Dark days loom for New Yorkers as climate law promises blackouts, cost hikes

Gov. Hochul has spent much of her 4 ¹/₂ years in office facing a time bomb left by her predecessor: drastic, legally binding greenhouse gas reduction targets that the state has no practical means of meeting.

The 2019 Climate Act requires New York to cut greenhouse gas emissions by about one-quarter from that year’s levels by 2030. The state has made little progress toward this goal, in part because officials shuttered New York’s largest nuclear power plant in 2021.

The law remains on the books, and its defenders balk at revision. If Hochul can’t persuade them to change it, Albany’s green dreams will cause harsh conditions in the Empire State — steep electric bills, green-energy boondoggles and rolling blackouts.

The law has saddled the state with three related but distinct problems: threats to the grid’s reliability, rising electric bills and a looming surge in fuel prices.

The most ominous —and the least visible — is the growing risk that New York City might have difficulty keeping the lights on as soon as June. Last summer’s heat wave, when temperatures reached 100 degrees in some neighborhoods, put the electric grid under extreme stress.

In spite of this sort of demand, state air-quality regulations (related to ozone and separate from the Climate Act) have already forced operators to close a few dozen small “peaker” power plants — plants that previously ran for a few hours each summer when demand was highest.