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Posted on 12/04/2025 6:39:12 AM PST by MtnClimber
Today I spent the day with my excellent collaborator Richard Ellenbogen cross-examining witnesses at the New York Public Service Commission’s hearing on whether the pending rate increase request of our utility Con Edison should be approved. We had a lot of fun. Although the hearing was theoretically open to the public, they had no live video feed, and you had to register in advance to attend in person. It looked like everybody there was an interested party.
At the close of the hearing, we were invited (along with everybody else) to file a post-hearing brief by next Friday, December 12. The hearing provided us with lots of good material, and we will be putting together a good scathing screed as our contribution. You can look forward to a post on the subject next Friday or Saturday.
But meanwhile, the short version is that the witnesses put up by Con Edison and the Department of Public Service to support their settlement proposal claimed to know absolutely nothing about our objection. Don’t feel bad for us. That’s actually a damning admission, because the proponents of the rate increase need to establish a rational basis for it. If instead it is deemed “arbitrary and capricious,” it will fail. Our position is that the rate increase is arbitrary and capricious because it provides ratepayer funding for mandates that have been admitted by the state to be “infeasible,” and that will not happen during the period of the rate increase.
As the single most striking example (among several), we had cited and quoted in our Statement of Opposition to the rate increase a 6 page letter submitted in August 2025 by the state Attorney General on behalf of the state government in a court proceeding, asserting that the goals of the 2019 Climate Act for emissions reductions by 2030 were “infeasible” and would impose “extraordinary and damaging” costs on New Yorkers. We had asked for witnesses to address the issues raised in our Statement, and particularly how much ratepayer money was getting approved to then be wasted on infeasible goals that would not be met. Con Edison and Department of Public Service each put up about ten witnesses to answer our questions. But when asked, not one of them would admit familiarity with the state letter or that they had read it. Not one of them would answer whether the rate increase proposal contained ratepayer funding to support goals that the state itself had conceded were “infeasible,” or would agree to quantify how much ratepayer funding was to be wasted on chasing infeasible goals. And then it went on downhill from there.
But meanwhile, there has been other news on the New York Climate Act front. On November 25 a Washington think tank called the Progressive Policy Institute put out a Report with the title “NEW YORK'S CLIMATE CROSSROADS: ASSURING AFFORDABLE ENERGY.” The Report takes serious note that New York’s “climate” regime is in big trouble.
I am not greatly familiar with PPI. Although they do not appear to be from the lunatic fringe, they are definitely a left-wing group, and from reviewing their website, they clearly share the fundamental belief of the Left that the government can, and therefore must, solve all human problems. And with the word “progressive” is in their name, they are not seeking to avoid association with the crazy wing of the Democratic Party.
And yet PPI has definitely taken a step outside the reservation here. With the orthodoxy enforcement that has been pervasive in the left-side climate space for two decades or more, there has been almost no criticism from that perspective of any or all efforts to achieve a forced march to climate net zero utopia. So it is no small event that PPI has now gone on record telling New York that its grand climate plans are crumbling.
OK, they don’t use exactly those words. But they also are not scrupulously avoiding reality in the way of, say, the New York Times.
I’ll give you a few choice excerpts. Here is the opening line:
New York has established some of the nation's most ambitious decarbonization targets, positioning itself as a leader in climate policy. However, the immense economic burden and practical challenges of implementing these mandates threaten their political viability. As the costs of this transition fall heavily on ratepayers and working families, a critical tension emerges between state-level climate objectives and the everyday financial realities faced by New Yorkers.
Just yesterday the official party line was that the “renewables” wind and solar were cheaper than hydrocarbon fuels for generating electricity, and therefore if your bills were going up it could only be because of nefarious deeds of some combination of evil actors, like the utilities or the oil companies, or maybe Donald Trump. So that opening statement from PPI represents a very significant shift toward reality.
On the 2019 New York Climate Act:
An assessment of New York's progress against the 2019 Climate Leadership and Community Protection Act (Climate Act), using the state's own metrics, reveals a clear and undeniable pattern of failure across its most critical mandates. . . . New York is not on track to meet its targets. Progress on offshore wind and energy storage, two cornerstones of the state's grid transformation strategy, is severely behind schedule. This poor performance is not an anomaly but a symptom of deeper, systemic pressures that are converging on the state's energy system.
And then PPI goes so far as to describe the current situation as a “looming crisis” of both grid stability and and affordability, brought about by the state’s own poorly-conceived policies and mandates:
The Looming Crisis: A Collision of Supply, Demand and Cost: New York is not on track to meet its targets. Progress on offshore wind and energy storage, two cornerstones of the state's grid transformation strategy, is severely behind schedule. This poor performance is not an anomaly but a symptom of deeper, systemic pressures that are converging on the state's energy system.
Well, guys, welcome to the right side of history. Now that we have this crack in the dyke of left-wing unanimity for strict net zero mandates, perhaps the flood will begin.
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How will things change when Mamdani is in office?
They keep saying climate is changing and people believe them but never look outside ,LOL
When they take away the natural gas and the grid is down, Mad-mani will demand staying warm by wearing hijabs.
It appears that the power requirements for the ability to provide better mass surveillance with cloud computing and AI in data centers is more important than the green nonsense.
When the grid is down Mamdani will blame Trump.
Global Warming is a fraud and always has been for the DNC.
Any idea who that might be? [snark]
If you consider local pollution “climate”, it’s the only thing NYC can affect. No amount of spending will change that.
Ironically I think we inadvertently gave China a strategic advantage over us in that regard.
We put restrictions on GPUs that run the AI models so they get underpowered ones only. so they have been focused on efficiency, do more with less and use less power. And if you follow the AI development, China is putting out small models that you can use at home that rival the big US corporate ones like OpenAI. Not as quite as good but damned close, and trained for a fraction of the time, with a fraction of the infrastructure, with fewer parameters that require far less hardware to run and less demand for power.
Honestly I think our massive lead in AI is over and their approach at lower power, lower VRAM, fewer parameters but more efficient training is the right one, but our side is still trying to make bigger, more power hungry models.
Clearly the work of wreckers and saboteurs.
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