Democrats whine about Con Ed hikes caused by their own dumb policies
Higher sit down earlier than you open your subsequent Con Ed invoice: Charges are set to soar, beginning subsequent month — and double over the following two years.
If you happen to’re a progressive, you possibly can’t complain. What did you suppose would occur, based mostly in your anti-fossil-fuel, big-spending, anti-business agenda?
On Thursday, the state’s Public Service Fee OK’d hikes of 9.1% for electrical energy and eight.4% for gasoline, beginning in August, together with further jumps although 2025. At that time, typical payments can have doubled, from about $70 a month to $140 — or an additional $840 a yr.
A whining letter from the Metropolis Council demanded that Gov. Kathy Hochul use her government powers to cease the ache.
The letter referred to as out an “already dire affordability disaster” and included specious worries about poor New Yorkers.
That “affordability disaster,” notably, is additionally of the left’s personal making, because of its anti-housing, inflation-fueling polices.
Why is Con Ed climbing charges?
True, execs on the firm did get pleasure from a pay bump in 2022, with CEO Timothy Cawley getting a 4% hike in base compensation.
However the central driver is idiotic inexperienced insurance policies, each on the state and federal degree — clamping down on fossil-fuel use, forcing infrastructure enhancements to deal with the shift, taxing utilities to the hilt, and so on.
That fuels prices that get handed on to shoppers.
This week, Workforce Biden struck yet one more blow in its battle in opposition to home vitality manufacturing, jacking up prices for drillers on federal land: Royalty charges will rise from 12.5% to virtually 17%; minimal per-acre lease bids will quintuple.
The administration estimates this can price producers some $1.8 billion over the following eight years — with the potential of but extra price hikes to return.
An ideal prescription to discourage future exploration and make extraction extra expensive.
And the identical progs whinging about Con Ed price hikes applaud this nonsense.
Simply as they applauded the state’s insane Local weather Management and Motion Plan.
That brainchild of Albany Dems, signed into regulation by then-Gov. Andrew Cuomo in 2019, goals to make New York’s energy technology 100% emissions-free by 2040.
The expensive upgrades demanded by that plan, in preparation for our (nonetheless nonexistent) transition to inexperienced vitality, are an enormous contributor to Con Ed’s rising prices.
And this adopted Cuomo’s painful ban on fracking (a supply of a lot cleaner gas for energy) and got here as he moved to shutter a significant supply of emissions-free energy, the Indian Level nuclear plant.
On prime of all that, 21% of the typical client’s electrical invoice goes to cowl Con Ed’s New York state property taxes.
The fallout from this, as anybody able to fundamental arithmetic might have foreseen, is greater energy prices for shoppers throughout the board.
And people prices hit low-income households, who can least afford it, onerous.
That’s by no means a part of the prosperous greenies’ calculus, after all. Little question they determine they’ll all the time by some means squeeze the wealthy to subsidize the upper prices. (Till that cash runs out, too, anyway.)
The reality is, progressive fantasies about high-tech windmills and photo voltaic panels gained’t maintain prices down; they’ll maintain boosting them — until, after all, they set off blackouts. Then nobody should pay a dime, whereas they sit at nighttime, with no AC.
