Blog: A Tour of the Past, Present, and Future of the Energy Infrastructure of Queens, New York City
By Adam B. Cohen, Ph.D., Co-Founder and CTO, NineDot Energy
Queens is home to 2.3 million New Yorkers and is one of the most diverse places in the world.
Like the rest of New York City, Queens is powered by electricity: from the third rail of the subway and LIRR, to the elevator banks of the gleaming glass skyscrapers in Long Island City, to the new CityWorks exhibit at the Hall of Science. Queens has a long and vibrant history, and so does its energy infrastructure.
My company, NineDot Energy, and I are plugging into this history to help make our shared power grid more reliable and our city more affordable and clean. This Earth Day, I want to share my own journey through Queens spanning the last few decades, how NineDot’s energy projects are just the latest in a long arc of Queens innovations, and how what happens here can be spread across the city, the state, the nation, and the globe. I distilled this into a one-day road trip with a few of my colleagues stopping at some of my favorite hidden pieces of Queens infrastructure. Here’s my story:
Like many New Yorkers of my generation, I got my driver’s license the day I turned 17.
My 1990s-era used Honda Civics (and me under the hood)!
The year was 2001, and one of my earliest memories behind the wheel is navigating the chaotic streets of Southeast Queens after the horrendous and scary crash of American Airlines Flight 587 after its takeoff from JFK Airport. In the era before iPhones and GPS, and well before Uber Eats and DoorDash, one of my first jobs was delivering Chinese food across the Rosedale and Laurelton neighborhoods. It was just me, a pocket full of cash and change, steaming bags of combination platters with stapled-on addresses, a stash of take-out menus, and my photocopied copy of the local Yellow Pages map in my used Honda Civic.
A tangle of power lines and maze of roads (including Battery Road!) in the shadows of JFK Airport
I learned the maze of roads, avenues, drives, streets, lanes, courts, and terraces like the back of my hand. I knew every shortcut to avoid rush-hour traffic on Merrick Boulevard and The Conduit, every unexpected dead-end, and especially the location of each and every payphone. In between solving the problems on my AP physics homework each afternoon, I was solving the “traveling salesman problem” and learning the infrastructure around the borough of Queens.
Fully charged up for the road trip around Queens energy infrastructure
Two decades later – after earning a doctorate in chaos physics, having a research and development fellowship with the U.S. Energy Department in Washington, working as a scientist at a dynamic rideshare company (where we wrote software to solve the traveling salesman problem!), and starting NineDot Energy with a mission to build and operate clean energy projects – I returned to these same city blocks.
My goal was no longer to deliver dinner to homes across Queens, but to find a better way to serve up electricity that’s more reliable and efficient, that’s less polluting, and protects our wallets. At NineDot, I’m fortunate to combine my theoretical knowledge of complex dynamical systems – including the power grid – with my on-the-ground, street-level understanding of how New York really works.
Chaos physics is the science of how a set of small, targeted changes can spur big, outsized impacts. It’s the science behind the “butterfly effect.” Every day at NineDot, we apply these concepts in the real world, by using our constellation of distributed energy projects to make our hometown cleaner, safer, and healthier and a more affordable place to live. Today, NineDot has dozens and dozens of clean energy projects in the works across the Five Boroughs, including seven that helped alleviate strain on the city’s power grid during the dog days of Summer 2025.
Adam stopping for lunch at a café outside JFK Airport with a historic aerial image of 1950s-era Idlewild Airport. This café also, and unexpectedly, is a host site for a set of batteries in the parking lot and solar on the roof!
As we’re preparing to turn on our first Queens projects, I recently went on my own infrastructure tour – looking at what’s been around for decades, what’s new, and what’s on deck – in my old high-school stomping ground (but now in my used electric car). Here, I’m telling some little-known stories about what makes bringing clean energy in The World’s Borough so timely and essential, and also how it fits within the area’s historical arc of innovation.
Powering the “Jewel of Jamaica”
I started my infrastructure tour with a walk through Rochdale Village. When it opened in 1963, it was designed as a “city-within-a-city.” It’s home to 25,000 New Yorkers, complete with twenty apartment towers, five schools, two shopping malls, and a library. Rochdale is also home to one of the world’s first cogeneration power plants that serves all the electric load, heat, hot water, and air conditioning to the entire community, with no connection to the rest of the city’s power grid. At the time it was built, the U.S. Department of Energy said of the 21-megawatt Integrated Community Energy System: “its success provided inspiration for the construction and operation of many other such plants across the country.”
The cover of a 1977 National Lab case study on Rochdale Village’s community energy system
Rochdale’s utilitarian-style power station is designed to fit in among the residential towers
Peering into the power plant windows, where each step of the process is displayed like a jewelry store window: from fuel input to power generation to electric distribution
For six decades and counting, Rochdale Village – like other systems it inspired – has kept the lights on through city-wide blackouts, blizzards, and superstorms. But, it has also been the blueprint for the right way to build and use neighborhood-scale power infrastructure. Rather than the conventional way of billion-dollar build-outs of giga-scale power plants, giga-scale substations, and a massive web of cables, Rochdale pointed the way to more local, shared, community “microgrids.”
For the last decade, New York State has again become the nation’s leader for community power. More than 1,300 community solar farms serve up clean power to homes, businesses, and schools across the state. One big change from the 1960s Rochdale flavor of community power: today’s community solar farms are not stand-alone: they work in tandem with the local utility to make the whole grid more reliable, cleaner, and affordable for everyone nearby, even beyond the host site.
Making a stop at JFK’s battery energy storage project, under active construction
Soon, the Southeast Queens will be host to the city’s largest community solar project, at JFK Airport, a ten-minute drive south from Rochdale Village. The carport project covering one of the long-term parking lots will be integrated with battery energy storage, so it can release energy when the local power grid is stressed but the sun isn’t shining. Even more, the financial savings from solar power will be automatically transferred as monthly utility bill credits to nearby residents. Also, as the New Terminal One at JFK is built, it will be home to a first-of-its-kind “microgrid” with solar panels, batteries, and fuel cells that can either work with the local power grid or by itself.
A revolution in community power started at Rochdale Village in 1963, and it continues today across Queens, across New York, and across the nation.
Keeping Cool in Addisleigh Park
Driving north on Merrick Blvd and turning right on Linden Blvd, my tour continued to the Addisleigh Park historic district. Designed in the 1930s based on the “Garden City Movement” of urban planning, this “greenbelt” community was a precursor to the Rochdale Village self-sufficiency plan. The neighborhood’s original design was based on the advent of the modern conveniences provided by wide-spread electric infrastructure. In fact, in 1935, when General Electric – then based in New York City – was deciding where to show off its newest technologies to the world, they built their demonstration home right at the corner of Linden Blvd and 175th St. GE’s Addisleigh home was one of the first in the world to be fully air conditioned and have all-electric kitchen appliances.
GE’s 1935 publication on the electric house of the future
By the 1960s, it was the rapid adoption of home air conditioning that set off a building spree for New York’s power grid. It also changed how the city uses power, with big spikes in electric demand during summer heat waves. Today, most of the time, most of the power grid is remarkably underused except for a handful of days each summer. With global climate change, it’s expected that these peak days will become much more frequent and more severe. So, for the first time in decades, we need to either rethink how we use today’s power infrastructure or set off another massive and costly 1960s-style infrastructure expansion.
One of Queen’s 30,000 solar electric homes, right on Linden Blvd and 149th St
Fortunately, New York City is innovating again, just as with GE’s 1935 demo home. Last summer, a pilot program called Responsible Grid hooked up batteries to home A/Cs that effectively removed the units from the grid during the peakiest hours. Coincidentally, one of the pilot locations was right here in Southeast Queens. Carrier is looking to do the same thing with their next generation of HVAC units that connect to homes throughout the city. Another innovation is from Copper: integrating batteries right into all-electric ovens, and installing the units in 10,000 apartments across the city. And Pila is doing a similar thing to integrate batteries with refrigerators. And efficient, new electric heat pumps are coming to replace our old oil and gas boilers, with a pilot at Woodside Houses in Queens. Throughout the state, nearly 7,000 homes now have back-up batteries installed that can also be called upon to support the grid. Queens is already home to over 30,000 solar photovoltaic rooftops installs, with thousands more families and businesses going solar each year. These are a handful of the modern advancements that help us use our power grid much more efficiently and reduce the need to build loads more old-school power plants and billion-dollar-plus substations.
All these battery-backed appliances use rechargeable battery cells that are designed to be re-filled each day over a decade or more. They charge up when grid power is plentiful, cleaner, and lower cost. And they hold their energy until the grid is in an over-stressed state or entirely offline, it’s running on the dirtiest sources of energy, or it’s extra expensive for everyone. Just like the billions and billions of iPhones, laptops, earbuds, smart watches, cordless vacuums, and electric toothbrushes, these lithium-ion-based devices are time-tested, safe, and reliable. And New York actually has a special history with this technology: it is our very own Stan Whittingham, a distinguished professor at Binghamton University, who helped invent these rechargeable batteries more than 50 years ago. Because of how the technology has completely transformed day-to-day lives of people across the globe, Stan shared the Nobel Prize in Chemistry for his work, and he continues to innovate by finding new ways to manufacture batteries and build a workforce for the state. I’m proud to serve as a board member of NY-BEST, the state’s consortium of battery companies, with Stan. Looking back on my career, it’s been quite a journey from my job delivering food in Queens to working alongside a Nobel laureate.
A stop at the mural at Linden Blvd and 192nd St in St. Albans, Queens
Next on my infrastructure tour, I continued on the “Boulevard of Linden,” where, in 1991, A Tribe Called Quest playfully rapped they’re “like an Energizer.”
Getting to the Peak
Going south on Rockaway Blvd, passing by JFK, and crossing the Jamaica Bay, any tour of the Queens energy infrastructure can’t miss the twin Jamaica Bay and Bayswater Peaking Facilities, powering the Rockaways. These are two in the city’s fleet of two dozen or so “peaking power plants” that get fired up when electric demand surges. Coincidentally, these plants are designed based on jet engines, so they can ramp up super fast to meet local power needs. Unlike many of the city’s power plants, which were built to meet growing demand in the 1960s, these peakers were installed much more recently in the early 2000s.
A pair of peaker power plants, tucked between homes in The Rockaways
These peakers have a “capacity factor” of roughly 1%, meaning that about 99% of the year they are idling, waiting around for grid demand to surge. These peakers are exactly the outmoded infrastructure that New York is trying to replace. They’re super expensive to build and inefficient to operate and maintain. And pollution from these kind of fossil-fuel plants is a leading cause of health problems like asthma. That’s why New York has committed to connect zero-carbon offshore wind to the grid, to build more rooftop solar, and to use batteries to match the variable output of renewable power with real-time power loads. And, oddly enough, the drive to and from these peaker plants goes right through Battery Road.
Homes on Battery Road in The Rockaways
A Battery Bank Pioneer
As I continued my tour, I backtracked across the Bay and went a few exits on The Belt to my next stop. Neatly tucked between the M.S. 137 public school, a church, and Bowl 360, right between the elevated tracks of the A train and the single-family homes of South Ozone Park, I found ConEdison’s first community battery. Neatly arranged in nine battery containers, each is about the size of a yellow school bus, an apt comparison because they’re sitting right next to where middle schoolers get on and off buses each morning and afternoon.
A stop outside ConEdison’s Ozone Park battery project
Con Edison’s battery is installed in a residential neighborhood, between M.S. 137, a bowling alley, a church, and the A Train
When Con Edison’s Ozone Park battery project went online in 2019, it set the example for how energy storage should be safely installed and sited in our city, and it created a whole new way to operate the grid. In times of high grid demand, rather than calling on peaker plants, batteries are dispatched to discharge their stored energy. Then, the batteries charge back up when the power grid has extra headroom, typically in overnight hours. In this way, the grid is used with way more efficiency, which reduces costs for everyone.
What started in Ozone Park has now gone citywide. This Con Edison project provided the lessons needed to shape the goals and policies for energy storage: from how the city agencies review and approve the safe use of grid-connected batteries, to what zoning districts batteries projects are permitted, to creating the rules for using batteries to reduce our city’s carbon footprint. With this first project in Queens, Con Edison helped pioneer the city’s battery energy storage guidelines.
Photo of NineDot BESS with mural and mosaics done by school children in the Bronx
Con Edison has applied these lessons again and again. In 2023, they flipped the switch on New York City’s largest single battery project in the heart of the residential Rosebank neighborhood of Staten Island. And they repeated this in 2025 with their first Brooklyn battery in Brownville, blending in with mixed-use commercial and residential properties and a short walk from the P.S. 328’s elementary-school playground. Con Edison’s Queens and Brooklyn batteries are part of the utility’s highly-lauded Brooklyn-Queens Demand Management program (commonly just called “BQDM” by folks in the industry), which helped defer more than a billion dollars of conventional grid upgrades with small, targeted projects like batteries. Con Edison also asked other developers to help out: like the battery pack installed on the rooftop of the Barclays Center, the one inside the Marcus Garvey Apartments, and the one that NineDot built in The Bronx which is adorned with a 135-foot clean energy mural painted by the students of the neighboring elementary school. These successes by Con Edison and others spurred the state’s nation-leading 6,000-megawatt energy storage roadmap, which allocates at least 40% of installed storage capacity by 2030 for the highest-need areas of New York City.
Planning for all these batteries sprinkled across New York City started in the months right after Superstorm Sandy struck in 2012. The city quickly realized the old way of only using centralized power sources isn’t going to provide the resiliency and reliability that “The City that Never Sleeps” expects. In 2013, the city’s “A Stronger, More Resilient New York” report set the plan in motion. New York City created the world’s most robust regulations for safely integrating battery energy storage systems into communities. Every battery installation across the city benefits from over a decade of experience and expertise that makes the city the global leader in regulating battery energy storage (plus decades and decades of experience using the underlying tech).
Touring NineDot’s Queens battery energy storage project, under construction
As I took a quick drive down Rockaway Blvd and passed by the storied Aqueduct Racetrack – which is about to turn to its next chapter as much-needed new housing – I made a stop at NineDot’s nearly-complete battery project. On the same block as one of New York City’s best spots for doubles and roti sandwiches and close to P.S.100, NineDot’s newest battery is transforming a former parking lot into a community power site designed to serve the local South Ozone Park neighborhood plus provide much needed grid support across a larger area, from Williamsburg and East Flatbush in Brooklyn to Kew Gardens and Howard Beach in Queens. Just like Con Edison’s other batteries, NineDot’s project has a set of sleek-looking modules. I toured the battery units, the control room, and all the equipment in place to make this system safe, robust, and reliable. Our construction crew was on hand, wiring up the gear and programming the software. It’s amazing to see how much the hardware has advanced from Con Edison’s 2019 install next to M.S. 137 to those being used now
Time to Recharge
I next stopped to juice up my car at a PlugNYC electric vehicle charging station in Laurelton, one of 100 identical curbside plugs installed throughout the Five Boroughs. This is the filling station of the future, where I can fill up my car’s battery rather than a gas tank. Southeast Queens is also home to a new super-fast charging station, in partnership with Revel, the Port Authority, and Con Edison, at JFK Airport, right off The Belt. This is one of the highest utilized EV charging stations in the country. And an even bigger station is in the works for LaGuardia in the other corner of Queens, which will become the nation’s largest airport EV station.
Just like most combustion-engine passenger vehicles, most EVs spend the majority of their time parked in driveways or garages. Parked EVs are really batteries on wheels, and they can be a resource for our city’s power grid. Cars and chargers enabled with “vehicle-to-grid” (or V2G) technology can send some of their stored energy back to the grid during times of high need. Even if 10% of the two million cars registered in New York City were set up for this, they’d add up to the equivalent power of half of the city’s fossil-fuel power plants. NineDot has tested out V2G tech, along with Revel and Con Edison, and we’re hoping it will become an important part of the city’s energy mix.
Recharging in Laurelton, Queens
The Invisible Workhorses of the Power Grid
My next stop is a short drive down Rockaway Blvd., at the corner of 120th Ave. and 133rd St.
What’s so remarkable about this stop is just how unremarkable it looks. This is an example of the humble “unit substation” that blends in, wedged between homes and businesses. This is the invisible infrastructure that really powers our city, working together with the miles of cables and power transformers buried beneath our streets – that’s what all the red spray-painted lines are about – or strung up on utility poles. The unit substation is what steps voltage down from what’s needed to move power from point A to point B to what’s needed for use within our neighborhoods. So, unit substations have to be installed right next to where people live, work, and go to school. For nearly a century, there have been hundreds of these green enclosures on quarter-acre-size parcels dotted in every neighborhood across in the city, including more than a dozen supporting the neighborhoods of Southeast Queens.
One of hundreds of ConEdison’s unit substations throughout the city
This tour reminded me what I love about all this seemingly mundane infrastructure. Just like unit substations, there are thousands of natural gas regulation stations, water pumping stations and water towers, subway substations and ventilators, and telephone buildings and cell towers hidden in plain sight throughout New York City. This is the forgotten utilitarian stuff that makes our modern lives possible – from the phones in our pockets, the lightswitches on our walls, the teakettles whistling on our stovetops. For well over half a century, New York City has recognized these forms of utilitarian infrastructure as part of the lifeblood of the city, classifying them under the same zoning group as civic and social infrastructure like police stations, firehouses, and other public-service establishments.
Over the years, the novelty of new technologies – community solar, induction stoves, grid batteries – will wear off and they’ll blend into the everyday. This new tech will soon become essential parts of how New Yorkers go about their days.
Back to the Beginning
I ended my tour with a short stop at China Dragon for take-out to bring home to my kids. I haven’t stepped inside the restaurant in quite a long time, but it’s got the same smell and the same table where I did my homework problems in basic electronic circuit design back in 2001: resistors, inductors, capacitors.
Back on The Belt in Queens
It was a zigzag of a day. And, for me, it’s yet another lesson in chaos theory: small changes spurring outsized changes. At first glance, the little things I learned while navigating around Queens as a teenager seem inconsequential. But they’ve had a big impact on how I choose to contribute to improving our city and our planet.
All original artwork: Nicole Kelner