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.
