electrical generation capacity, something that was not previously a focus.
“Even from 2019 to today, we’ve seen that it’s easy to close power plants, but it’s much harder to build new ones, and we find ourselves in this building footing that is more than just the clean energy transition, but it’s for the whole energy infrastructure in New York,” he said. “Basically what’s changed from when I started to now is that the rubber has met the road.”
Ewart said the focus now is to build up in-state capacity to allow New York to meet its needs itself without relying heavily on other states or Canadian provinces to import energy; that focus on energy independence is something he said he’s carried over from growing up in the north country.
“In the north country, the electricity is very close to 100% renewable or at least from carbon-free sources,” he said. “There’s a certain sort of independence that comes along with the north country, and that’s carried through here, I think, in a way.”
The north country is set to be a key part of the state’s energy plans going forward, even more so than it already has been. Beyond the major hydro-power project across the St. Lawrence River, the region has a long list of smaller hydro power plants that keep things around them running. The north country has seen an explosion of renewable development across its open farmlands, with hundreds of acres of solar facilities and large wind farms dotted throughout the region. And now, the region’s westernmost counties including St. Lawrence and Jefferson are on a short-list to host the new nuclear power plants the Governor is pushing to have built.
All of that development has come with some community pushback; locals raise concerns that these power facilities are being built to meet demand farther south, are changing the character of their communities and in the case of solar and wind farms, some argue that they provide little in local support and create few, if any, new jobs.
Ewart said he acknowledges those concerns, although he doesn’t agree with the people who raise them. Firstly, he pointed out that local power plants are generating the electrons used to power the homes and businesses closest to them; electricity follows the shortest path of least resistance to return to ground. New developments do provide power to those closest to them on the grid, although those electrons can flow fairly far away as well.
Secondly, he said that those same concerns were raised back when the Moses-Saunders Power Dam was built, only for that development to spark new development of manufacturing and business at the time. And as he pointed out, no developments are being forced on unwilling landowners.
“The reality is, economic activity begets economic activity, and in New York we’re fortunate to have landowners who want to work with these developers to build these projects,” he said. “When developers are building, you can see them at the local diner, you can see those benefits.”
As the deputy energy secretary, Ewart is tasked with a long list of responsibilities. He stays in touch with the state agencies that manage the power industry like the New York Power Authority, the Long Island Power Authority and the state energy research and development authority, as well as the developers for new projects the state has commissioned or is interested in.
Ewart also tracks energy usage, and on the day he sat with the Watertown Daily Times, with temperatures near or above 100 degrees throughout much of the state, he was closely monitoring the state’s energy demands. The grid stayed stable that day, but Ewart said that high-demand days like particularly hot or cold days pose one of the greatest challenges in his job.
“We have a statutory, and more than that we have a moral obligation, to keep the lights on for New Yorkers,” he said. “And to do so at a price that people can afford.”
There are professionals who balance the grid; the folks at the New York Independent System Operator, the nonprofit that’s tasked with maintaining the statewide energy grid. The ISO interfaces with the independent energy producers and the state’s many utility companies, balancing production with demand as closely as possible. Those organizations are regulated by the state’s Public Service Commission, a part of the executive Department of Public Service overseen by Hochul.
Ewart’s role is to interface with the power authorities, the Public Service Commission and the research and development authority, advocating for the Governor’s vision to those independently-run groups, and then taking the messages back from those authorities to the Governor.
In the nuclear development program, Ewart was there when the Hochul administration started seeing the signs that the President in Washington was turning hostile to renewable energy projects. President Donald J. Trump has used his power to cancel off-shore wind projects planned for the coast of Long Island, and has worked to discourage solar development as well.
Ewart said that he saw the discussions turn to how New York can keep pushing towards those energy goals within the new reality, and when the answer of nuclear power was given, he said he saw the discussion turn to how quickly that can be achieved.
“Our state agencies surveyed the situation, saw the tremendous energy needs that we have on the horizon, and with the threats from the Trump administration that are challenging our clean energy plans, we wanted to keep the train on the tracks,” he said. “We realized that if we want to make a sizable contribution to nuclear power by 2040, we have to start today. We had to start immediately.”
And now, Ewart and the Governor’s office are forging ahead on that 5 gigawatt nuclear goal; they’re working with industry experts and NYPA to build up one new facility to be co-owned by the state and a developer producing one gigawatt, plus pushing for other facilities statewide to generate another four gigawatts.
Ewart said he believes strongly in the value of nuclear power. It’s a proven technology that the state has managed to maintain an excellent track record with. Reactor One at Nine Mile Point in Oswego, that facility Ewart’s great grandfather helped build, is now the oldest operating nuclear reactor in the country, one of the oldest in the world, and it has had no major accidents.
And he said that the economic impact of the Nine Mile facility is clear in Oswego County, something that can be replicated where other reactors open.
“In addition to all the clean power, the economic impact is something that makes me really excited about the prospect of bringing new nuclear power to New York,” he said. “You see it in Oswego County, the atom is on the county seal, you see what it’s done there.”
Ewart said he’s excited to be a part of this next phase of the state’s energy evolution, and honored to be part of a push to reinvigorate the nuclear sector in the footsteps of his great-grandfather. He said he hopes to stay focused on energy policy throughout his career.
“I don’t think I’ll be the chief system project engineer on this side of the project, but I very much hope to be involved in some capacity in the groundbreaking and ribbon-cutting for these projects,” he said.
