New York Governor Kathy Hochul has spent much of her four and a half 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. [some emphasis, links added]
The 2019 Climate Act requires New York to cut statewide 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 Governor 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.
[Despite this] demand, state air-quality regulations (related to ozone and separate from the Climate Act) have already forced operators to close a few dozen small “peaking” power plants—plants that previously ran for a few hours each summer when demand was highest.
Some of the lost ‘peaking’ capacity should have been replaced years ago.
But state environmental officials, citing the Climate Act, blocked a major power plant upgrade in Astoria 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 (PSC), 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 percent over last year and a whopping 47 percent since 2019. In greater Syracuse, customer bills have more than doubled since 2019.
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 at least an additional 40 percent 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 highest new statewide costs—for offshore wind and a new powerline 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.
Read rest at City Journal
