Inside the Grid Powering Upstate New York’s Comeback

Happy Thursday.

The build this week: Upstate New York is growing again, and the grid has to keep up. I traveled with Avangrid Deputy CEO Kim Harriman from a substation near Letchworth State Park to a century-old hydro station in Rochester to see what that takes.

Underneath: Japan will put up as much as $21 billion for two new GlobalFoundries fabs in Malta, New York. Lockheed Martin opened a $300 million expansion of its missile parts plant in Grand Prairie, Texas, AEP plans to invest $4 billion in a fuel cell plant near Cheyenne for Google, M.C. Dean said it will add 1,950 jobs at its modular factory campus in Virginia, and Savannah won the permit for a $2.3 billion container terminal.

The Lead

The big picture: After decades of decline, upstate New York is adding jobs and electric load again. Micron broke ground on its roughly $100 billion megafab in Clay in January, Japan is now funding two new GlobalFoundries fabs in Malta, and Chobani has a $1.2 billion plant planned in Rome. All of it depends on substations and power lines that, in many places, went into service in the middle of the last century.

Driving the news: Avangrid, owned by Spain’s Iberdrola, runs eight electric and gas utilities serving more than 3.4 million customers in New York and New England, including NYSEG and RG&E upstate. At NYSEG’s South Perry substation, part of which has been in service since the 1950s, crews are in the middle of an $83 million rebuild set to finish in 2029. The station serves more than 8,500 customers around Perry, Warsaw and Mount Morris, plus Letchworth State Park. Harriman said it also carries wind and solar power that can’t reach customers today because the system is too constrained. “Instead of running at 10%, 30%, we’re doing upgrades here that will allow that power to flow more freely to customers,” she told me.

Behind the scenes: Parked at the site was one of the 24 mobile substations in NYSEG and RG&E’s fleet. These trailer-mounted units plug into the grid and keep customers powered while a permanent substation is down for upgrades or repairs. But with a service territory that stretches from Westchester to the North Country, the utility needs more of them. Other critical equipment like transformers can take years to arrive, so Avangrid buys across its utilities and plans purchases several years out.

Why it matters: New York is the largest yogurt producer in the nation and fifth-largest dairy-producing state, and that matters for the grid. Modern dairies run milking, cooling and ventilation equipment around the clock, and Chobani already buys more than a billion pounds of New York milk a year. Dairy farms rarely come up in conversations about electricity demand, but upstate they sit alongside advanced manufacturing as a reason the system needs upgrading. “I’m a Western New Yorker. I was born in Buffalo. I was raised outside of Rochester. We went through decades of economic decline,” Harriman told me. “It is wonderful to see this area come back, come back strong. We never want to be a hindrance. We want to be a partner.”

What’s next: The upgrades have to be paid for, and customers are already feeling squeezed by rising costs of all kinds. Avangrid has announced $18.5 billion in grid investment through 2031. Harriman argues that the spending pays for itself in fewer outages and cheaper power. “There is this notion of affordability, but there’s also investing your way to affordability,” she said. “The more power we can bring into the system, the lower energy prices can become.”

🎬️ Watch the full episode of our visit to Upstate New York

Defense & Space

• Lockheed Martin opened a $300 million expansion in Grand Prairie, Texas, growing the missile parts plant to more than 735,000 square feet as part of a plan to add 6,000 U.S. jobs, 2,000 of them in Texas.

• Hadrian will install an automated machining cell inside Lockheed's Grand Prairie plant under a seven-year agreement, making parts for PAC-3 MSE, THAAD and PrSM missiles starting in early 2027.

• Corvid Technologies will invest $95 million in a 400,000-square-foot plant in Mooresville, North Carolina, adding 423 jobs that pay an average of $81,550 to build vehicle launch systems.

• Lockheed Martin got a $1 million federal grant, plus $755,000 from Pike County, to run a water line to its expanding THAAD plant in Troy, Alabama, where it expects to add 300 jobs.

• Avio USA agreed with Lockheed Martin to build solid rocket motors for Extended Range GMLRS and PrSM at the 900,000-square-foot plant where it broke ground in Hurt, Virginia, in September.

• Raytheon won an Air Force contract worth up to $8 billion to modernize and restart production of strategic communications terminals, with work in Marlborough, Massachusetts, and Largo, Florida, through 2036.

• Micross Components earned Class K qualification for space-grade hybrid microcircuits from the Defense Logistics Agency at its plant in Apopka, Florida, making it a domestic source for satellite and missile defense parts.

Maritime & Shipbuilding

• HII's Newport News Shipbuilding won a $56 million Navy contract for engineering and design work supporting the AUKUS submarine partnership, with an option that could bring it to $91 million.

• Fincantieri Marine Group received about $10 million from the Navy and the Maritime Administration for cutting, welding and automation upgrades at its Wisconsin yards that build the Navy's Landing Ship Medium.

• Lockheed Martin won a $74.3 million Navy order to build AN/SLQ-32(V)6 shipboard electronic warfare systems for Canada and Japan, with most of the work in Liverpool, New York.

• Austal began commercial negotiations with Hanwha Defense USA over a sale of its shipbuilding business in Mobile, Alabama, and expects a binding offer.

Semiconductors & Electronics

• GlobalFoundries was picked to build and run two new 300-millimeter fabs at its Malta, New York campus, with Japan providing up to $21 billion under its trade agreement with Washington. The first fab is expected online in 2029, adding about 900,000 wafers a year, and GF expects more than 1,000 manufacturing jobs. Separately, GF will reallocate $955 million of its CHIPS award, and Commerce will take an equity stake of about 4%. Read GlobalFoundries’ announcement.

  NYU and New York City announced a $284 million quantum chip fabrication facility at 770 Broadway in Manhattan, a 23,000-square-foot fab set to open in 2030 and expected to serve more than 100 companies over its first decade.

• VDL Groep will invest about $77 million to expand its plant in Oakwood, Georgia, adding 120 jobs and a bigger cleanroom to build equipment for chipmakers.

• Fujifilm will spend about $18 million to expand chip slurry production in Mesa, Arizona, adding a production line for advanced packaging slurries that starts running in 2027.

• Fab equipment spending in the Americas is on track to more than double, from $18.1 billion in 2026 to $40.6 billion in 2029, according to SEMI's latest 300mm fab outlook.

Manufacturing & Automation

• M.C. Dean will invest $412.5 million in two new plants at its modular manufacturing campus in Caroline County, Virginia, with 1,950 jobs projected as the campus grows past 3.6 million square feet by 2030.

• Daikin Applied more than tripled its modular systems plant in Phoenix to 191,000 square feet, where it builds custom modular cooling and electric systems.

• Ambrosia Energy has started work on a 10-gigawatt-hour battery factory near Austin, Texas, a 150,000-square-foot plant that will make batteries for off-grid data centers.

• CuBE Packaging Solutions will invest more than $30 million in high-speed injection molding machines and automation in St. Charles, Illinois, with the first phase already running.

• Med-Mizer will invest $9 million and add a second shift in Batesville, Indiana, creating up to 73 jobs to build hospital beds under a five-year VA contract.

Energy & Materials

• American Electric Power plans to invest about $4 billion in a 702-megawatt fuel cell plant near Cheyenne, Wyoming, using Bloom Energy fuel cells to supply Google under a 20-year power purchase agreement, with full operation expected by the end of 2028.

• The Energy Department said it intends to support $581 million of grid upgrades by the Tennessee Valley Authority, including $250 million in federal funds, covering 84 transmission and distribution projects across eight states and about 800 jobs.

• Ozinga opened a slag cement mill in East Chicago, Indiana designed to turn steelmaking slag into 1 million tons of cement a year, which the company calls the largest mill of its kind in North America.

• Utili-Serve will invest more than $24.8 million in Conover, North Carolina, adding 105 jobs and a 25,000-square-foot plant that builds protective relay and field control panels.

• Aclara Resources finished basic engineering for its heavy rare earths separation plant in Vinton, Louisiana, near Lake Charles.

Supply Chain & Freight

• The Georgia Ports Authority won the Army Corps permit for a $2.3 billion container terminal on Hutchinson Island, which will let Savannah handle 3.5 million more twenty-foot container units a year, with construction starting in January 2028.

Dealbook

• ICON raised a $200 million Series D co-led by Baillie Gifford and BlackRock-managed funds to build more of its robotic construction systems and open a large R&D facility in Austin, Texas.

• Flex closed its purchase of EPC Power, adding power conversion gear for data centers and the grid that EPC says has more than 15 gigawatts deployed.

• JPMorganChase hired Chryssa Rask to lead shipbuilding financing under its $1.5 trillion Security and Resiliency Initiative, which has committed up to $10 billion to direct equity and venture investments.

• Scimplify raised $25 million led by Hitachi Ventures and plans to put about $7.5 million into its U.S. expansion, including manufacturing of specialty chemicals.

• Giraffe Bio raised a $6.4 million seed round led by Orion Industrial Ventures, with BHP Ventures joining, for biomolecules that help mines recover up to 5% more copper.

Back Tuesday.