How Will New York's Energy Madness End? The "Don't Do It!" Report

I frequently write about how the mandates for energy transition that New York has adopted are impossible and irreconcilable in the real world; and therefore it is inevitable that they will have to be abandoned at some point when implementation of the project runs up against physical reality.

Probably the most frequent question that I get asked is, OK, how and when will that occur?

The question is important because for as long as the impossible mandates remain in place they are causing massive ongoing damage to our electricity system and to consumers. As examples, on the electricity generation side, natural gas power plants that currently supply about half of our electricity are slated for forced closure at the rate of several a year until all of them are closed by 2040. The longer the net zero fantasy goes on, the more difficult and costly it will be to re-open these plants (if they are even still standing), or build new ones. Wind and solar facilities are getting built at the cost of billions, with huge subsidies, producing essentially no useful power. Every time another one gets built, the taxpayers and ratepayers are on the hook to pay its costs for its entire life. On the consumer side, residents of large buildings are under a mandate to discard their current natural gas or oil heat systems in favor of inferior electric heat pumps, at costs estimated at $100,000 per housing unit or more for older buildings. When the net zero project gets abandoned, these massive investments will be a deadweight loss. And there are many other examples of the ongoing damage being caused by the mandates.

So what will be the event that causes the project to crater? If nothing else comes first, at some point we will get hit with a string of catastrophic blackouts. That would surely wake people up and almost certainly force a re-think of the project. But just waiting for this catastrophe to turn things around is not really a great idea, for two reasons: first, to their credit, the people who run the grid are good at keeping it going in difficult circumstances, meaning that we could get “lucky,” and the catastrophe could be postponed for years during which enormous ongoing damage from mal-investment occurs; and the second problem is that when the blackouts come they could cause real human harm and tragedy, such as deaths of people with electric heat who freeze in their apartments. In other words, people who care about New York owe it to their fellow citizens to try to straighten this out before the catastrophe hits.

And thus it comes about that three public-spirited guys, who have been observing the ongoing slow-motion train wreck with horror, have written a Report to urge New Yorkers to defy the statutory mandates to electrify building heat. The title of the Report is “Don’t Do It! Report to New York Co-op and Condo Boards and Trade Associations On LL97 Conversion To Electric Heat.”

The three public-spirited guys are myself and co-authors Roger Caiazza and Richard Ellenbogen. Caiazza is a retired air pollution meteorologist who has a blog called the Pragmatic Environmentalist of New York, where he writes prolifically about New York’s impending energy disaster. Ellenbogen is a Cornell-trained electrical engineer who does not have a big internet presence, but is a very knowledgeable frequent commenter on New York’s various regulator dockets relating to the energy transition, where he pulls no punches. The three of us wrote this Report for no compensation so that nobody could accuse us of being shills for the fossil fuel industry or the real estate industry or any other special interest.

The reason that the Report is directed to condominium and co-op Boards and Trade Associations is that the condo/co-op community represents a group of hundreds of thousands of voters who find themselves in the cross-hairs of New York’s impossible energy mandates. Among other New York residents, small building residents and single-family homeowners have been exempted from the heat conversion mandates (at least for now), while rental tenants are insulated by rent regulations. So the boards and shareholders of the large condos and co-ops are the largest group of residents directly affected by the mandates. Many boards of these buildings are only now starting to look into how to comply with the 2030 mandate to convert to electric heat, and getting feedback from consultants about the enormous costs. Few of them realize that the State at the same time has no credible plan to generate enough electricity to make the heat conversion mandate work.

The distribution of the Report to the relevant communities has recently begun. Daughter Jane — known to readers here as a frequent contributor — has set up a group called New Yorkers for Affordable Reliable Energy (“New Yorkers ARE”) to organize grass-roots opposition to complying with the heat conversion mandate. Co-author Roger Caiazza wrote a post for Watts Up With That two weeks ago announcing the issuance of the Report.

I recommend the Report to readers who are at all interested in the depths of ignorance and incompetence of the New York legislators and regulators who are pushing the impossible “energy transition.” It’s only about 15 pages long, with a good Introduction and Executive Summary at the beginning that capture the gist. Here is a summary quote from the Executive Summary:

The Net Zero transition is by far the largest, most expensive and ambitious government-directed project ever undertaken in New York. However, the statutory mandates of the CLCPA and LL 97 have been enacted without:

• Any detailed Feasibility Study of whether this transition is possible under basic physics and existing technology;

• Any Demonstration Project anywhere in the world showing how an electrical grid can function relying on mostly on wind and solar and without emissions-creating resources for back-up of intermittency;

• Any detailed analysis or projection of the costs to New Yorkers of this transition, whether in their capacities as taxpayers or ratepayers or both.

This Report assesses issues of the feasibility and cost of New York’s electricity transition project. The purpose is to advise New York residents, particularly co-op and condo owners and their Boards who are subject to LL 97, on how they should respond to the statutory mandates. The Report reviews facts and data showing that there are strong reasons to believe that the goals that have been set, and mandated by law, are impossible of achievement, let alone at any remotely affordable cost. The State and City have totally failed in their responsibilities to their citizens to assure that the mandates they have enacted are feasible and affordable.

So to get back to the initial question of how New York’s energy madness will end: An alternative to just waiting for the blackouts to come will be for a critical mass of New Yorkers in the cross-hairs of the mandates to refuse to comply and to demand that the mandates be rescinded. We are attempting to start that process into motion. Let’s hope that we have some success.