Editorial: New York journeying into darkness as statewide energy issues loom

Post Editorial Board | May 4, 2022

The state Department of Environmental Conservation needs to make the right call ona crucial liquefied-natural-gas project, or New Yorkers will be out in the cold. 

Literally. 

The DEC has until Friday to issue permits for two new LNG vaporizers at a National Grid facility in Brooklyn, to back up the plant’s main generating capacity during winter demand surges(and make its overall operation cleaner and more efficient).

If the DEC bows to green agitators, the plant will be unable to meet demand for the coldest days of upcoming winters. That means real suffering, and even deaths.(The catastrophic blackouts caused by a freak Texas blizzard in February 2021 killed as many as 750.) 

In other words, it’ll mark yet one more step on New York’s journey into darkness. 

That journey began with 2019’s Climate Leadership and Community Protection Act, a piece of green insanity that will — if its roadmap is followed — lock in permanent energy pain across the Empire State while costing taxpayers more than $300 billion. 

In fact, a new report from the Empire Center pegs the energy deficits the CLCPA will cause at 10% by 2040, when the act says New York must go emissions-free. 

That’s what happens when legislators plan to sacrifice our state’s actual generating capacity for pie-eyed dreams about renewable energy, i.e. wind and solar (now accounting for less than 6% of our power). 

That same report shows that the CLCPA’s proposed solar and wind build-outs — assuming they happen in time — will generate less than a third of the energy needed to make up for the removal of other capacity even as consumption increases.   

In other words, large-scale energy scarcity. 

Today’s skyrocketing energy prices are just a hint of how utterly detached from reality the CLCPA really is. 

To really go green, New York needs to keep its existing conventional capacity alive while it builds more nuclear (and, sure, wind and solar, too). We also need to unleash fracking, as neighboring Pennsylvania has done, to reap energy and jobs gains. Cutting New York’s carbon emissions to zero will do little to combat climate change globally while inflicting massive pain here. Which shows, yet again, that green pols are more interested in political power than clean energy.