Some Other Parties Weigh In On The Con Edison Rate Case

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  • In my last post I linked to, and quoted portions of, the objection submitted by myself and two colleagues to the pending settlement of the rate increase request of our local utility, Con Edison. The gist of our objection is that the ratepayers should not be forced to pay to build infrastructure for delivery of “renewable” electricity that does not exist.

  • Our objection was filed on the day before Thanksgiving, November 26. That day had been set as the due date for all statements either in support or opposed to the pending settlement, which is referred to as the Joint Proposal of “JP.” And thus, on the same date, numerous other parties to the proceeding also filed statements, either in favor or opposed to the JP. The large majority were in favor — which is not surprising, given that to reach a settlement that might stick they needed the support of a large majority of the parties.

  • Most of the parties who had joined the case had sought from the outset to characterize their position as standing up for the ratepayers by opposing excessive revenue demands from Con Edison. And yet here at the settlement phase we find nearly all of these parties signing on to large amounts of spending by Con Edison that are completely wasteful, in that they provide for delivery of non-existent electricity and support for impossible Climate Act goals that are not happening.

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Objection Filed Against Con Edison Request For Rate Increase

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  • As I have mentioned here on a couple of occasions, I have joined with two colleagues to intervene in the regulatory proceeding where our local electric utility, Con Edison, has made its most recent request for a large rate increase.

  • My colleagues in this enterprise are Roger Caiazza, who blogs as the Pragmatic Environmentalist of New York, and Richard Ellenbogen, a Cornell-trained engineer who as his day job runs a factory in Westchester County.

  • After a “deregulation” that took place in the 1990s, Con Edison almost entirely got out of the business of generating electricity, so this case is about the rates for delivery of the electricity, rather than generation. The basis for Con Edison’s request for a rate increase is substantially that it wants to build lots of new infrastructure, like additional cables, substations and transformers, to deliver incremental power to support widespread electrification of vehicles and buildings as part of New York State’s goal of “net zero” greenhouse gas emissions.

  • That idea might make some sense if there were large amounts of zero-emissions electricity ready to be sent to New York City to be used for electrifying the buildings and vehicles. But in fact it is the opposite: a very large majority of the electricity that Con Edison delivers is generated by natural gas — which means that electrifying buildings and vehicles doesn’t reduce GHG emissions at all, and probably increases the emissions.

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At The New York Krazy Klimate Konference, 2025 Edition

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  • Two years ago, in November 2023, my friend Roger Caiazza and I attended a conference put on by a local news source called City & State. They called their conference the “Clean Energy New York Summit: The Path to Sustainability.” I called it the Krazy Klimate Konference, and I wrote about it in a post on November 18, 2023 titled “At The New York Krazy Klimate Konference.”‍ ‍

  • Last year both Roger and I skipped the Konference, and this year Roger again wisely decided to stay home in Syracuse. But I was morbidly curious as to how this crowd of climate grifters and subsidy farmers would react to the rapid derailment of their gravy train during the first ten months of President Trump’s second term. And for me, the venue was only about a 10 minute subway ride away, at the southern tip of Manhattan. So I rounded up my daughter Jane (who had to trek in from Queens) to accompany me, and off we went.

  • This year they slightly re-titled the Konference to “Energy Infrastructure Summit: New York’s Path to Sustainability.” On the surface, it was remarkably similar to the program of two years ago, and to hear the words of the speakers, it was as if nothing was wrong. But with a little reading between the lines, the changes were big.

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With Zohran Mamdani, Everything That Has Already Failed Is New Again

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With Zohran Mamdani, Everything That Has Already Failed Is New Again

  • Our newly-anointed Mayor-elect, Zohran Mamdani, vows that he is a Socialist, and that he intends to implement an explicitly Socialist suite of policies. OK, the guy is only 34 years old. He was born on October 18, 1991, just a couple of months before the final collapse of the Soviet Union on the day after Christmas that year. He lacks the personal experience that we senior citizens have of reading every day for decades of the horrors of life in Brezhnev’s Soviet Union, or Mao’s China. But could a student really learn so little in fancy schools like Bronx Science and Bowdoin College that he could graduate in the 2010s and not know about this history? Shockingly, yes.

  • So the “Socialist” policies advocated by Mamdani are different, more akin to the standard progressive playbook of a greatly expanded handout state financed by higher income taxes on the high earners. Of the various policies that Mamdani has advocated, the three that I think are most significant in their potential impact on the City are: (1) raising income taxes on high earners, (2) having the City as developer build 200,000 new publicly-owned “affordable” housing units, and (3) “defunding” and/or downsizing the police department.

  • To Mamdani and his twenty- and thirty-something acolytes, all this stuff seems so terribly new and fresh and creative. But the funny thing is that all of these policies have been tried before in New York. They were all implemented well before Mamdani was born, and then reversed by the time he was a little kid. In each case the reversal occurred because the policy had abjectly failed.

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New York At The Green Energy Wall -- What Is The Exit Strategy?

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  • When New York passed its utopian Climate Leadership and Community Protection Act back in 2019, it set mandatory targets for reductions in greenhouse gas emissions from the state’s energy consumption. But none of the mandates were scheduled to take effect prior to 2030.

  • The earliest mandates were: 70% of electricity from “renewables” by 2030, and 40% overall reduction in GHG emissions by the same year. (Still more ambitious mandates were also set for 2040, followed by a “net zero” mandate for 2050.). These dates all seemed so terribly far away — plenty of time for somebody to invent some new gizmos in the off chance that new technology might be needed to hit the goal.

  • Our legislators, innumerate to a person, had bought into the fantasy — peddled by lightweight academics like Mark Jacobson and Robert Howarth, and by grifting promoters like the American Wind Energy Association and investment bank Lazard — that wind and solar were now the cheapest way to make electricity. To abolish the evil fossil fuels, all that was needed was some political will.

  • The legislators definitely did not pay the slightest attention to the Manhattan Contrarian.

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The Latest Political Scam -- "Affordability" -- Is Really Taking Off

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  • If you want to run for office as a Democrat, there is a new catchword that you need to make as your main promise: “Affordability.”

  • As anybody paying attention knows, the cry of “affordability” was the central theme that carried the Democrats to victory in all the big races this year, most notably those of Zohran Mamdani for Mayor in New York City, Abigail Spanberger for Governor in Virginia, and Mikie Sherrill for Governor in New Jersey. The same theme also carried two Democrats to victory as Public Service Commissioners in Georgia — the first victories by Democrats in statewide elections for state office in Georgia since 2006.

  • But here is the question: Is the promise of “affordability” by these politicians something that has any prospect of being delivered through their proposed policies? Or are the proposed policies instead more likely to be useless, or even counterproductive, thus making the promise of “affordability” a scam from the outset?

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