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Dark days loom for New Yorkers as climate law promises blackouts, cost hikes

Gov. Hochul has spent much of her 4 ¹/₂ years in office facing a time bomb left by her predecessor: drastic, legally binding greenhouse gas reduction targets that the state has no practical means of meeting.

The 2019 Climate Act requires New York to cut greenhouse gas emissions by about one-quarter from that year’s levels by 2030. The state has made little progress toward this goal, in part because officials shuttered New York’s largest nuclear power plant in 2021.

The law remains on the books, and its defenders balk at revision. If Hochul can’t persuade them to change it, Albany’s green dreams will cause harsh conditions in the Empire State — steep electric bills, green-energy boondoggles and rolling blackouts.

The law has saddled the state with three related but distinct problems: threats to the grid’s reliability, rising electric bills and a looming surge in fuel prices.

The most ominous —and the least visible — is the growing risk that New York City might have difficulty keeping the lights on as soon as June. Last summer’s heat wave, when temperatures reached 100 degrees in some neighborhoods, put the electric grid under extreme stress.

In spite of this sort of demand, state air-quality regulations (related to ozone and separate from the Climate Act) have already forced operators to close a few dozen small “peaker” power plants — plants that previously ran for a few hours each summer when demand was highest.

Reality is finally crashing New York’s utopian green-energy party

Some of the lost peaker capacity should have been replaced years ago. But state environmental officials, citing the Climate Act, blocked a major power plant upgrade in Astoria, Queens, in October 2021 and another one in Orange County the same day. That move — about which state officials jetted off to Scotland to boast — put the kibosh on other upgrades. The remaining stock keeps getting older: The two yet-to-be-replaced power plants in Astoria that went offline amid the heat last June were built in 1954 and 1958.

In December, the state’s utility regulator, the Public Service Commission, ordered the city’s electric utility, Con Edison, to address the shrinking margin between peak electricity demand and supply. But because of the Climate Act, the PSC told the company to look only at “non-emitting solutions” — i.e., those that didn’t create additional greenhouse gases. It remains unclear how Con Edison will handle the next sweltering weekday afternoon.

Meanwhile, customer rates have surged across New York.

As of November, bills were up an average of 7% over last year, and up a whopping 47% since 2019 on average. In greater Syracuse, customer bills have more than doubled from 2019 levels. A state energy forecast published without fanfare last year (following criticism that prior forecasts were unrealistic) showed that electricity prices across upstate New York could rise by at least an additional 40% in the next five years.

Why? The Climate Act. Customers are paying more so that the state can subsidize wind and solar facilities, as well as new transmission projects to get that energy to market. (Something that can’t always happen, thanks to the ready-shoot-aim mentality behind state climate policy.) Some of the biggest new statewide costs — for offshore wind and a new power line under the Hudson River — haven’t even hit customers’ bills yet. And electric utilities are stealthily funding various electrification projects, at the state’s behest, with costs spread out to all customers.

The state has also been fending off a lawsuit by environmental groups upset that officials haven’t issued the Climate Act’s long-promised — and legally required — regulations to increase fuel costs for homes, businesses and vehicles. The costs only go up from here.

The state Department of Environmental Conservation was supposed to implement these regulations two years ago. But Hochul has resisted, in part because such a system would increase gasoline prices by $1.62 per gallon and cause similar price hikes on home-heating oil, diesel and natural gas.

Unfortunately for Hochul, the environmental activists won at the trial level and have a good shot of prevailing on appeal in their lawsuit. That means she needs to modify the Climate Act substantially in ongoing budget talks to prevent what would amount to the biggest middle-class tax hike in state history (and, relatedly, a sizable operating-cost hit for state agencies).

While that price increase hasn’t yet materialized, Hochul’s credibility on “affordability” wanes with each customer zapped by a new electric bill. She needs to worry, too, about the aging system that the Climate Act won’t let her replace. High electric bills hurt political careers — but rolling blackouts end them.

Ken Girardin is a fellow at the Manhattan Institute from City Journal.

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