Paul Daruszka of Hamburg, Erie County, clears his driveway on December 26, 2022, after a monster storm dumped as much as four feet of snow on the Buffalo area.

Winter storm Elliott, Christmas week 2022, remains for the energy industry the ultimate lesson of what we don’t ever want to see repeated. Across America, high winds, arctic cold and heavy snows nearly brought the nation’s power grid to its knees, a combined grid that did not live up to expectations for this emergency. We came remarkably close to a national disaster.

New York City was within three days of running out of natural gas. That would have affected millions, as gas production and delivery proved particularly vulnerable to extreme winter weather. Gas is the source for heating 60% of the homes in the state, 89% downstate, and generates 40% of our electricity.

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Natural gas was crucial to our energy needs in 2022. That’s still true today, and according to the best guesstimates embodied in the draft state energy plan headed to a final plan by the end of year, that will be true decades from now.

No matter what was foolishly written in law in 2019 mandating that sustainable energy replace fossil fuels on a fixed schedule — without any analysis as to whether it was actually feasible. Ain’t gonna happen on that timeline. While the embodied goals of the Climate Act are entirely........

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