Watt's Next 4 NY

Inspiration

Climate change does not pick who feels it. In New York City, people in underserved communities across the boroughs are already living with the effects. We were inspired by the New York Power Authority (NYPA) and its work toward a greener New York. We wanted to see where the state's electricity comes from today, and whether the sources that are growing are actually making the mix cleaner.

What we learned

We learned the year-over-year story in the percentages, not just that a few renewable sources went up. Wind grew from 3.7% of generation in 2023 to 5.3% in 2025. Other renewables grew from 1.8% to 2.3%. Over the same years, the eco share, nuclear plus hydro plus wind plus other renewables, fell from 49.33% to 47.22%. The sources relate to each other: wind is stronger in the colder months, and other renewables are stronger in the warmer months. Growth in two small sources does not, by itself, pull the whole mix in a cleaner direction.

How we built it

We started by wrangling the monthly NYISO fuel-mix file, 36 months from 2023 through 2025, and looking for outliers and patterns. In Google Colab we drew the first graphs: bar, line, and pie charts for the fuels and the yearly change. We used Cursor, with Claude, to turn that notebook into one interactive webpage. The page has the circle chart, the 36-month stack, the season lines, and the eco bars, with filters for year, season, fuel, and percent or TWh. GitHub Pages hosts the demo.

Challenges we ran into

The hard part was seeing the real pattern between sources. Wind and other renewables both rose, which looked like good news until we set them next to the eco share and saw that share fall. Fitting every graph into one page was the other challenge. The pie, the stacked months, the lines, and the yearly bars had to use the same fuel colors and the same story so the dashboard read as one view instead of a pile of separate charts.