Jonathan A. Lesser New York’s Green Energy Fantasy Continues The state’s latest plan would break the bank, without meaningfully reducing emissions.
https://www.city-journal.org/article/new-york-energy-plan-2025-climate-change
New York’s recently released Draft 2025 Energy Plan is rooted in fantasy. The plan asserts that the Empire State’s electrification and zero-emissions obsession will reduce energy costs, fight climate change, and create over 60,000 net new jobs by 2035. In reality, while the plan won’t meaningfully affect the climate, it will devastate consumers and New York’s economy.
The plan asks New Yorkers to ignore the realities before their eyes—including surging energy costs. ConEd, the state’s largest electric and gas utility, has requested double-digit rate increases for its provision of electricity and natural gas, which will cost consumers an additional $2 billion annually. National Grid has filed for similar rate increases upstate.
Those requested hikes are solely for natural gas and electricity delivery. As more fossil-fuel-generating plants close in response to the state’s net-zero Climate Action Plan, wholesale electricity costs will continue to soar, as growing demand, driven by the state’s building- and vehicle-electrification mandates, outstrips supply.
The state’s climate plan also contains a litany of dubious targets and assumptions. For example, it commits the state to former Governor Cuomo’s goal of deploying 9,000 megawatts of offshore wind by 2035, despite that industry’s having sunk under its own bloated costs.
Elsewhere, the plan assumes that someone will somehow develop, commercialize, and install currently nonexistent electric generating technologies over the next 15 years. Specifically, it claims that someone will retrofit 17,000 megawatts of existing natural gas-fired generators—the equivalent of eight Indian Point nuclear plants—to burn pure hydrogen by 2040. The plan also assumes that the state will somehow manufacture enough “green” hydrogen using surplus wind and solar generation to fuel those plants and build an entirely new pipeline infrastructure to deliver hydrogen to them.
Even if developers created generators capable of burning pure hydrogen, the quantity of surplus wind and solar power generation needed to manufacture sufficient hydrogen to power those 17,000 megawatts is staggering. Producing enough energy to fuel even just the 10 percent of hours when electricity demand is highest would require building 13,000 megawatts of offshore wind capacity, which would require an investment of between $25 billion and $65 billion. That doesn’t include financing costs. Nor does it include the cost of the hydrogen manufacturing facilities themselves.
The plan also recommends that New York expand alternative methods for mass-producing hydrogen, such as gasifying garbage and other waste products. But gasification requires significant energy, and the plan’s authors never identify where that energy will come from. Indeed, it’s a thermodynamic fact that it takes much more energy to manufacture hydrogen than the hydrogen itself contains.
Finally, the plan assumes that the state will implement Governor Kathy Hochul’s recent order for the New York Power Authority to develop an advanced nuclear plant upstate. Given the state’s sordid history of political patronage, the costs of constructing such a plant will likely make former governor Cuomo’s ill-fated Buffalo Billion seem like pocket change.
While the plan’s authors plainly detail their ambitions for “a cleaner energy system,” they are less forthcoming about the overall costs. They list annual costs for only three years—2030, 2035, and 2040. They admit, however, that achieving the plan’s net-zero scenarios would require New Yorkers to spend an additional $270 billion, before accounting for inflation, between now and 2040.
The plan’s authors seem to believe that consumers and businesses will welcome these changes. Consumers, they assume, will embrace higher electricity prices; happily trade gas furnaces and water heaters for costlier electric heat pumps; grow to love electric vehicles, despite slowing sales and the vehicles’ poor performance in cold winters; and support electric utilities’ ability to shut off large appliances remotely. None of those assumptions is realistic.
It’s more likely that the plan will break the bank. “New York’s energy transition needs to be on a sustainable financial footing to secure wide benefits,” the authors maintain. “Federal funding and permitting is essential to this objective.” In other words, they expect U.S. taxpayers to foot the bill for New York’s energy illusions.
These expenditures will hardly make a dent in global emissions. The plan projects that by 2040, pursuing net-zero policies would reduce New York’s annual carbon emissions to about 125 million metric tons—66 percent lower than the state’s emissions in 2022. But even under the “No Action” alternative, the plan projects that annual emissions would decrease by 23 percent, thanks to existing state policies.
If New York follows the net-zero plan, it will reduce emissions by about 1.5 billion metric tons by 2040. This may sound like a lot, but global emissions eclipsed 35 billion metric tons in 2016 and have, on average, increased 265 million metric tons annually over the last decade. New York’s efforts will amount to just over two weeks of current annual world emissions.
Instead of wasting taxpayer money on boondoggles, the state should enact policies that would actually reduce emissions and benefit the economy. For one, it should eliminate Cuomo’s ban on fracking, which would create thousands of new jobs and lower heating and electricity costs. It should also abandon policies that promote high-cost offshore wind and reopen Indian Point, which provided one-fourth of New York City’s electricity at a low cost.
With rising costs and growing demand, the Empire State cannot afford bureaucratic make-believe. It needs real energy solutions—and policymakers committed to pursuing them.
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