Climate Act – Page 2 – Pragmatic Environmentalist of New York

Comparing the New York Energy Transition Against the World

Roger Pielke Jr. recently published an update of his annual review of the status of global energy transition away from fossil fuels based on the 2026 Energy Institute Statistical Review of World Energy (“2026 Energy Review”). This post examines how well New York is doing relative to the transition results described by Pielke.

Overview

It is ancient history now, but in August 2009 New York Governor Paterson issued Executive Order 24 formally establishing a state goal of reducing GHG emissions from all sources 80 percent below 1990 levels by 2050. The Climate Action Plan was never implemented in a meaningful, binding way because it remained a non‑statutory planning exercise and was then effectively sidelined by political, economic, and administrative priorities. The political calculus changed and in 2019 the Climate Act established a New York “Net Zero” target (85% reduction in GHG emissions and 15% offset of emissions) by 2050. This year some of the components of the act were modified, but there still are requirements that eventually require a “zero emissions” electric system with the a net zero target.

I have been a fan of Roger Pielke Jr.’s book The Climate Fix: What Scientists and Politicians Won’t Tell You About Global Warming since it was published in 2010. He described the “Kaya Identity” that was formulated in the 1980s by Yoichi Kaya in the book. Pielke notes that the Kaya Identity was “originally developed to facilitate climate scenarios and projections, but it also turns out to be a very powerful tool for climate policy evaluation.” It ““operationalizes the IPAT formulation, which holds that environmental impacts (I) are a result of the interactions of population (P), affluence (A), and technology (T) — hence, I = PAT.”

While researching this article I discovered my Kaya Identity analysis of New York through 2008. I updated this analysis for years but stopped doing so before I started this blog. Pielke’s article prompted me to update my analysis so I could compare New York to the rest of the world. Pielke provides a methods appendix and spreadsheet with documentation and data that I updated for this work.

New York Data

Pielke’s input data was from the 2026 Energy Institute Statistical Review of World Energy. For equivalent New York energy data I used the New York State Energy Research & Development Authority Patterns and Trends most recent report covering data from 2009 -2023 and the edition covering 2007-2021. The earlier edition provided data in a usable format. For example, all the data tables listed 15 years of data but included a link to the complete data set. The two reports since that report was released do not include as much information and are designed to support the political narrative more than to simply provide data. I will follow up with a post about those changes someday. In the meantime, the data used are available upon request.

Generation Trends

Pielke introduced his analysis by describing the carbon-free share of global energy consumption (Figure 1). The 2026 Energy Review uses a longer and more recent data set. Figure 2 overlays New York’s share of carbon-free generation from 1990 to 2023 to global emissions. Note that New York’s share started at 16% and has increased to 25%. This reflects New York’s geographical advantage for hydroelectric power generation and investments in nuclear. Using these data there is no indication that the Climate Act has accelerated the carbon-free share of energy consumption.

Figure 1: Carbon-Free Share of Global Energy Consumption, 1965-2025

Source: Roger Pielke, Jr. Energy Transition: Yes, No, Maybe

Figure 2: Carbon-free Share of Global and New York State Energy Consumption 1990 – 2023

Pielke notes that “Total energy demand continues to increase, and fossil fuels have continued to meet the majority of that growth”. Figure 3 lists his graph that shows that global fossil fuel consumption is still growing and includes New York’s contribution. Not surprisingly, New York is such a small component that the data do not show a trend so I included another graph with just New York. NY fossil fuel consumption has gone down but that trend started before the 2019 implementation of the Climate Act.

Figure 3: Global and New York State Fossil Fuel Consumption 1990 – 2023

Source for Global Data: Roger Pielke, Jr. Energy Transition: Yes, No, Maybe

Net-Zero Transition Projection

Pielke generated a graph showing what reductions are necessary to get the fossil fuel consumption to zero by 2050 (Figure 4). Pielke notes:

Reaching zero by 2050 requires retiring ~21 exajoules of fossil energy every year, starting now. That annual reduction exceeds the total energy consumption of most countries on Earth. And every year the line fails to bend down, the required rate in the remaining years grows larger, just as a matter of math.

Figure 4: Global Net-Zero By 2050 Requirement

Source: Roger Pielke, Jr. Energy Transition: Yes, No, Maybe

Figure 5 displays the New York requirement to reach the Climate Act 85% net-zero target using the same units and a different starting year. The New York required decline is 0.5 Exajoules per year. It appears to me that the existing reduction trend is flatter than what is required.

Figure 5: New York State Net-Zero By 2050 Requirement. Required decline is 0.5 EJ /year.

Pielke described what is needed to meet the global requirement to replace fossil energy to reach net-zero:

Replacing 21 EJ of fossil energy per year, and retiring an equal amount of fossil supply alongside it, means building the equivalent of about one 1.75-gigawatt nuclear plant every day from now until 2050 — roughly 420 plants a year. Measured in wind turbines instead, at 3 megawatts and a 0.30 capacity factor, that comes to about 2,000 turbines a day, every day, for 25 years.

I estimated the resources needed in New York by simple proportions with Pielke’s analysis. Replacing 0.5 EJ of fossil energy per year and retiring an equal amount of fossil supply alongside it, means building the equivalent of about nine 1.75-gigawatt nuclear plant every five years from now until 2050 for a total of 48 facilities. Measured in wind turbines instead, at 3 megawatts and a 0.30 capacity factor, that comes to over 3,000 turbines a year totaling over 83,000 turbines. As Pielke notes net-zero by 2050 is infeasible by any practical standard for the globe and I believe that is also true for New York.

Pielke goes on to describe annual changes in global energy consumption. I do not think that this is a meaningful statistic for just New York State so I did not reproduce his findings for comparison.

Decarbonization Trend

Figure 6 shows the carbon intensity of the global economy 1992-2025 — CO₂ per unit of Gross Domestic Product (GDP). Pielke has explained that the carbon intensity of GDP equals the product of two factors: how much energy the economy uses per dollar (energy intensity), and how much CO₂ that energy emits (carbon intensity of energy). Pielke explains:

The global economy has decarbonized steadily since well before climate policy existed — back to at least the 1960s.

Two things follow.

First, global climate policy does not drive decarbonization as the decrease in carbon intensity of the global economy long pre-dates the climate movement (which started as coordinated global policy in 1992 with the Rio Earth Summit); economies growing wealthier and using more energy more productively have driven that trend.

Second, and less comfortably: since the climate-policy era began in 1992 the background rate shows no acceleration. Hitting deep-decarbonization targets requires this straight line to bend down. It has not done so.

Some economies cut their carbon intensity by about two-thirds since 1990 — China, the United Kingdom, Germany. Others moved the wrong way and grew more carbon-intensive, led by Iran. These differences track different starting points, energy mixes, and stages of development — not the presence or absence of climate ambition.

Figure 6: Global Decarbonization 1992-2025

Source: Roger Pielke, Jr. Energy Transition: Yes, No, Maybe

Figure 7 compares the global carbon intensity per unit of GDP to the New York carbon intensity per unit of Gross State Product (GSP). In 2023 the normalized to 1992 global value was 58 and the New York value was 48. New York is decarbonizing faster than the world by this metric but Pielke’s criticism’s of climate policy are appropriate for New York as well.

Figure 7: New York and Global Decarbonization 1992-2023.

Figure 8: lists the energy intensity of GDP (energy ÷ GDP), carbon intensity of energy (CO2 ÷ energy), and carbon intensity of GDP (their product). These component factors show how each has contributed to global decarbonization. Pielke notes that:

The green line — the economy becoming less energy intensive per dollar of output — accounts for almost the entire decline in CO₂ per unit of GDP. The tan line — the carbon intensity of the energy that is consumed — has barely moved in 35 years, despite the impressive growth in carbon-free energy.

Figure 8: Factors Affecting Decarbonization 1990-2025

Source: Roger Pielke, Jr. Energy Transition: Yes, No, Maybe

I plotted the same parameters in Figure 8. Global data are plotted in blue: energy intensity of GDP is lightest blue, carbon intensity of energy is darkest blue, and carbon intensity of GDP is medium blue. New York data are plotted as follows: energy intensity of GDP is yellow, carbon intensity of energy is red, and carbon intensity of GDP is orange. Globally the economy becoming less energy intensive per dollar of output accounts for almost the entire decline in CO₂ per unit of GDP. The global carbon intensity of the energy that is consumed is relatively steady. New York is different. The New York economy is also becoming less energy intensive per dollar of output at a rate consistent with the global data. However, there also is a reduction in carbon intensity of energy so the combination of the two results in a greater decarbonization rate. I believe that reflects New York’s fuel switching conversion away from goal and oil to natural gas in the electric and industrial sectors. I believe those conversions were the result of economics as natural gas became the cheapest fuel, not because of climate policy.

Figure 8: Factors Affecting New York and Global Decarbonization 1990-2023

Pielke compares the change in carbon intensity of GDP from 2015 to 2025 in Table 1 for G20 economies and the world, ranked by largest reduction in CO2/GDP since the Paris Accord in 2015 New York’s reduction from 2015 to 2025 was 31.9% placing the state second to the countries Pielke evaluated.

Table 1: Change in Carbon Intensity of GDP from 2015 to 2025

Source: Roger Pielke, Jr. Energy Transition: Yes, No, Maybe

Discussion

Using the Kaya Identity methodology documented by Pielke I show that New York compares favorably with the world and other countries in the decarbonization race to net-zero. There are two caveats.

Pielke’s bottom line for the world is also appropriate for New York:

The 2026 update is fully consistent with the pattern I have documented here year after year. Carbon-free energy is growing. Decarbonization continues its long, slow, pre-policy downward trend. Global fossil fuel consumption continues to increase. The carbon intensity of energy has barely budged, drifting downward ever so slowly. The gap between the required rate of change to hit aggressive decarbonization targets and the observed rate in the real world widens every year.

If we are to achieve deep decarbonization this century, the lesson to take is that we should start thinking about some different options for how to get there. What we have been doing isn’t working.

The second caveat is that while New York’s carbon intensity was more of a factor in the state’s decarbonization, I believe it was affected by fuel switching to natural gas and there are not many more opportunities for that to occur in the future.

Conclusion

Pielke claims that the aspiration of net-zero is not impossible. Based on these results I believe that even if New York’s net zero aspiration is not impossible, it is impractical.

June 29 – July 4 2026 Heat Wave Weather Impacts to the New York Grid

Last week a strong, persistent upper‑level ridge and associated surface high formed a classic summer ridge (which the media now hypes as a heat dome) over the central and eastern United States, acting as a subsident “lid” that trapped and reinforced hot, humid air over several days. These conditions stressed electric systems across the country. This post offers examines the availability of New York renewable energy resources during classic high-load hot weather conditions.

Overview

The Climate Act established a New York “Net Zero” target (85% reduction in GHG emissions and 15% offset of emissions) by 2050. Although the original interim 2030 target of a 70% renewable energy electricity mandate has been modified, there still are requirements that require much greater use of wind and solar energy generation.

Electric systems must be built around reliability during peak demand. One of my primary concerns with the Climate Act renewable energy mandates is weather variability because the conditions that characterize the highest loads also have the weakest expected wind resource availability. That makes electric resource planning for reliability during the peak period especially challenging. .

Earlier this year I wrote multiple articles about the January 23-27 winter storm and subsequent cold snap that lasted until February 9. This is a good case study for a New York extreme event that must be addressed by electric system planners. I described the New York Independent System Operator (NYISO) document Winter 2025-2026 Cold Weather Operations and the Climate Act transition implications.

For this assessment of the heat wave, I relied on the New York Independent System Operator (NYISO) fuel-mix load data are available at the NYISO Real-Time Dashboard. For last winter’s analysis I used the Operations Performance Metrics Monthly Report prepared by the NYISO Operating Committee that data set is not available yet. This article is limited to the description of the weather, generation mix, and resulting loads.

NYISO Real-Time Fuel Mix

The dashboard real-time fuel mix data includes links to current and historical five-minute generation (MW) for energy generated in New York State. I processed that data to calculate hourly averages. The generator types include “Hydro” that includes pumped storage hydro; “Wind”, mostly land-based wind but does include 136 MW of offshore wind; “Other Renewables” that covers solar energy (394 MW of “front-of-the-meter solar”), energy storage resources (63 MW), methane, refuse, or wood; “Other Fossil Fuels” is oil; “Nuclear”; “Natural Gas”; and “Dual Fuel” which are units that burn both natural gas and oil.

Figure 1 graphs all the fuel mix hourly data and Table 1 summarizes the data. The relative average fuel mix energy provided over the heat wave was nuclear 16% and fossil fuels 64% for a total of 80%. Although renewables accounted for 20%, hydro made up 15% of that. This year’s Budget Bill revised the Climate Act but the core power‑sector mandate—70 percent renewable electricity by 2030 and 100 percent zero‑emissions electricity by 2040—remains intact. Clearly power generation during this heat wave is nowhere near these mandates.

Figure 1: Hourly NYISO Realtime Fuel Mix June 29 – July 4, 2026

Table 1: Summary of Hourly NYISO Realtime Fuel Data Mix June 29 to July 4, 2026

These data do not show the contribution of wind and solar well. “Other Renewables” includes solar energy (394 MW of “front-of-the-meter solar” at the end of 2025), energy storage resources (63 MW), methane, refuse, or wood. The methane, refuse and wood facilities show up as the relatively constant base in Figure 3. If the 63 MW of energy storage is too small to show up, that means that the utility-scale “front-of-the-meter” solar shows up as the daily peaks each day. It appears that there some component of “Other Renewables” is base load because the nighttime values all are approximately 300 MW

Figure 3: Hourly NYISO Realtime Fuel Mix Other Renewables and Wind June 29 to July 4, 2026

Weather

New York wind resource availability dodged a bullet during this episode. Northeastern United States heat waves are typically associated with high pressure systems, the media hyped “heat dome”, and the location of the center of the dome makes all the difference. I combined daily NYISO realtime fuel data mix data and the June 29 daily weather map in Figure 4 and Table 2 to show how bad it could have been. The Weather Prediction Center National Center Environmental Prediction National Oceanic & Atmospheric Administration provides daily weather mapsthat I used to describe the weather during this heat wave episode.

The daily weather map for June 29, 2026, shows that there was a high-pressure system centered over New York. The brown lines are isobars that show constant atmospheric pressure. Wind speed increases as the distance between isobars get smaller. Note that there are two closed 1020 isobar circles labeled with “H” in Quebec and western PA that are both labeled with pressures of 1021 millibars (mb). I have added four orange arrows that highlight the location of the 1016 mb contour. On an east to west basis the dome of air pressure greater than 1016 mb is over a 1000 miles with a peak at 1021. North south the dome is even longer. This weak pressure gradient led to extraordinarily weak wind production for New York’s land-based and offshore wind generators (Table 2).

Figure 4: June 29, 2026 Weather Map at 7:00 AM EST

Table 2: Hourly Data for June 29, 2026

I maintain that New York dodged a bullet because the center of the high pressure system was mostly south of New York for the rest of the event as opposed to June 29. Consider July 1 as shown in Figure 5. The pressure gradient on this day between 1012 mb and 1016 mb is on the order of 300 miles as opposed to 500 miles on June 29. Table 3 lists the hourly data statistics for the two days. It is important to note that even though July 1 wind resources are better the average generation was only 1,000 MW which represents 35% of the total NYS wind capacity of 2,858 MW. That is not terrible, but it surely is not good.

Figure 5: Jul 1, 2026 Weather Map at 7:00 AM EST

Table 3: Hourly Wind Statistics for June 29 and July 1

Figure 6 shows all the weather maps for the episode and I have prepared documentation with more details. The location of the high pressure ridge or dome was far enough away from New York that wind speeds did not drop off like they did on the June 29.

Figure 6: June 29 – July 4, 2026 Weather Maps at 7:00 AM EST

Because Behind-the-Meter solar data are only provided in the NYISO Operations Performance Metrics Monthly Report I was not able to determine the solar resources available. I would expect that they would be as good as they can get because the weather system had few clouds, the days were about as long as they can get and the solar angle maximized solar radiation to the panels.

Conclusion

There is no meteorological reason that the high-pressure system ridge or heat dome could not have been centered close enough to New York to replicate the poor wind resource availability or that these conditions could not have persisted longer. The takeaway message from the 2026 extreme winter and summer weather observed is that in the winter solar can go to zero availability and wind availability can go to zero at any time. This makes providing reliable electricity using an electric system that dependent upon wind and solar extremely challenging. In my opinion the challenge is so large that it is more appropriate to rely on nuclear power as the backbone of the future electric system.

2026 Draft CES Biennial Review: How It Addresses Prior Concerns

The New York State Department of Public Service and NYSERDA released the Draft 2026 Clean Energy Standard Biennial Review (Report) on July 1, 2026. This is the third biennial review since the Clean Energy Standard was established in 2016. Having submitted comments on the 2024 draft and the related Affordability Standard proceeding, I reviewed this latest document to see whether the Commission has responded to the fundamental concerns raised in previous comment cycles. The short answer is that the report documents worsening conditions but stops short of the structural reforms that have been repeatedly called for.

I am convinced that implementation of the Climate Leadership & Community Protection Act (Climate Act) net-zero mandates will do more harm than good if the future electric system relies only on wind, solar, and energy storage because of reliability and affordability risks. I have followed the Climate Act since it was first proposed, submitted comments on the Climate Act implementation plan, and have written over 650 articles about New York’s net-zero transition. The opinions expressed in this article do not reflect the position of any of my previous employers or any other organization I have been associated with, these comments are mine alone. I acknowledge the use of Perplexity AI to generate summaries and references included in this document.

Overview

The Report includes a comprehensive summary of the clean energy policy and regulatory background in the first chapter that I recommend if you are interested in comprehensive background information. The Introduction also describes the requirements for the Report:

Public Service Law section 66-p requires that the Public Service Commission (PSC or Commission) issues a review for notice and comment that considers “(a) progress in meeting the overall targets for deployment of renewable energy systems and zero emission sources, including factors that will or are likely to frustrate progress toward the targets; (b) distribution of systems by size and load zone; and (c) annual funding commitments and expenditures.” This Report serves to inform the Commission’s review. It summarizes the progress made toward the renewable energy and zero emission goals since the establishment of New York State’s Clean Energy Standard (CES) as set in Public Service Law section 66-p, assesses what remains to be done to achieve those goals, and invites comments from stakeholders and the public on these or any other matters raised in this Report. As part of the assessment, this Report also addresses how changes in federal energy and trade policy have impacted State progress, including forecasted deployment of additional offshore wind resources. This Report also identifies available clean energy solutions that can be incorporated within reliability planning processes to meet State reliability needs, particularly in New York City, per directive from the Commission in the Order Adopting Clean Energy Standard Biennial Review as Final and Making Other Findings (2025 CES Biennial Review Order) and the Order Withdrawing Public Policy Transmission Need.

2024 Biennial Review

In my prior comments on the 2024 CES Biennial Review and the Affordability Standard proceeding, I raised fundamental concerns.

The 2024 review acknowledged the 70% by 2030 goal was unlikely to be met but offered no realistic revised schedule.
The state has no credible plan to ensure reliable electricity generation given new large loads and electrification goals. The transition to a weather-dependent grid introduces significant reliability risks, particularly the correlated intermittency of wind and solar across New York.
New York State Energy Research & Development Authority (NYSERDA) modeling obscures true incremental costs and fails to disaggregate CLCPA-related costs from pre-existing programs.
I have long argued that the State needs to formally define the safety valve criteria — what constitutes a “significant increase in arrears” or threat to “safe and adequate electric service” that would warrant suspending or modifying programs.
I also believe that the stakeholder process used in the last version was broken because impactful issues were never acknowledged or addressed.

My initial impression is that this edition of New York Agency rhetoric does not align well with reality or my previous concerns;

The 70% by 2030 Goal Is Even Further Out of Reach, but…..

The 2024 Biennial Review already acknowledged that the 70% renewable energy by 2030 target was unlikely to be met, projecting 41% renewable coverage. The 2026 draft revises the 2030 load forecast upward again — from 164,915 GWh to 171,050 GWh — driven largely by large loads (data centers, manufacturing) that were not anticipated when the CES was created. With attrition applied, currently operational and contracted renewables are now projected to deliver only 40% of the 2030 load forecast, down from 41% in the 2024 review and 45% in the original 2020 CES Order.

The report acknowledges that large loads are adding approximately 21.4 TWh of demand that was not envisioned when the CES was established. Yet it does not propose a realistic revised schedule or a feasibility-based reassessment of the timeline. The 70% target remains legally mandated but functionally unachievable on the current trajectory.

When I said this report does not align with reality I was thinking of this issue. The original statutory requirement for a 40% statewide GHG reduction by 2030 is effectively displaced by a new mandate to achieve a 60% reduction by 2040, “to the maximum extent feasible and cost effective,” using 1990 as the baseline. The 2026 Enacted Budget (Part VV of the TED bill) made several significant amendments to the CLCPA, including: replacing the 40% by 2030 GHG reduction target with a 60% by 2040 target, changing the GHG accounting methodology from a 20-year GWP to a 100-year GWP, excluding biogenic CO2 and out-of-state fossil fuel extraction emissions from the state inventory, extending the DEC regulatory deadline to December 31, 2028, and changing the Climate Action Council plan update cycle from every five years to every six years.

The 2026 Draft Biennial Review, dated July 1, 2026 — after the budget was enacted — makes no mention of any of these statutory changes. The report continues to reference the original CLCPA targets (70% renewables by 2030, 9 GW offshore wind by 2035, zero emissions by 2040) without acknowledging that the 2030 interim target has been formally replaced by a 2040 target. This is a significant omission. The budget bill’s relaxation of the 2030 interim target fundamentally changes the regulatory landscape that the Biennial Review is supposed to assess. By continuing to frame the analysis around the original 2030 deadline and the original GHG accounting methodology, the report is evaluating progress against a standard that no longer exists in statute.

This is particularly striking given that the report was prepared and filed after the budget was enacted. The omission suggests either a deliberate decision to avoid acknowledging the statutory relaxation, or a failure to integrate the most recent legislative changes into the review. Either way, it undermines the credibility of the review as an honest assessment of the state’s clean energy progress.

Reliability Concerns Are Acknowledged — But Not Resolved

The 2026 draft includes a new Section 6 on Reliability Concerns, which is a step forward from the 2024 version. It acknowledges that the NYISO’s Q3 2025 STAR Report identified generator deactivation reliability needs as early as summer 2026 in New York City and Long Island. It also notes the Commission’s December 2025 order opening a proceeding to address NYC reliability needs.

However, the report does not address the fundamental reliability risk of a grid increasingly dependent on weather-dependent resources. It does not address the correlated intermittency of wind and solar across the state, nor does it propose robust criteria for what constitutes “safe and adequate electric service” under the statute. The reliability concern is acknowledged but not resolved.

Affordability and Cost Transparency Remain Absent

The affordability and cost transparency issues raised in the Affordability Standard proceeding remain entirely unaddressed in this document. The draft explicitly defers forward-looking cost estimates to the separate DPS Annual CLCPA Report. It contains no affordability metrics, no discussion of arrears or service disconnections, and no connection between CES program costs and ratepayer impacts.

The core affordability concerns — that CLCPA implementation is a significant driver of rate increases, that the Reference Case modeling obscures true incremental costs, and that the state has failed to provide comprehensive cost accounting — remain unaddressed.

Safety Valve Criteria Still Undefined

The safety valve mechanism under New York Public Service Law § 66-p allows the PSC to delay Climate Act targets when safety and affordability concerns arise. The definition of “safe and adequate electric service” and what constitutes a “significant increase in arrears” remain undefined. The 2025 Biennial Review Order did not define these criteria, and the 2026 draft does not advance this issue.

This is a critical gap. Without defined criteria, the safety valve is effectively a theoretical option that cannot be triggered in practice. Ratepayers are left with no clear mechanism to pause or modify programs when they demonstrably harm consumers.

Load Growth and Interconnection Challenges Worsen

The draft documents a significant upward revision in load forecasts. NYISO’s 2030 load forecast increased by 16 TWh (10%) between 2020 and 2026, and the 2040 baseline forecast increased by more than 23 TWh (13%). The interconnection process continues to be a bottleneck, with the NYISO’s new Cluster Study Process expected to take approximately two years to complete for each cluster.

The report acknowledges that the interconnection process has been a major factor in project delays, with many projects experiencing three- to four-year timelines. The new Cluster Study enhancements are described as incremental improvements rather than fundamental reforms.

The Stakeholder Process Remains Broken

The draft invites comments from stakeholders and the public, but it does not demonstrate any systematic response to prior comments. The fundamental concern that impactful issues are never acknowledged or addressed in the regulatory process remains unchanged.

Positive Developments

The report does document some positive developments, including the extension of the Zero Emission Credit (ZEC) program through 2049, the approval of the Offshore Wind Implementation Plan, and the establishment of the Nuclear Reliability Backbone proceeding. These are meaningful steps, but they do not address the fundamental feasibility and affordability concerns.

Conclusion

The 2026 Draft CES Biennial Review is a thorough documentation of the state of New York’s clean energy transition, but it does not address the fundamental structural issues that have been raised in prior comment cycles. The report documents a transition that is falling further behind schedule, facing increasing reliability risks, and imposing significant costs on ratepayers — but it does not propose the structural changes necessary to address these problems. Moreover, the failure to include the Budget Bill revisions to the Climate Act undermines the credibility of the review as an honest assessment of the state’s clean energy progress.

The Commission has an opportunity to address these concerns in the final order. The questions raised in prior comments remain open:

What is the realistic timeline for achieving the 70% renewable energy goal?
What are the criteria for invoking the §66-p safety valve?
What is the comprehensive cost of the transition, and how will it be allocated?
How will the state ensure reliability during the transition?

These questions deserve answers before the Commission adopts the final order.

New York’s Climate Act Façade is Crumbling

Worldwide support for the net-zero energy transition is falling apart as the existential threat justification falls apart and the reality of the harms to affordability, reliability, and the environment become apparent. The question now is not if but when New York’s Climate Leadership & Community Protection Act (Climate Act) will be paused to account for reality.

As a retired air‑pollution meteorologist who has spent a career worrying about both the air people breathe and whether the lights stay on, I am convinced that implementation of the Climate Act net-zero mandates will do more harm than good if the future electric system relies only on wind, solar, and energy storage. I have followed the Climate Act since it was first proposed, submitted comments on the Climate Act implementation plan, and have written over 650 articles about New York’s net-zero transition. The opinions expressed in this article do not reflect the position of any of my previous employers or any other organization I have been associated with, these comments are mine alone.

Impetus

I was prompted to write this article by Judith Curry’s announcement that her blog Climate Etc. is being euthanized. She described the reasons that she will no longer support her blog:

Major progress has been made in the climate debate and the political climate has changed
My interests have evolved in other directions
The logistics and cost of keeping the blog running are substantial.

Her summary of the state of the climate debate prompted me to write about the situation in New York. First, I want to acknowledge the impact her blog had on this one. I have great respect for Dr. Curry, and her writings influenced me greatly. I also strongly admire her courage because she took the politically inconvenient position that the existential threat of climate change argument was not supportable and paid for it personally and professionally. In addition, she published some of my guest posts and put my blog on the map so to speak when she added it to her blog roll. For many years most of my visitors came from that list. It also led to some collaboration related to the New York State Reliability Council’s Extreme Weather Working Group. I am in her debt.

State of the Climate Debate

Kevin Killough wrote a good summary of Dr. Curry’s decision. She waswas a member of the “Climate Working Group” with John Christy, Steve Koonin, Ross McKitrick, and Roy Spencer that prepared a draft report for U.S. Energy Secretary Chris Wright on the topic of climate change impacts on the United States. The draft “Critical Review” remains publicly available and on DOE’s books, but the Climate Working Group that wrote it has been dissolved and a federal court has ruled that DOE violated the Federal Advisory Committee Act (FACA) in the way it set up and used the group. Earlier this year McKitrick cleared up some misconceptions about the report.

In my opinion, critics of the report ignore the fact that this process was more transparent and open than the process used by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) to produce its reports that are considered the “proof” that action on climate change is needed. Therefore, I believe that the criticisms of the process are overblown and the Executive Summary arguments are valid:

CO₂ has substantial fertilization and “global greening” benefits and that these are underplayed in IPCC assessments.

CMIP-class climate models overstate historical and projected warming, especially in the troposphere, and therefore exaggerate risks.

Long‑term trends in most U.S. extreme weather metrics (hurricanes, tornadoes, floods, droughts, wildfires) are weak or absent in the historical record, and U.S. sea‑level rise shows little acceleration once local subsidence is accounted for.

Economically, plausible climate sensitivities imply relatively modest damages, uncertain and potentially low social cost of carbon, and U.S. mitigation policies with “undetectably small” direct effects on global climate.

Dr. Curry noted that the DOE report has influenced the climate debate by changing the arguments for the need to transition away from fossil fuels. Another key argument in the debate is the widespread acknowledgement that the emissions scenario used to produce the most extreme impacts is an implausible emissions scenario. Over the past few years, climate scientists and assessment bodies have moved away from treating RCP8.5 as a realistic baseline or “business‑as‑usual” trajectory and now generally regard it as an implausible, low‑likelihood pathway whose coal‑heavy emissions profile no longer matches observed and projected energy trends. In updated scenario sets and popular explanations, RCP8.5 (and its successor SSP5‑8.5) is explicitly excluded from the range of plausible futures, yet retained as a worst‑case or “high‑end risk” scenario because its strong forcing signal is valuable for probing upper‑bound climate responses, local impacts, and model behavior.

I have long been a critic of this practice in New York regulatory proceedings, especially as it relates to Part 490 Sea-Level Rise. It remains to be seen whether New York will modify its analyses to exclude this emission scenario.

State of the Transition Debate

Despite the massive investments the wind, solar, and energy storage approach advocated in the Climate Act is failing globally. “A sea-change is occurring in energy policy as realism overtakes magical thinking” but Robert Bradley notes that folks who rely on social media for their information still rely on magical thinking for energy policy. The reality is that no amount of clean energy media messaging can avoid the fact that wind and solar require so much backup support that they will never be affordable.

This has been acknowledged in at least one state. In April 2026, North Carolina regulators ordered Duke Energy to pause its next round of solar projects while finalizing a broader energy plan. North Carolina’s carbon‑plan results show that even with strong climate goals, a real‑world grid ends up needing more firm capacity—gas and nuclear—alongside renewables and storage to keep the lights on and bills tolerable. Because New York faces harsher winters, more aggressive statutory mandates, and similar emerging reliability concerns in NYISO and State Energy Plan modeling, it is very hard to see how New York avoids eventually making the same kind of course correction.

In North Carolina, once planners incorporated actual load growth, winter risk, project lead times, and customer‑bill impacts, the Commission’s “carbon plan” backed away from a renewables‑only path and embraced new gas builds and extended nuclear as the least‑cost, reliability‑constrained solution, while loosening the 2030 interim emissions requirement. New York’s own studies already tell a parallel story: NYISO’s winter assessments flag growing fuel‑security risk and winter adequacy concerns; the State Energy Plan acknowledge a need for roughly 20–25 GW of “clean‑firm” capacity by 2040, equivalent to most of today’s fossil fleet. I have shown that wind and solar can be almost absent during peak winter demand, making dispatchable emission-free resources (DEFRs) non‑negotiable.

On the Other Hand

Unfortunately, there is so much invested in the clean energy transition that stamping out the nonsense is a big problem. Climate‑ and environment‑focused nonprofits now constitute a large professionalized industry, and climate change activism sits at the center of that funding stream. In the United States alone, environmental organizations collectively report more than 30 billion dollars in annual revenue and tens of billions more in assets, with climate advocacy a dominant theme in their campaigns, communications, and grant proposals. A relatively small number of large national and international NGOs capture a disproportionate share of this money, reporting annual revenues in the hundreds of millions and in some cases over a billion dollars, much of it from major foundations and high‑net‑worth donors explicitly interested in climate policy and energy transition. By contrast, the thousands of small grassroots climate groups that are often highlighted in media coverage operate on comparatively modest budgets, together accounting for only a small fraction of the sector’s total income even though they make up the vast majority of organizations by number. John Robson’s weekly Climate Discussion Nexus newsletter regularly documents the “Green Money Machine”. He describes the revenues of the smaller non-governmental organizations dedicated to the proposition that they can save the planet if only people would donate more for their work.

In addition, there are many people who’s careers depend on climate change being an issue. Consider all the universities that have climate change related programs. Anthony Watts describes former EPA regulatory staff who want to the climate movement to continue. “According to a June 23 New York Times report, “Former NOAA Employees Revive Climate Site Shut by Trump Administration,” a small group of former NOAA employees has recreated much of the former Climate.gov website under a new domain, Climate.us, after the original site was effectively retired during the Trump administration. The project reportedly involved former NOAA staff, approximately $280,000 in crowdsourced funding, and the painstaking recataloging of more than a thousand reports, datasets, articles, and educational resources.”

I have no doubts that the same actors will advocate that New York continue the Climate Act as long as possible.

Conclusion

The rationale to transform the energy system because there is an existential threat due to climate change caused by GHG emissions is no longer justifiable. Once policymakers can no longer ignore the electric system constraints—especially as retirements and electrification continue—New York will face the same fundamental choice North Carolina just confronted: either relax or reinterpret interim targets and incorporate substantial firm capacity (through gas, nuclear, or other DEFRs), or accept growing reliability risk and politically unsustainable rate and outage impacts. The only question that remains is when this reckoning will occur.

Climate Act Status – June 2026

New York’s Climate Leadership & Community Protection Act (Climate Act) is now driving every major energy and climate decision in the state. I’ve grown increasingly concerned that the transition plan built around this law is not affordable, is risky for reliability, and will not deliver the environmental benefits people assume. This post provides an overview of my concerns.

Climate Act Requirements

The Climate Act is often described in broad, aspirational terms, but its mandates are very specific. Public Service Law Section 66‑p requires the Public Service Commission, by June 30, 2021, to establish a program ensuring that at least 70% of statewide electric generation secured by jurisdictional load-serving entities in 2030 comes from “renewable energy systems” and that by 2040 the statewide electrical demand system is zero emissions. These statutory “targets” are the Climate Act’s headline electric-sector mandates translated into binding obligations on utilities and other load-serving entities, rather than being left as generalized policy goals. On top of that, it sets a net‑zero statewide emissions target by mid‑century and directs a large share of climate and energy spending to “disadvantaged communities.”

To push enough wind, solar, and transmission projects through the pipeline to meet those dates, the state created new fast‑track siting regimes: first the Office of Renewable Energy Siting (ORES), and more recently the Renewable Action through Project Interconnection and Deployment (RAPID) Act, which folds big renewables and major transmission lines into a single accelerated process. In short, the law is not just a statement of long‑term goals; it has spawned a whole machinery of timelines, mandates, and permitting shortcuts to force the system in one direction.

My over-riding concern is that the Climate Act set very aggressive goals without a realistic, step-by-step plan to get there. We don’t have a plan; we have a wish list. The law sets big targets for cutting emissions, but there’s no practical roadmap that says who builds what, by when, and how we keep the lights on and bills affordable along the way. This is declaring we’ll rebuild the whole electric system in 15 years without a construction schedule or budget.”

The law assumes everything will work out—technology, costs, and reliability—without proving it. No conditions have been defined. There are no clear affordability limits, no defined reliability safeguards, and no trigger points where the state must slow down or change course if things start to go wrong. I’m used to testing assumptions. Here, the assumptions are treated as facts.

The law ignores permitting reality. We make it harder and slower to permit both existing plants and new infrastructure, while at the same time assuming we can build massive amounts of renewables, storage, and transmission on a tight deadline. The timelines and the permitting system just don’t match. It can take many years to permit a single transmission line. The law acts as if we can permit and build dozens on a political timetable.

Affordability: what it looks like at the household level

From the beginning, the Climate Act’s architects asserted that the transition would be cost‑effective and could be done using technologies available a decade ago. In practice, when I look at the numbers through the lens of a typical upstate household, that claim is hard to square with the evidence.[

NYSERDA’s modeling and public messaging emphasize long‑term fuel and operating savings from electrification, but I believe they understate or obscure the full capital and retrofit costs that real people will face. A gas‑heated home in upstate New York is not starting from a blank slate; to electrify heat it may need a heat pump, electric panel upgrades, new wiring, backup systems, and often building shell improvements. When those costs are levelized over realistic lifetimes and added to electric bills that must also carry the cost of massive new generation, storage, and transmission, NYSERDA’s own calculations show annual costs rising by thousands of dollars compared to staying on gas.

That’s before we talk about vehicle electrification and the additional load that puts on both household budgets and local distribution systems. For low‑ and middle‑income families, especially in older housing stock, the up‑front burden is steep, and the promised payback periods are long and uncertain. The latest budget language envisions a cap‑and‑invest system that would raise revenue and then “share” proceeds with New Yorkers to offset bills, but that still means raising the underlying cost of energy to generate those funds in the first place.

Previous energy transitions, for example, from coal town gas to natural gas, or from inefficient oil burners to modern gas boilers, succeeded because they saved consumers money and improved convenience. The Climate Act’s transition is different: it is enforced by law and regulation rather than emerging organically from better economics, and that is why I keep coming back to affordability as a core concern.

Reliability: weather‑dependent supply on a tight grid

My second major concern is reliability. The New York Independent System Operator (NYISO) prepares an annual report on “forces shaping the electric grid and wholesale electricity markets.” NYISO’s Power Trends 2026 is a notable document because it acknowledges that Climate Act related initiatives such as electrification, retirement of conventional resources, and weather-dependent generation combined with large new energy-intensive loads are making the system more uncertain and more fragile. It also says reliability margins are shrinking and that winter conditions are becoming a defining challenge.

The Climate Act’s targets effectively assume that New York can completely revamp the electric system to run largely on wind, solar, and storage, with something called “Dispatchable Emissions‑Free Resources” (DEFRs) appearing down the road to back them up. In the Scoping Plan and State Energy Plan, those DEFRs are more of a placeholder than a commercially available option today.

As a meteorologist, I am very aware that wind and solar are controlled by the weather, not by grid operators. They are intermittent, they don’t work all the time; they are diffuse, they require large land areas and new transmission to deliver the same energy as a single conventional plant; and their output is correlated over large regions due to large‑scale weather systems. That means a cold, calm high‑pressure system can reduce wind output over the whole Northeast just when electric heating demand is highest, and clouds can reduce solar output across a broad swath of the state at the same time. The Scoping Plan and State Energy Plan acknowledge that DEFR is necessary for this situation but there is no proposal how to address this requirement.

Batteries are valuable for smoothing and short‑duration balancing, but they become very expensive very quickly if you try to size them to cover multi‑day or seasonal shortfalls. Studies that look at the cost of backing up long, widespread wind lulls strictly with storage point to staggering cost numbers and large amounts of capacity that would sit idle much of the time. Despite repeated warnings from the New York Independent System Operator (NYISO) about resource adequacy and the risks of retiring fossil capacity faster than firm replacements are available, I don’t see those concerns fully reflected in the state’s official transition roadmap.

My worry is that we are treating weather‑dependent megawatt‑hours as if they are interchangeable with firm capacity on peak and in worst‑case conditions and filling the gap with optimistic assumptions about future technologies. That may look fine in a model, but on a winter evening with a regional cold snap and limited imports, the real‑world consequences of getting it wrong would be very serious.

Environmental impact and local siting

People understandably assume that a climate law must be environmentally beneficial. My view, informed by decades of air‑quality work, is that the answer depends on how we define and measure “benefit,” and on the local impacts of the projects required to meet statewide targets.

On the accounting side, the statute originally used 20‑year global warming potentials (GWP20) and included out‑of‑state, upstream emissions from fossil fuel production in New York’s inventory. That approach gave very high weight to methane and made New York’s near‑term targets particularly difficult to meet compared to jurisdictions using 100‑year GWPs and more conventional boundaries. I have long argued that this approach magnified the appearance of urgency without changing global physics and raised the risk that New York would push expensive policies for relatively modest climate impact while encouraging emissions to “leak” to other regions.

The 2026 budget revisions change that accounting. They move to 100‑year GWPs, drop out‑of‑state upstream emissions, and exclude biogenic CO₂. Those moves align New York’s bookkeeping more closely with federal and international practice and immediately reduce reported statewide emissions—without any physical change in the atmosphere. The new law also softens the near‑term target, replacing the 40 percent‑below‑1990 mandate for 2030 with a 60 percent reduction by 2040, qualified by “to the maximum extent feasible and cost effective,” and pushes the deadline for DEC regulations out to the end of 2028. The changes simply push the inevitable reckoning down the road.

At the same time, ORES and the RAPID Act change how projects are sited on the ground. These frameworks centralize permitting for large renewables and major transmission in Albany, set tight timelines, and include “deemed complete” and “deemed approved” provisions if agencies miss deadlines. Town associations, landowners, and even some developers have flagged that combination as a problem: local governments lose leverage, procedural timelines are very tight, and the opportunity to raise and adjudicate substantive issues is narrow.

From an environmental perspective, I worry that we are trading thorough site‑specific review and local consent for speed, especially in rural upstate communities being asked to host industrial‑scale projects for benefits that are mostly diffuse and global. That doesn’t mean every project is harmful or that renewables have no place, but it does mean we should be honest about the trade‑offs and the cumulative impacts of covering large areas of the landscape with energy infrastructure.

In my opinion, the biggest flaw with ORES and the RAPID Act is that they do not include specific conditions for developers. Because there are no specific limitations for prime farmland protections, wildlife habitat, noise, or technology constraints, projects are being approved that will have long lasting adverse environmental impacts, health effects, and will require even more development. For example, utility-scale solar development should use tilting axis panels that maximize solar collection and should not be sited in areas severely affected by lake-effect snow.

The 2026 “Reset”

One reason I am skeptical that these trade‑offs are being weighed objectively is the way the Climate Action Council and Energy Planning Board were put together. A clear majority of Climate Action Council members were appointed by the Governor and legislative leaders, and only a minority have deep energy‑sector experience, particularly in utility operations and reliability. The Energy Planning Board had one non-voting industry expert. Given the obvious affordability problems, the 2026 budget revisions included a “blue-ribbon” commission on affordability that will have the same makeup. I think the most probable outcome is a final report that acknowledges bills are too high, recommends more rebates and cost‑shifting to taxpayers, proposes tougher oversight of utilities, and treats NYISO reliability concerns as justification for even more spending on renewables, storage, and transmission—not as a warning sign about the Climate Act transition.

In my comments and blog posts, I’ve argued that this structure makes it unlikely that the Council would squarely confront feasibility and cost issues raised by NYISO and others. Instead, the Scoping Plan tends to assume that technologies and projects will appear when needed, and that equity goals can be layered on top of mitigation without exploding costs.

The 2026 budget changes are, in a sense, an indirect admission that the original timelines and accounting structure were not realistic. They soften near‑term targets, adjust the emissions inventory in ways that make the numbers easier to hit, and give regulators several more years before binding rules must be in place. To me, that looks less like a fundamental reexamination of the transition plan and more like a political‑relief valve designed to avoid an imminent collision between statutory deadlines, litigation, and physical reality.

Discussion

I think we are at a crucial crossroads for New York energy policy. Advocates have demanded that the future energy system reduce GHG emissions to zero citing major co-benefits from improved air quality. Over my career I have seen enormous improvements in air quality, but there have not been corresponding health benefits that are consistent with the co-benefit claims in the Scoping Plan and State Energy Plan from the small incremental improvements from further reductions .

What I want from New York’s energy policy is something more pragmatic: a plan that starts from reliability and affordability constraints, acknowledges technology and permitting limits, and is transparent about both costs and benefits. That would mean putting independent technical experts, especially from NYISO and utility engineers—at the center of planning, not at the margins. It would mean evaluating wind, solar, storage, nuclear, and cleaner fossil technologies on a level playing field based on reliability contribution and life‑cycle cost, rather than committing in advance to a narrow renewable energy portfolio. And it would mean being honest with the public about what this transition will cost households, businesses, and communities, rather than leading with best‑case scenarios and hidden caveats.

Conclusion

The existing transition plan built around the Climate Act is not affordable, is risky for reliability, and will not deliver the environmental benefits people assume. I’m not saying, ‘do nothing.’ I’m saying: be honest with people. We need a realistic, engineering‑grade plan that respects reliability, affordability, and permitting realities, instead of pretending they’ll take care of themselves. We must concede that we are not ready to rely completely on zero-emission renewable resources today. We must act now to develop natural gas infrastructure to ensure that we have a reliable electric system that can be used as a bridge to the future. When full system costs and infrastructure life expectancy are considered I expect that nuclear power should be used as the backbone of the electric system.

Climate Act Blue Ribbon Commission Affordability Politics

I previously described revisions to the Climate Leadership & Community Protection Act (Climate Act) in the New York State budget bill. I believe the budget bill addresses some of the most egregious technical and accounting problems I have criticized since 2019, but it leaves my central concerns about feasibility, affordability, and reliability largely untouched. A key shortcoming in the transition process has been non-existent consideration of input contrary to the political narrative. This post describes a provision in the budget bill for a “blue-ribbon” commission to address ratepayer affordability that I believe will continue that same approach.

I am convinced that implementation of the Climate Act net-zero mandates will do more harm than good if the future electric system relies only on wind, solar, and energy storage because of reliability and affordability risks. I have followed the Climate Act since it was first proposed, submitted comments on the Climate Act implementation plan, and have written over 650 articles about New York’s net-zero transition. The opinions expressed in this article do not reflect the position of any of my previous employers or any other organization I have been associated with, these comments are mine alone. I acknowledge the use of Perplexity AI to generate summaries and references included in this document.

Overview

The Climate Act (Climate Act or CLCPA) created the Climate Action Council and charged it with developing a Scoping Plan that recommends strategies and policies to achieve the statute’s emission-reduction and clean energy mandates. The plan was finalized in December 2022 and outlines how New York proposes to implement the Climate Act across all sectors of the economy.

Under the State Energy Law, the New York State Energy Planning Board—made up of agency heads, gubernatorial and legislative appointees, and the NYISO president—develops and adopts a comprehensive State Energy Plan every four years. The most recent plan explicitly incorporates and advances the Climate Action Council Scoping Plan’s recommendations so that they guide the State’s energy-related decision making through about 2040.

Part TT of the 2026 Budget Bill establishes another appointed group. This legislation establishes a temporary commission to be known as the blue-ribbon commission on residential affordability through energy savings, or RATES commission. The RATES commission will “study the causes and origins of rising utility rates and to recommend any actions or reforms to reduce such rates.”

Because the entire RATES commission is appointed by one party, I believe that the findings are pre-ordained to be whatever is politically convenient. At the top of that list is to claim that the Climate Act has little to do with rising utility rates.

Climate Action Council

The fundamental problem with the Climate Action Council was evident by July 2021, sixteen months after the bylaws were adopted. The statute emphasized climate‑advocacy and social‑justice perspectives over power‑system engineering, economics, or utility operations, so the Council’s recommendations reflected ideological commitments (electrify everything; rapid fossil shutdowns) rather than an honest assessment of feasibility. Decisions were made on the presumption of expertise by some Climate Action Council members who have no relevant background or experience on power-system topics. For example, regarding electric grid reliability, they went so far to state anyone who disagrees with them is a mis-informer. Paul Shepson, Dean, School of Marine and Atmospheric Sciences at Stony Brook University, stated at the 26 May 2022 Council meeting recording:

Mis-representation I see as on-going. One of you mentioned the word reliability. I think the word reliability is very intentionally presented as a way of expressing the improper idea that renewable energy will not be reliable. I don’t accept that will be the case. In fact, it cannot be the case for the CLCPA that installation of renewable energy, the conversion to renewable energy, will be unreliable. It cannot be.

Another example was Council member Rober Howarth. Howarth claims that he played a key role in the drafting of the Climate Act and his statement at the meeting where the Scoping Plan was approved claims that no new technology is needed:

I further wish to acknowledge the incredible role that Prof. Mark Jacobson of Stanford has played in moving the entire world towards a carbon-free future, including New York State. A decade ago, Jacobson, I and others laid out a specific plan for New York (Jacobson et al. 2013). In that peer-reviewed analysis, we demonstrated that our State could rapidly move away from fossil fuels and instead be fueled completely by the power of the wind, the sun, and hydro. We further demonstrated that it could be done completely with technologies available at that time (a decade ago), that it could be cost effective, that it would be hugely beneficial for public health and energy security, and that it would stimulate a large increase in well-paying jobs. I have seen nothing in the past decade that would dissuade me from pushing for the same path forward. The economic arguments have only grown stronger, the climate crisis more severe. The fundamental arguments remain the same.

The “Highlights from the 2025 State of the Market Report for the NYISO Markets” presentation to the NYISO Management Committee by the NYISO Market Monitoring Unit, Potomac Economics on May 27, 2026 included the following slide documenting issues contradicting Howarth’s statement. The failure of the Climate Action Council to demand a feasibility study and a conditional transition plan because “the conversion to renewable energy would be reliable” has resulted in significant retirements of the resources necessary for reliability and other impacts unacknowledged by ideologues on the Council.

State Energy Planning Board

The same basic problem shows up in the State Energy Planning Board, which is supposed to be the more sober, technocratic body that translates the Climate Action Council’s ambitions into an official State Energy Plan. Under Article 6 of the State Energy Law, the Board is stacked with senior state officials: the heads of ten agencies and authorities, one appointee each from the Governor, the Assembly Speaker, and the Senate Temporary President, and the president of NYSERDA as chair. The only person at the table with direct responsibility for keeping the bulk power system operating, the presiding officer of the federally designated bulk system operator (the NYISO), is there as a non‑voting member.

On paper, the Board is supposed to balance multiple objectives. The statute says the State Energy Plan should improve reliability, protect consumers from price volatility, reduce overall energy costs, and minimize health and environmental impacts. In reality, because the voting members are drawn from the very institutions already committed to the Climate Act agenda, the Board behaves more like an internal ratification committee than an independent check. When NYSERDA announced that the State Energy Planning Board had approved the 2025 State Energy Plan, it emphasized that the Board “comprised of multiple State agency heads, appointees from the Governor, Senate, and Assembly, and the president of the New York Independent System Operator” adopted the plan unanimously and that the Plan explicitly advances the Climate Action Council’s Scoping Plan recommendations.

Notice what is missing from that description: there is no guaranteed voting seat for a consumer advocate whose job is to push back on bill impacts, no requirement for independent power‑system engineers, and no formal role for utility planners or market economists whose professional obligation is to question whether the numbers add up. The NYISO can raise concerns about reliability, but at the end of the day, the NYISO representative does not get a vote when the Board decides whether to bless a plan that folds in the Climate Action Council’s assumptions and timelines. That structure guarantees that any serious challenge to the political narrative — for example, that the pace of mandated retirements is inconsistent with maintaining reliability at reasonable cost — will be treated as a nuisance rather than a core planning issue.

In other words, the State Energy Planning Board is not a neutral referee standing above the Climate Action Council. It is an extension of the same political narrative, organized to give the appearance of comprehensive, expert‑driven state energy planning while insulating the underlying policy from meaningful technical or economic scrutiny. That helps explain why the 2025 State Energy Plan reads more like a translation of the Scoping Plan into agency task lists than a candid assessment of what is achievable without blowing up reliability and affordability.

RATES Commission

The political sales pitch for the RATES Commission is straightforward. Governor Hochul and the legislature recognize that utility bills are punishing households and are a political liability. In response they want a “blue‑ribbon” panel to get to the bottom of it. The reactions to Part TT, and the way the membership is structured, suggest what the commission is likely to do—and what it will avoid.

On the supportive side, Assembly leadership, AARP, and several majority legislators point to the RATES Commission as proof that this budget delivers “strong utility reforms,” grouping it with one‑time rebate checks and changes in how PSC and NYSERDA assessments show up on bills. Their messaging emphasizes “cracking down” on utility profits, increasing transparency, and protecting working families from “corporate greed,” not reevaluating the Climate Act. The appointment scheme reinforces that emphasis: all members are named by the Governor and legislative majorities, with designated seats for administration officials and majority‑aligned appointees, and no guaranteed voting role for an independent consumer advocate, power‑system engineer, or NYISO representative.

Business‑oriented groups are more conditional. Upstate United, for example, has framed the commission as a potential vehicle to force transparency around what is really driving costs, especially in upstate regions that have seen sharp delivery and supply increases while being told they already live in a “clean energy success story.” Their implicit challenge is that if the commission is serious about affordability, it must finally addres the full cost of CLCPA implementation, NYSERDA surcharges, and transmission and resource‑adequacy investments that flow directly from the Climate Act.

Republican legislators focus on process and composition: every voting appointment is controlled by the Governor and legislative leaders who supported the Climate Act, the Scoping Plan, and the 2025 State Energy Plan. The absence of built‑in representation for independent consumer advocates, utility planners, or market economists, and the lack of a voting role for NYISO, signals that the same political coalition that designed the transition will decide which rate drivers are fair game for criticism.

Given that context, it is not hard to predict how the RATES Commission will treat Climate Act cost drivers and NYISO reliability warnings. It is politically easier for the commission to treat Climate Act‑driven spending as non‑negotiable “public policy costs,” blame rising bills on utility behavior and generic “infrastructure needs,” and recast NYISO’s reliability warnings as implementation problems rather than evidence that the mandates themselves are out of sync with what the power system can safely deliver.

Conclusion

The most probable outcome is a final report that acknowledges bills are too high, recommends more rebates and cost‑shifting to taxpayers, proposes tougher oversight of utilities, and treats NYISO reliability concerns as justification for even more spending on renewables, storage, and transmission—not as a warning sign about the CLCPA transition. In other words, given who will sit on it and who won’t, the RATES Commission is unlikely to be the place where New York finally confronts the affordability and reliability consequences of implementing the Climate Act as written; it is more likely to become an additional layer of political insulation around a transition whose costs and technical risks remain off‑limits.

Out of Control New York State Renewable Developers

Fred Stafford has put together a comprehensive look of the New York State (NYS) renewable development process administrated through the New York State Energy Research & Development Authority (NYSERDA). He shows how the state’s renewables developers dumped their project risk onto the backs of ratepayers but without the open scrutiny that the state applies to utilities. He also provides a comprehensive look at renewable projects in New York.

Background

NYSERDA’s renewable procurement role looks like a neutral administrative function on paper, but it has turned into a highly centralized process that papers over the practical risks of New York’s climate agenda while shifting cost and execution risk onto ratepayers. The Clean Energy Standard and subsequent orders anoint NYSERDA as the “central clean energy procurement agency,” steadily increasing its annual targets even as an uncomfortable share of its contracted portfolio never makes it to commercial operation. That structure suits the Hochul Administration and activists because it allows big press releases about “nation‑leading” awards while the messy details of cancellations, repricing, and cost escalation disappear into a complex tangle of Renewable Energy Credits (REC) and Offshore Wind Renewable Energy Credits (OREC} contracts.

To its credit, NYSERDA is fairly candid in some filings and interviews about underlying structural problems. There can be a three‑ to six‑year lag between a bid and the start of a contract during which global cost conditions can swing wildly. A bid that looked “cheapest” in year one can be hopelessly underwater by the time a project is ready to build, at which point everyone faces an ugly choice between swallowing higher costs or losing the project. Instead of rethinking this model, the state has chosen to pile on larger annual procurement targets and give NYSERDA more discretion to tweak terms, hoping better central planning will overcome siting bottlenecks, NYISO interconnection constraints, and macroeconomic headwinds.

While NYSERDA has admitted in some instances that there are issues with renewable procurements, they have not provided a detailed assessment of the programs and their status. Fred Stafford details what has happened to renewable contracts over the last three years. In short the developers threatened to cancel their projects unless NYS coughed up more money. He also has compiled the first comprehensive look at what happened to each of the 86 projects that the renewables industry cited in its threat of cancellation.

Renewable Development Shakedown

Stafford describes what has happened in NYS:

Back in June 2023, the trade group representing New York renewables developers, Alliance for Clean Energy New York (ACE NY), warned the state that, due to post-COVID supply chain issues and inflation, their 86 wind and solar projects under development were facing cancellation. That amounted to about 7.5 GW of new power generation at risk.

Each of the projects held a contract with NYSERDA, the state’s energy procurement agency, to receive subsidies in the form of renewable energy certificates (RECs), a project revenue stream on top of the actual sales of power. Having all competed for, and won, these contracts in annual auctions between 2016 and 2021, the developers were concerned the subsidies wouldn’t yield enough return on investment for their shareholders. The developers of four offshore wind projects and the ill-fated Clean Path NY transmission project all followed suit: our competitively won subsidies need to be increased.

To remedy their financial predicament and to save the projects, ACE NY requested that the state renegotiate their contracts by adjusting the REC prices with an inflation index. If the state refused their request then many of the developers would be forced to terminate their projects. But without these projects, ACE NY argued, not only would the state’s statutory climate goals be in jeopardy, so too would its electric reliability. After all, the only significant new power generation winning investment in New York these days is renewable.

The ACE NY petition fleshes out the threat to reliability posed by the cancellation of their projects. Here’s an example: “… [D]elays in renewable energy development would only exacerbate the reliability risk already implicated in recent reports and undercut the State’s commitment to developing the resources necessary to effectively combat climate change.” NYPSC Case 15-E-0302, Petition of the Alliance for Clean Energy New York to Address Post COVID-19 Impacts on Renewable Development Economics and Contract Considerations (filed June 7, 2023, revised June 12, 2023), pp. 34-35.

New York needed the developers’ projects and therefore needed to increase their subsidies beyond the competitively determined contractual prices. The developers had the state under their thumbs and both sides knew it. Other trade groups and nonprofits that push renewable energy even backed them up in demanding inflation adjustments, as did labor unions, whose members’ livelihoods were predicated in part on building the projects.

In October 2023 the state’s Public Services Commission nonetheless voted unanimously to refuse the request for inflation adjustment to existing contracts. In a statement, ACE NY’s director Anne Reynolds painted a picture of doom and gloom. “Unfortunately, today’s action by New York is not a sign that our state is really committed to the climate change action mandates that exist in law, and it is not a day that has moved us forward in giving future generations of New Yorkers a healthier and safer environment,” she said.

But the state wanted to preserve competitive procurement as the way to develop new electricity resources at lowest cost to ratepayers. “By rejecting this relief, we signal to every vendor that our contracts, our commitments are worth the paper they are written on,” PSC Chair Rory Christian stated at the time. “We signal that ratepayer funds are not an unlimited piggy bank for anyone’s disposal.”

Instead, the PSC ordered a new, expedited 2023 auction for renewables subsidies, held shortly before the regularly scheduled 2024 auction. The new auctions also included an optional inflation adjustment index that would apply to the final strike price once the project was finished with construction. This was a major ask from the ACE NY petition, and they largely got it. Any of those 86 projects that wouldn’t pencil for their investors under existing contracts could be cancelled, and developers could simply re-bid for subsidies in the new auction. Since they’re organized politically into a trade group that presses the state on the need for higher subsidies, they could be sure that the subsidies in the new auctions, a result of all their competitive bids, would be higher.

And that’s exactly what happened: a majority of these projects’ developers ultimately cancelled their contracts, re-bid in the subsequent auctions, won even higher subsidies from ratepayers, and continued with the projects.

The fate of the offshore wind projects that issued the same demand is better understood, given the smaller count. Each of the four cancelled their contracts and two of them won contracts for higher prices than what they’d won back in the 2018 auction. Empire Wind 1 gained a 27% increase in its subsidy, while Sunrise Wind scored a 32% increase. See Table 5 in this research on offshore wind for a clear presentation of the New York offshore wind solicitations timeline and increase in strike prices. Hansen, Tyler A., et al. “Institutional learning in the energy transition: The case of offshore wind in the United States.”

Contract Tracking Analysis

As is the case with anything associated with NYSERDA documentation for the Climate Act there is NYSERDA data available but getting it all together is not straight forward. I cannot over-emphasize my admiration of the work Stafford did to put together a spreadsheet documenting the fate of the 86 projects. He explains:

Projects show up with slightly different names, perhaps different developers, in periodic reports. One must use their NYISO interconnection queue positions and their state siting cases, both of which are included in state data, to track their progression over time.

Even determining the actual list of 86 projects requires some footwork, as ACE NY’s petition didn’t list them out.⁴ ACE NY characterized the 86 projects as the subset of the 117 Tier 1 land-based wind and solar contracts, from 2016 to 2021 procurements, that were considered “Under Development” as of June 2023. See Table 14, NYPSC Case 15-E-0302, Petition of the Alliance for Clean Energy New York to Address Post COVID-19 Impacts on Renewable Development Economics and Contract Considerations (filed June 7, 2023, revised June 12, 2023), Attachment A, pp. 23.Because NYSERDA’s data hides earlier snapshots, I had to rely on lucky Archive.org snapshots of it to reconstruct that list. They’re all the land-based wine and solar Tier 1 projects from 2016 through 2021 auctions that were, at the time of the June 2023 petition, still listed as under development. See the “project roster” tab in my spreadsheet.

Results Overview

Stafford summarizes the results:

Of the 86 wind and solar projects that ACE NY demanded higher subsidies for, totaling 7.5 GW, a majority of that capacity, 4.1 GW, consisted of projects that eventually re-bid and won contracts in the subsequent auctions that NYSERDA ran.

20 of them (2.0 GW) won contracts, at much higher prices (see next section), in the late 2023 auction.

18 of them (2.1 GW) won contracts in the 2024 auction, whose price outcomes are not yet public.

8 of them (650 MW) submitted bids for contracts in the 2025 auction, which is still being evaluated.

6 of them (357 MW) continued to completion on their original NYSERDA contracts.

34 of them (2.4 GW) were simply abandoned by their developers, so far.

The ones that won contracts in 2023 scored subsidies that were 20 to 64% higher

He explains that the project status is still evolving:

Note that we can’t argue yet that a majority of the 86 projects won contracts after rebidding. The 2025 procurement auction is currently ongoing, so we don’t know which of the 8 projects from the petition set will actually win contracts based on their bids. In the 2023 auction, 48 of the 86 submitted bids but only 20 won, and in the 2024 auction, 25 of the remaining 86 submitted bids but only 18 won.

Discussion

The NYSERDA bidding process is rigged against consumers. While PSC Chair Rory Christian said that “We signal that ratepayer funds are not an unlimited piggy bank for anyone’s disposal.” The facts show that the renewable energy lobby led by ACE-NY blackmailed NYS into re-bidding renewable energy contracts and that when the contracts were re-bid the piggy bank was cracked open. The lawmaker advocates for the Climate Act did not require a feasibility analysis to determine whether an electric system that relies on wind, solar, and energy storage can maintain current reliability and affordability standards. Instead they opened up NYS to renewable developers to build as much as they can, as fast as they can and in the process documented By Stafford essentially guaranteed rates of return that represent a regressive tax on all utility bills.

NYSERDA’s procurement responsibilities are not a neutral back‑office function; they define how risk, cost, and accountability are distributed across the entire Climate Act build‑out. By keeping so much of the action behind the curtain of complex contracts, the current setup enables a steady stream of “bold” announcements about new renewable and offshore wind awards, even as the roster of operating projects grows more slowly and the affordability and reliability implications become harder to ignore. That gap between promises and projects is not a surprise failure of an otherwise sound system; it is an entirely predictable outcome of a procurement model that prioritizes optics and statutory compliance over realistic timelines, durable contracts, and transparent evaluation of costs and benefits.

Conclusion

Stafford concludes:

The whole point of moving from utility monopoly to competitive markets for electricity generation was to lower costs by putting project risk onto investors and not onto ratepayers. Here we have a fully competitive procurement system and yet the investors managed to collectively exert some political pressure and shift the project risk back onto ratepayers. All it took was canceling their contracts, waiting for later auction processes, and acting collectively to bid much higher prices for those subsidies.

That’s because New York’s electricity system is not some testbed of pure competition, pure price signals, and autonomous, uncoordinated agents. The state has a grid that desperately needs new generation and it has climate goals that desperately need new renewable projects. The renewables developers have demonstrated their capacity to work collectively, through ACE NY, to push a narrative about their common industrial and financial situation. Of course it’s in large part true: COVID did create major new supply chain snarls and inflationary pressures.

But unlike in the old electricity market, where investment in generation came from the state’s utilities, the New York Public Services Commission has no corporate books to look at, no ability to regulate profits to ensure that investors aren’t making out like bandits. Instead, they can only trust the developers and read the tea leaves of the market, and hope that these iterations of competitive procurement aren’t producing huge windfalls for the projects’ ultimate investors. Maybe there was something important lost in that old way of doing things.

NYISO 2026 Power Trends – Reality is Catching Up

The New York Independent System Operator (NYISO) prepares an annual report on “forces shaping the electric grid and wholesale electricity markets.” NYISO’s Power Trends 2026 is a notable document because it says many of the right things, even if it still does not say them quite as bluntly as the situation deserves. The report acknowledges that electrification, large new energy-intensive loads, retirement of conventional resources, and weather-dependent generation are combining to make the system more uncertain and more fragile. It also says reliability margins are shrinking and that winter conditions are becoming a defining challenge. That is an important step forward, but it is also an implicit admission that the Climate Leadership & Community Protection Act (Climate Act) implementation process has been pushing the grid toward a level of risk that the state has not honestly grappled with.

I have written over 650 articles about the Climate Act and I am convinced that implementation of the Climate Act net-zero mandates will do more harm than good if the future electric system relies only on wind, solar, and energy storage because of reliability and affordability risks. The opinions expressed in this post and in my filing do not reflect the position of any of my previous employers or any other organization with which I have been associated; these comments are mine alone. I acknowledge the use of Perplexity AI to outline this post and draft the text used in this document.

Power Trends 2026

The Executive Summary states:

Power Trends explores the issues shaping New York’s electric system as it undergoes a historic transformation driven by simultaneous changes in supply, demand, and infrastructure.

The report highlights increasing and more uncertain electricity demand, a changing generation mix, and a system that is more geographically dispersed, weather‑dependent, and operationally complex. Maintaining reliability depends on disciplined planning, timely investment, and market structures that align investment with system needs and value operational performance during stressed conditions.

NYISO provides the report, a key trends fact sheet, a note from the NYISO president and CEO, and report figures and resources.

Key Findings

The report highlights five big trends: declining reliability margins, rapid and uncertain load growth, shifting seasonal risks, a changing resource mix, and expanding system uncertainty. That is a polite way of saying the grid is getting harder to run while the policy environment keeps adding complexity. NYISO is also explicit that the system needs generation, storage, transmission, and demand-side solutions that can perform during extended periods of high demand.

The press release makes one point especially clear: NYISO wants an “all-of-the-above” investment approach supported by competitive markets. In plain English, that means New York cannot afford to bet the system on a single preferred technology or an aspiration about how fast a transformation will happen. It needs resources that are available when needed, not just resources that look good in a policy presentation.

Where this fits my concerns

My long-running concern with Climate Act implementation has been that the process has treated emissions targets as if they were operational plans. The result has been an unfortunate habit of confusing policy preference with system capability. NYISO’s report does not use that language, but it does describe the consequences: less margin for error, greater weather dependence, more uncertainty, and increasing pressure on winter operations.

That is exactly the kind of caution that should have been part of the implementation process from the beginning. Instead, the state has often acted as though the answer to every reliability question was “more renewables, more quickly,” with insufficient attention to the timing and performance of the resources that keep the lights on. NYISO now says the system needs disciplined planning and timely investment, which is a far cry from the casual optimism that has often accompanied Climate Act roll-out discussions. I remain concerned that there still are unresolved differences between the New York State Energy Research & Development Authority (NYSERDA) implementation descriptions of the transition in the Scoping Plan and the State Energy Plan and NYISO planning reports.

The report also reinforces a point that has been obvious for years: load growth is not a static assumption anymore. Electrification, data centers, and other large projects are changing demand in ways that can swamp neat planning narratives. The idea that energy efficiency and energy conservation efforts will prevent load growth is also no longer valid. That means the state’s implementation process should be more conservative, not less, because uncertainty is rising on both the supply and demand sides.

Not so Independent NYISO

One reason NYISO’s documents are often carefully crafted to not contradict NYSERDA’s transition planning documents is that they must operate in a political environment where outright candor can be punished. That does not mean the report is wrong; it means the language is often muted. In my view, that restraint is not accidental. It reflects years of pressure on NYISO to avoid sounding too skeptical about the transition path the state has chosen.

“Energy Czar” Richard Kauffman’s role in that pressure campaign should not be forgotten. In 2016 NYISO filed comments with the state saying its goal to power the state with 50 percent renewable energy by 2030 was unrealistic unless a massive investment in new transmission lines were undertaken. Kauffman sent a letter saying it was misleading, incomplete, and grossly inaccurate. Even though the NYISO filing has since proven to be correct NYISO has every incentive to soften language that might be interpreted as resistance. I believe that dynamic has contributed to NYISO documents pulling their punches when discussing the risks of the zero-emissions transition and the practical limits of the Climate Act pathway.

That matters because the public needs more than carefully crafted phrases about “uncertainty” and “scenario-based planning.” It needs a frank explanation that the current policy path creates real reliability risks unless the state changes course on pace, technology assumptions, and resource adequacy. NYISO is getting closer to that point, but it is still speaking in institutional code.

What the report gets right

To NYISO’s credit, Power Trends 2026 is not a celebratory document. It acknowledges declining reliability margins and says retirements and performance problems are outpacing additions to supply. It recognizes that winter is becoming a defining reliability season. It also states that a diverse resource mix is necessary, including generation, storage, transmission, and demand-side measures.

That is a welcome correction to the oversimplified narrative that has dominated much of Albany’s energy policymaking. The report’s emphasis on competitive wholesale markets is also important because markets are where resource adequacy should be tested in practice, not in press releases. If policymakers want reliable electricity, they should listen carefully when the grid operator says performance under stress matters. It would also be appropriate for the press to qualify any transition story lauding renewables with the concerns described in this report.

What it leaves unsaid

Even so, the report still avoids saying the most uncomfortable thing plainly: Climate Act implementation has been moving faster in policy than in infrastructure. That gap is the heart of the problem. You can mandate a future, but you cannot mandate transmission buildout, generator construction, interconnection readiness, or seasonal fuel security on a slogan-driven schedule. This means that the transition schedule must be reconsidered.

The report also does not dwell on the institutional failure implied by repeated assurances that the transition is manageable without significant tradeoffs. NYISO is now warning that the system’s margin for error is shrinking. That should be read as a warning not just about the grid, but about the policy process that created these pressures in the first place.

A better reading of the outlook

The right takeaway from Power Trends 2026 is not that New York should abandon decarbonization. It is that the future electric system must be treated as an engineering problem, not a moral assertion. Reliability, affordability, and emissions all matter, but they do not obey the same timeline, and they certainly do not respond well to wishful thinking.

Nowhere is this more evident than the undeniable need for Dispatchable Emissions-Free Resources (DEFR). Power Trends 2026 defines this as:

A resource designed to provide reliable, on-demand electricity without emitting carbon. Unlike intermittent renewable sources like wind and solar, DEFRs can be dispatched as needed to meet demand. Many of the potential technologies are still in development and may face challenges in terms of economic viability and scalability

My concern is that DEFR is indispensable for a wind an solar dependent system, yet there is still no concrete plan to commercialize and deploy any DEFR technology at the scale required. Significant technical, economic, and regulatory uncertainties remain for all proposed DEFR options, so assuming a viable solution will simply emerge when needed amounts to taking an extraordinary reliability risk with the bulk power system. If nuclear ultimately proves to be the only practical DEFR candidate, then a grid architecture centered on wind, solar, and short duration storage cannot be implemented reliably without large scale nuclear generation. However, nuclear power is best suited to continuous, high-capacity factor operation, so holding it in reserve as an infrequently used DEFR “backup” misuses the technology and wastes its economic advantages. This problem should be resolved sooner than later.

If the Climate Act implementation process is to become credible, it needs a more honest accounting of resource availability, winter performance, the lead times for transmission and generation, and DEFR technology. NYISO’s latest outlook is useful because it points in that direction, even if cautiously. The report should be read as a signal that reality is asserting itself over rhetoric.

Conclusion

The most important thing about Power Trends 2026 is that it reflects a system under stress and a planning environment that has grown much more complicated than policymakers seem willing to admit. NYISO is telling us that New York needs a broad, reliable, market-based resource buildout, not a narrow ideology dressed up as planning. That is exactly the direction the state should have taken from the start. Instead, it is now being forced to catch up with the consequences of the flawed Climate Act and State Energy Plan implementation process. New York policy has talked as though ambitious emissions targets could be translated into real-world electric system performance simply by declaring them so. NYISO’s latest power trends report is a reminder that physics, infrastructure lead times, fuel availability, and operating reserves do not care about slogans.

Guest Post – Heat Pump Rate Carveouts

It has been my experience that every aspect of the green energy transition is more complicated than it appears at first. This is an example of the unintended consequences of a transition component. I recently met Scott Endler who provided this guest post describing a proposal to change the electric rate structure to support heat pumps. The proposed solution is not what it seems.

Scott is a self taught efficiency and energy analyst in Central New York.

I acknowledge the use of Perplexity AI to convert Endler’s study into this post.

Background

On May 5, 2026, “A coalition of environmental groups today filed a petition calling on the New York Public Service Commission to fix electric rate designs that unfairly overcharge households that switch to clean electric heating. The petition was filed by Alliance for a Green Economy, Building Decarbonization Coalition, Earthjustice, Environmental Defense Fund, New Yorkers for Clean Power, Rewiring America, and Sierra Club”.

The basis for the petition is a report conducted by Switchbox, “Heat Pump Rates in New York State: An Analysis of Cost-Based and Cost-Reflective Rates for Heat Pump Customers.” The report claims that when customers switch from gas heating to heat pumps they dramatically cut their energy use, however, most of these same customers see their bills go up due to outdated electric pricing policies. My initial impression is that if cost savings are only possible by changing policies then the proposed “solution” is not all it is cracked up to be. Endler explains why this is more complicated below.

Why heat pump carve‑outs are a dead‑end

Advocates like Earthjustice and Switchbox argue that New York utilities are overcharging heat pump customers for delivery service—on the order of hundreds of dollars per year—and propose a dedicated “heat pump rate” to fix the problem. Their basic case rests on two current facts about the New York grid.

The system is still summer‑peaking, so much of the winter distribution network is treated as “already paid for,” with plenty of headroom when heat pumps run on cold but not extreme days.
A customer who electrifies heat can see roughly a doubling of their kWh volume, so volumetric delivery charges go up even if the utility’s embedded winter distribution costs barely move.

From there, the coalition jumps to a political conclusion: create a boutique, technology‑specific discount so heat pump adopters pay less for winter delivery while everyone else stays on the old schedule. That might satisfy the coalition in this rate case, but it fails three basic tests: fairness, durability, and alignment with the Climate Leadership & Community Protection Act (CLCPA) long‑term grid trajectory.

The transition paradox: today’s spare winter capacity won’t last

The core problem with the carve‑out logic is that it freezes today’s grid snapshot and pretends it is permanent. CLCPA‑driven electrification of buildings and transportation all but guarantees that New York will flip from a summer‑peaking to a winter‑peaking system sometime in the 2030s, as electric heat and winter peak EV charging push load into the coldest hours.

Under that future paradigm, heat pumps are no longer opportunistic users of “free” winter capacity; they become the main driver of localized peak demand, transformer overloads, and the next round of capital projects. The very customers who are being framed today as victims of an unfair delivery rate will, in a decade or so, be the marginal cost causers when the system is strained on sub‑zero January mornings.

Designing a permanent special discount for a technology that is on track to become the dominant driver of winter peaks is a textbook example of a policy that works only as long as it doesn’t succeed.

Horizontal equity: same wires, same rules

If the wires are a shared public asset, then any consumer who pushes current through those wires at a constrained hour should face the same price signal regardless of what device is on the other end of the cord. I frame this as “horizontal equity”: identical structural rules for every ratepayer.

In a horizontal‑equity framework, a kilowatt‑hour is charged based on the physical state of the network and the prevailing supply price, not on whether it feeds a heat pump, a resistance heater, an EV, or a Bitcoin rig. That approach avoids cross‑subsidies from non‑adopters to relatively affluent early adopters of new technologies, a regressive pattern that is already visible in some rooftop solar and EV incentives.

By contrast, a bespoke “heat pump” class asks a single mom in a gas‑heated apartment to pay higher delivery charges so that a homeowner with a brand‑new variable‑speed HP and smart thermostat can enjoy a tailored discount in the name of climate justice.

A dynamic, capacity‑based delivery price

The counter‑proposal coming out of the feasibility study is a dynamic, capacity‑based delivery tariff that works much more like the wholesale energy market. Instead of a static cents‑per‑kWh delivery rate smeared over all hours, the distribution price would move up and down with remaining localized grid capacity.

When local transformers, feeders, and substation capacity are plentiful—say, on a quiet winter night—the marginal cost of using the network is low and the delivery price falls toward zero for everyone.
When capacity is tight—say, during a frigid morning when Winter Storm Fern pushed downstate resources to the brink—the delivery component spikes exactly when the system is most stressed.

This preserves cost‑recovery for the utilities over the year while sending a sharp, physics‑based price signal in the hours when grid use is genuinely expensive. Crucially, the signal is identical for any customer whose load shows up in that hour.

Why this beats Straight Fixed‑Variable (SFV)

Some utility economists default to Straight Fixed‑Variable designs—high fixed monthly charges and very low volumetric delivery rates—to stabilize revenue as electrification reshapes load. The problem is that SFV guts the conservation signal: once you’ve paid your hefty monthly fee, each extra kilowatt‑hour costs very little, so the customer’s incentive to invest in efficiency or to shift load out of peak hours is weak.

A capacity‑prorated volumetric charge keeps the usage‑based signal intact. Customers still save real money by using less energy over the billing period, and they get an additional incentive to avoid precisely those hours when both supply and wires are constrained. That is exactly what CLCPA‑era demand management is supposed to reward.

In other words, this is a way to modernize rate design without flattening everything into a subscription fee that severs the link between behavior and system cost.

Behavioral and planning benefits

Under a dynamic distribution price, a heat pump owner is not punished for having electrified; they are only penalized if they insist on running at full load in the same hour that everyone else is trying to do the same thing on a constrained circuit. The rational response is not to rip out the heat pump, but to invest in insulation, envelope upgrades, and smarter controls that quietly shave load exactly when the grid is tight.

This architecture also makes grid planning more honest. When the delivery price spikes repeatedly on a certain circuit, it is a market signal that the wires and transformers there are under‑sized relative to demand, justifying targeted capital upgrades instead of generalized rate hikes. Because every technology sees that same price shape, the planner’s data isn’t distorted by carve‑outs and exemptions.

You can think of it as bringing distributed marginal‑cost pricing down from the wholesale level into the distribution system, instead of trying to fine‑tune social policy via ever more fragmented rate classes.

How this plays out as CLCPA bites

Look at the CLCPA trajectory and the recent Winter Storm Fern emergency order for a preview of the stakes. As more load is pushed into winter mornings and evenings, the occasional near‑miss we saw in January 2026 becomes more common unless billions are poured into wires and flexible resources.

In a world of boutique heat pump discounts, those marginal infrastructure costs get socialized onto everyone else while the prime driver of the peak enjoys a protected class rate. In a capacity‑based, technology‑neutral regime, the households and businesses that draw power at the worst times pay the highest delivery price, regardless of whether they are doing the “right thing” in some broader climate narrative.

That may be politically uncomfortable, but it is honest—and if CLCPA is supposed to be about aligning economic signals with physical reality, it is hard to justify anything else.

Where advocates are right—and what regulators should do instead

The Earthjustice coalition is not wrong to say that current volumetric delivery tariffs can make early electrifiers look like suckers. But the fix should address the structural flaw in the rate design, not just the optics for one favored technology.

Regulators who genuinely care about affordability and equity should focus on:

Deploying interval‑capable meters fast enough to make capacity‑based delivery pricing administratively feasible.
Phasing in a simple, transparent distribution price that reflects localized capacity conditions, starting with the most constrained circuits.
Avoiding the temptation to endorse technology‑specific carve‑outs that will be impossible to unwind once the political beneficiaries are numerous and vocal.

That path doesn’t lend itself to a press release about “fixing heat pump delivery rates,” but it would actually modernize the tariff architecture for a high‑electrification, high‑constraint grid.

Conclusion

New York’s new “heat pump rates” campaign gets one thing right: today’s delivery tariffs are a blunt instrument that can punish electrification. But carving out a special rate class for heat pumps is the wrong fix; a capacity‑based, technology‑neutral delivery charge tied to real‑time grid conditions would be fairer, more durable, and far more honest about who actually drives system costs.

New York State Renewable Permitting Scandal

This article was also posted at Watts Up With That

Paraphrasing the Washington Post “Environmental Protections Die in Darkness”, could be a slogan for New York’s Climate Leadership & Community Protection Act (CLCPA) monomaniacal emphasis on renewable energy development. Reasonable limits have never been established on wind and solar projects, so developers have been given free rein to build wherever is most convenient and cheap without regard to the environment. If a recent article in the New York Post is any indication, however, that may be changing. I explain the context of solar development in New York in this article.

I am convinced that implementation of the Climate Act net-zero mandates will do more harm than good if the future electric system relies only on wind, solar, and energy storage because of reliability and affordability risks. I have followed the Climate Act since it was first proposed, submitted comments on the Climate Act implementation plan, and have written over 600 articles about New York’s net-zero transition. The opinions expressed in this article do not reflect the position of any of my previous employers or any other organization I have been associated with, these comments are mine alone

Background

The CLCPA has been an exercise in political pandering to emotion-driven activists convinced that climate change is an existential threat that can be solved by transitioning to an energy system reliant on wind, solar, and energy storage. I have been writing for years about the lack of a feasibility analysis that demonstrates that relying on renewable energy that does not provide energy all the time, including the times when needed the most, does not work well in New York’s climate and high latitude, and relies on resources that tend to fail at the same time over large areas. Instead of an ordered approach to decarbonization, New York lawmakers enacted a transition plan that consists of building as much wind and solar as possible, as fast as possible, and assumed that it would all work out.

In the first year after the CLCPA was enacted renewable development did not get permitted as fast as the developers and activists wanted. In April 2020, New York lawmakers enacted the Accelerated Renewable Energy Growth and Community Benefit Act that created the Office of Renewable Energy Siting (ORES) to implement a consolidated, expedited siting and permitting process for major renewable energy facilities. Because New York progressive lawmakers know everything, the idea that there should be conditions on development was not included in the law. There was no provision to ask the Department of Agriculture and Markets for recommendations on limits for the taking of prime farmland. The Public Service Commission was not asked if solar developers should have technology mandates like tilting axis solar panels or recommendations not to build solar facilities in the Great Lake snowbelts that get 20 feet of snow a year. The Department of Health did not establish noise limits to protect industrial neighbors of wind turbines. In every instance there have been egregious impacts that the ORES permitting process has ignored as they rubber stamped approvals despite the strenuous efforts of local groups concerned with those impacts. In future articles I will address these impacts.

The more I learn about the permitting process the more I am convinced that most New Yorkers have no clue about these destructive policies. The local grassroots organizations have been knee-capped by this law and have failed to kill projects that cause what I am sure state agencies would agree are unacceptable impacts. Publicity is needed to expose this scandal. The grassroots organizations opposed to unfettered renewable development that has no safeguards usually count themselves lucky to get a mention in a local newspaper or TV station, but their reach is limited. They have not been able to get this issue publicized enough.

There is another egregious impact. I have no doubts that if the lawmakers had asked the Department of Environmental Conservation to recommend limits on destruction of rare and endangered species habitat, they would certainly have demanded limits on fragmenting habitat. That did not happen and it has come to the attention of a social media influencer who is articulate, passionate and mad. She also has a platform.

Alexandra Fasulo

Alexandra Fasulo has a Substack called House of Green with the stated goal “to equip you with the information and stories you need to farm, garden, homestead, futurestead, set up agricultural education businesses, and heal the environment.” Her overall Substack presence (including House of Green and other titles) is listed as having “53K+ subscribers” and ranked around #13 in the Climate & Environment category. Her Youtube channel has 384K subscribers and videos routinely get tens of thousands of views. In her latest endeavor she established a farm and her followers can monitor her homestead progress.

When she found out about the nearby planned 100 MW Fort Edward Solar Project she attended a public hearing. It was a wakeup call. I think her public reach as social media influencer is going to have an impact as exemplified by the fact that the New York Post reached out to her. She gave him the overview and connected him with other people in the article.

Fort Edward Solar

Chadwick Moore’s article describes Fasulo’s initial reaction to the Fort Edard Solar Project at a public hearing:

“There was nearly unanimous opposition to this project. So, I thought it wouldn’t go through. That’s how representative democracy works, right? Wrong.”

I had the same reaction about this project. As shown in the following map that was used in the article, the project is within the Audubon-designated Fort Edward Grasslands Important Bird Area and the NYNHP Raptor Winter Concentration Area. It also surrounds the NYS DEC Grassland Wildlife Management Area on three sides. Note that the developer frequently points out that their project does not surround the Wildlife Management Area on all sides. The idea that fields of solar panels could be permitted adjacent to a wildlife management area is beyond my comprehension.

The Fort Edwards site, in red, is in the middle of a state-recognized wildlife sanctuary.

Grassland Bird Trust/ American Land Rescue Fund

I admire Fasulo because she did not take the rejection of her concerns sitting down. She established a non-profit American Land Rescue Fund to “defend America’s land through law and action.” Because the permitting documents are heavily redacted, she hired independent consultants to assess the environmental impact.

That report, reviewed by The Post, shows the Fort Edwards site sits inside a NYS Department of Environmental Conservation-managed grassland and bird sanctuary “well known for high species diversity of breeding grassland birds and important numbers of wintering raptors including an Endangered and a Threatened species,” the report stated.

The species impacted by the development include the endangered short-eared owl (fewer than 50 breeding pairs remain in the state, per the Grassland Bird Trust), the threatened northern harrier and 15 species of reptiles and amphibians of “conservation concern,” among many others.

Moore goes on to describe 17 other solar projects in Upstate New York that have their own issues.

Each of the 18 sites ORES has selected will have a capacity over 25 megawatts. The agency also has an additional dozen wind projects in the works.

Some of the largest projects are the 4,000-acre (6.25-square-mile), 500-megawatt Cider Solar Farm in Genesee County and the 2,000-acre (3.1-square-mile) Ridge View Solar Farm in Niagara County, as shown on The Post’s map.

To add insult to injury, many of the multibillion-dollar solar contracts have been farmed out to foreign companies — including Canada’s Boralex, France’s EDF Renewables, and South Korea’s Cypress Creek Renewables, The Post has found.

He describes a smaller project in Copake NY.

A hundred miles south in the bucolic Hudson Valley town of Copake, local resident Sara Traberman has made fighting Big Solar her full-time job. Chicago-based developer Hecate Energy scooped up over 700 acres of productive farmland to install a planned 42-megawatt-capacity solar facility, expected to go online late next year.

Locals were told to expect two years of nonstop construction where 547 dump trucks and 10 pile drivers along with numerous cranes and excavators will swarm the picturesque hamlet from 7 a.m. to 8 p.m. — seven days a week.

“It’s about changing the character of this town. It’s a rural, farming community. We just ask that the rules of the town and the view of what the people want for where they live is respected,” Traberman told The Post.

“It’s going to impact tourism, local traffic, the schools. It’s going to be horrible.

Moore also describes a lawsuit against ORES in Montgomery County.

Developers were permitted to gobble up 6,400 acres (10 square miles) — most of it active farmland — for two massive solar complexes near the towns of Canajoharie and Root.

Montgomery County Attorney Meghan Manion told The Post the litigation challenges “the grossly unlawful actions of ORES,” which “deviated from lawful procedure by choosing not to follow their own regulations in granting these [solar] permits.”

While developers cover the cost of construction, locals have to eat revenue losses on property tax for the sites, Montgomery County lawmaker Michael Muhlebeck told The Post. He also said his constituents, who are “97 percent” opposed to the projects, will likely face higher utility costs due to the increased demand that often follows large industrial projects like this.

Issues

The article describes the futility of changing the climate with solar power and explains that solar resources in New York are not strong. According to the New York Independent System Operator summary of renewable performance utility-scale solar facilities provided between 16 and 19% of the maximum possible generation over the last four years. There is a bigger problem. Electric resource planning must be based on the worst-case event. During last winter’s extreme winter weather 18-day episode the daily solar capacity available was less than 10% half the time and less than 5% three days. I also showed that this episode proves that in these events all short-term energy storage would be depleted early, leaving insufficient renewable generation to both meet demand and recharge storage systems. As a result, a new dispatchable emissions-free resource is needed to keep the lights on.

I recommend checking out the article’s map of the 18 solar projects currently under consideration by ORES that extend from far western New York to the Canadian border in the north. All these projects are needed to provide New York City with zero-emissions electricity as part of the CLCPA. Because they are so spread-out transmission upgrades will undoubtedly be required, if not for these projects, then surely for all the other renewable projects necessary.

The experiences recounted in the article indicate that unfettered renewable energy development in New York is causing demonstrable environmental impacts. Given environmental advocacy outrage over environmental impacts of data centers it is disappointing that they have not expressed their concerns over the more extensive impacts of renewable energy development.

At the end of the day this outcome is solely on the lawmakers who supported these laws. They never enabled state agencies to fulfill their missions, and I think you could say they prevented them from doing so in the process. The developers cannot be faulted for taking advantage of the situation and ORES staff is simply following the law. Prior to 2019, the state agencies would have said the environmental impacts f Fort Edward Solar are unacceptable and asked the developer to build their facility somewhere with less impacts.

Conclusion

Montgomery County lawmaker Michael Muhlebeck summed up the scandal:

“New York state has taken more and more from our communities and they’ve literally just shut us down. We no longer have the right to protect our residents. “But there’s a goal that has to be met. And that goal is bigger than our local communities, our wildlife, our wetlands. And they don’t care,” she added.

Publicity is needed to expose this scandal. I hope that the power of social media exemplified by Alexandra Fasulo can bring this to the attention of enough New Yorkers that the policies can be changed to protect the environment and interests of the local communities impacted by these industrial developments. The only way this can be fixed is for legislative change.