Objection Filed Against Con Edison Request For Rate Increase

As I have mentioned here on a couple of occasions, I have joined with two colleagues to intervene in the regulatory proceeding where our local electric utility, Con Edison, has made its most recent request for a large rate increase.  My colleagues in this enterprise are Roger Caiazza, who blogs as the Pragmatic Environmentalist of New York, and Richard Ellenbogen, a Cornell-trained engineer who as his day job runs a factory in Westchester County.    

After a “deregulation” that took place in the 1990s, Con Edison almost entirely got out of the business of generating electricity, so this case is about the rates for delivery of the electricity, rather than generation.  The basis for Con Edison’s request for a rate increase is substantially that it wants to build lots of new infrastructure, like additional cables, substations and transformers, to deliver incremental power to support widespread electrification of vehicles and buildings as part of New York State’s goal of “net zero” greenhouse gas emissions.  That idea might make some sense if there were large amounts of zero-emissions electricity ready to be sent to New York City to be used for electrifying the buildings and vehicles.  But in fact it is the opposite:  a very large majority of the electricity that Con Edison delivers is generated by natural gas — which means that electrifying buildings and vehicles doesn’t reduce GHG emissions at all, and probably increases the emissions.  New York State’s “climate” plans to generate lots of zero emissions electricity for New York City are almost completely dead.  Its big program for off-shore wind generation in the waters off Long Island has been nixed by the federal government; and while the State continues to promote onshore wind and solar facilities in upstate New York, its plan to bring that power to New York City died, at least for now, in November 2024 when the new $11 billion Clean Path transmission line got canceled as uneconomic.      

It’s actually great that these projects have died, because if they had gone forward they could have multiplied our electricity rates by at least double (before even getting started on huge costs of energy storage as penetration of intermittent renewables on the grid increased).  Meanwhile, the death of the generation and transmission projects has made the whole idea of building and vehicle electrification useless, and indeed counterproductive (in terms of reducing GHG emissions, if you should happen to care about that).  It doesn’t take an engineering genius to understand that burning natural gas on-site to heat a building uses less natural gas than burning it at a power plant, generating electricity, transmitting the electricity to a house, and then using the electricity at the house to make heat.  But Con Edison — egged on by advocates ranging from environmental crazies to the religiously-committed New York City itself — soldiers on to try to build expensive new infrastructure to receive mythical zero-emissions electricity that does not exist and is in fact nothing but regular-old natural gas electricity.  

The concept of Messrs. Caiazza, Ellenbogen and myself has been to see if we can inject some rationality into the process to prevent entirely futile and wasteful (and even counterproductive) spending in pursuit of the infeasible “net zero” goals.  None of the three of us are being compensated in any way for this work.  Basically, we are doing it as a hobby, to see if we can save New Yorkers from their own folly.