From Manhattan Contrarians
Francis Menton
I often write that the energy transition mandates adopted by New York are impossible and irreconcilable in the real world; therefore, when the implementation of projects conflicts with physical reality, they will inevitably be abandoned at some point.
Probably the question I get asked most often is, well, how and when is this going to happen?
This question is important because as long as Mission Impossible remains in place, they will cause enormous and ongoing damage to our power system and consumers. On the power generation side, for example, the natural gas-fired power plants that currently supply about half of our electricity are expected to be forced to close at a rate of several per year until all are closed by 2040. still exist) or the higher the difficulty and cost of building new factories. Wind and solar facilities cost billions of dollars to build and are heavily subsidized but produce essentially no useful electricity. Every time another building is built, ratepayers and ratepayers have to bear the cost for its entire life cycle. On the consumer side, residents of large buildings must abandon their existing natural gas or oil heating systems in favor of inferior electric heat pumps, which cost an estimated $100,000 or more per housing unit in older buildings. When net zero projects are abandoned, these huge investments will become deadweight losses. There are many other examples of the lasting damage these orders have caused.
So what events will cause the project to get into trouble? If nothing else happens first, at some point we will suffer a series of catastrophic power outages. This is sure to wake people up and almost certainly force a rethink on the project. But just waiting for this disaster to turn things around is not a good idea for two reasons: First, to their credit, the people who run the grid are good at keeping the grid running under difficult circumstances, which means we can get “lucky” , disasters can be delayed for years, during which time poor investments can cause huge ongoing damage; The second problem is that when power outages occur, they can cause real human harm and tragedy, such as people using electric heaters. The apartments were freezing to death. In other words, it was the responsibility of concerned New Yorkers to try to fix this problem before disaster struck to help their fellow citizens.
So three public-spirited individuals who have been watching in horror as the slow-motion train wreck unfolds write a report urging New Yorkers to ignore the legal requirement to electrify building heating. The report is titled “Don't Do It! Report LL97 Conversion to Electric Heat to the New York Co-op and Condominium Board and Trade Associations.”
These three public-spirited individuals are myself and my co-authors Roger Caiazza and Richard Ellenbogen. Caiazza is a retired air pollution meteorologist who maintains a blog called New York’s Pragmatic Environmentalist, where he writes extensively about New York’s impending energy disaster. Ellenbogen, a Cornell University-educated electrical engineer, doesn't have a huge online presence, but he's knowledgeable and often and relentlessly comments on various regulatory matters related to the energy transition in New York. The three of us wrote this report pro bono so that no one could accuse us of being shills for the fossil fuel industry, the real estate industry, or any other special interest group.
The reason the report targets condo and co-op boards and trade associations is that condo/co-op communities represent hundreds of thousands of constituents who find themselves at the crossroads of New York’s impossible energy mandate. Among other residents in New York, small building residents and single-family homeowners are already exempt from heat transfer mandates (at least for now), while rental tenants are exempt from rent regulations. As a result, boards of directors and shareholders of large condominiums and cooperatives are the largest group of residents directly affected by this directive. Many councils for these buildings are only now starting to look at how to comply with the 2030 requirement to switch to electric heat, and are getting feedback from consultants on the huge costs. Few of them realize that the nation simultaneously has no reliable plan to generate enough power to make the thermal conversion mission effective.
Distribution of the report to relevant communities has recently begun. Daughter Jane (known to readers here as a frequent contributor) founded a group called New Yorkers for Affordable Reliable Energy (New Yorkers ARE) to organize grassroots opposition to compliance with the heat switch mandate. Co-author Roger Caiazza published an article on Watts Up With That two weeks ago announcing the release of the report.
I recommend this report to readers interested in the depth of ignorance and incompetence among New York’s legislators and regulators pushing for an impossible “energy transition.” It's only about 15 pages long and has a good introduction and executive summary at the beginning that captures the main points. Below is a summary of the executive summary:
The net-zero transition is New York’s largest, most expensive and ambitious government-led initiative ever undertaken to date. However, the statutory authority of CLCPA and LL 97 was enacted without:
• Any detailed feasibility study of whether this transition is possible given the underlying physics and existing technology;
• Any demonstration project, anywhere in the world, that shows how the grid can run primarily on wind and solar power, without emission-producing resources to support intermittency;
• Any detailed analysis or projections of the costs to New Yorkers in this transition, whether they are taxpayers or taxpayers or both.
This report assesses the feasibility and cost issues of New York's electricity transition plan. Its purpose is to provide New York residents, particularly co-op and condominium owners and their boards of directors who are subject to LL 97, with advice on how they should respond to statutory orders. The facts and data reviewed by the report show that there is good reason to believe that the stated goals set out in the law are impossible to achieve, let alone at any remotely attainable cost. States and cities have completely failed in their responsibility to citizens to ensure that the mandates they enact are feasible and affordable.
So, back to the original question, how New York's energy madness will end: Besides waiting for the blackouts to come, one option is to refuse to comply and stop the blackouts, for the large number of New Yorkers in the crosshairs of the directive. Request the revocation of these authorizations. We are trying to start this process. Hopefully we can have some success.
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