Tag: Con Edison

Our Final Objection To Our Local Utility’s Rate Increase

If you have been following this blog closely, you know that I have been participating, along with two excellent colleagues, in the rate proceeding of our local utility, Con Edison. A rate proceeding is the mechanism by which a utility goes before a regulatory body, in our case the New York Public Service Commission, seeking to increase the rates charged to consumers.

A panoramic view of the New York City skyline featuring the Statue of Liberty in the foreground, with buildings and wind turbines in the background under a clear blue sky.

From Manhattan Contrarian

From Francis Menton

If you have been following this blog closely, you know that I have been participating, along with two excellent colleagues, in the rate proceeding of our local utility, Con Edison. A rate proceeding is the mechanism by which a utility goes before a regulatory body, in our case the New York Public Service Commission, seeking to increase the rates charged to consumers. Our purpose in the proceeding has been to object to and disrupt having the ratepayers charged for the building of infrastructure in pursuit of the futile and infeasible “climate” goals of our deluded politicians.

One of the rules of these things is that anybody with a genuine interest in the outcome can “intervene” if they want, and participate as a party in the proceedings. That’s how we got ourselves in on the action. And by the same mechanism, multiple parties advocating for the utopian future of “renewable” and “zero emissions” energy also joined up. Among the green energy advocates in the mix were the Environmental Defense Fund, the Natural Resources Defense Council, and the Alliance for a Green Economy. And then there was the New York City government, which wants to present itself as an advocate for low consumer rates, but at the same time has enacted its own mandate for electric building heat that can only be implemented with the support of some expensive new infrastructure to be built by Con Edison.

When last we visited this subject on November 28, a lengthy settlement process of about 6 months had just concluded with a document of close to 300 pages called the “Joint Proposal” (JP) of the settling parties. Nearly all of the parties had signed on, with the main exception being my own little group. The JP was filed on November 5 as number 183 on the docket of the proceeding; and on November 6 a “Summary of Joint Proposal,” 6 pages long, was filed as number 185 on the docket. Among those signing on to the JP were all of the environmental groups, and also New York City, along with Con Edison itself, and the Staff of the Department of Public Service. On November 26, my two colleagues and myself filed an Objection, number 214 on the docket, which was discussed in the November 28 post.

Since that post, the Public Service Commission assigned three of its Aministrative Law Judges to conduct a public hearing for any objectors to cross-examine witnesses. In advance of the hearing, my colleagues and I asked for a breakout of which of Con Edison’s costs approved in the JP were in support of “climate” goals like building and vehicle electrification; but the Company responded only with an objection, and declined to break out Climate Act-related costs. The hearing was then held on December 3. And after the hearing, the parties were given until December 12 to file a post-hearing brief. Our brief is number 227 on the docket.

The problem for the supporters of the settlement, principally Con Edison and the Public Service Department Staff, was that they had admitted in the documentation that the JP contained “funding” for the “climate” goals. This is a quote from the Summary of Joint Proposal:

The Joint Proposal contains numerous provisions that are intended to further New York State’s ability to meet the goals of the CLCPA [Climate Act], including provisions or funding that will:

  • enhance the electric system in anticipation of transportation and building electrification; . . .
  • facilitate the clean energy transition

As also pointed out in our November 26 Objection, the State had admitted in a letter submitted in a court proceeding in August 2025 that the mandates of New York’s Climate Act had now become “infeasible,” and would impose “extraordinary and damaging costs” that would be “unaffordable” for consumers. These admissions gave us the opportunity in our final brief to point out the crazy box into which the parties had built themselves. Some excerpts:

The Summary of Joint Proposal would not have said that there was “funding” in the JP for these [“climate”-related] matters if there was no funding.  And yet all of the witnesses for both Staff and the Company resolutely refused to provide any quantification or breakout of the amount of funding at issue.  The Independent Intervenors made a clear record by asking for this breakout both in discovery, and also on cross-examination, and they had explicitly signaled in their pre-hearing Statement in Opposition that they intended to ask about this topic.  And yet of 21 witnesses who appeared, none would address this topic on the merits.

A fair inference is that DPS finds itself caught in a whipsaw between on the one hand activists who insist on approving spending to pursue the CLCPA goals no matter how expensive or infeasible, and on the other hand Con Edison ratepayers (among them two of the Independent Intervenors) who are squeezed by rising costs and think that rate increases should be minimized.  So Staff has adopted the strategy of approving excess costs to appease the activists and then agreeing with the Company to hide and conceal those costs from the broader public to minimize the blowback.  This strategy is not legitimate and should not be countenanced by either the ALJs or the Commission.

At this point the matter goes to the ALJ’s to make a decision. And then it goes on to the full Public Service Commission for final approval and implementation. After that, we will have the opportunity in a court proceeding to make a public splash about the efforts of Con Edison and the Department of Public Service to engage in futile “climate” spending and hide the amounts from the public.

Even “Progressives” Are Now Allowed to Notice That New York’s Climate Plans Are Crumbling

Today I spent the day with my excellent collaborator Richard Ellenbogen cross-examining witnesses at the New York Public Service Commission’s hearing on whether the pending rate increase request of our utility Con Edison should be approved. We had a lot of fun. Although the hearing was theoretically open to the public, they had no live video feed, and you had to register in advance to attend in person. It looked like everybody there was an interested party.

Deteriorated wind turbines standing in shallow water against a dark, stormy sky, symbolizing the challenges in renewable energy implementation.

From The Manhattan Contrarian

 By Francis Menton

Today I spent the day with my excellent collaborator Richard Ellenbogen cross-examining witnesses at the New York Public Service Commission’s hearing on whether the pending rate increase request of our utility Con Edison should be approved. We had a lot of fun. Although the hearing was theoretically open to the public, they had no live video feed, and you had to register in advance to attend in person. It looked like everybody there was an interested party.

At the close of the hearing, we were invited (along with everybody else) to file a post-hearing brief by next Friday, December 12. The hearing provided us with lots of good material, and we will be putting together a good scathing screed as our contribution. You can look forward to a post on the subject next Friday or Saturday.

But meanwhile, the short version is that the witnesses put up by Con Edison and the Department of Public Service to support their settlement proposal claimed to know absolutely nothing about our objection. Don’t feel bad for us. That’s actually a damning admission, because the proponents of the rate increase need to establish a rational basis for it. If instead it is deemed “arbitrary and capricious,” it will fail. Our position is that the rate increase is arbitrary and capricious because it provides ratepayer funding for mandates that have been admitted by the state to be “infeasible,” and that will not happen during the period of the rate increase.

As the single most striking example (among several), we had cited and quoted in our Statement of Opposition to the rate increase a 6 page letter submitted in August 2025 by the state Attorney General on behalf of the state government in a court proceeding, asserting that the goals of the 2019 Climate Act for emissions reductions by 2030 were “infeasible” and would impose “extraordinary and damaging” costs on New Yorkers. We had asked for witnesses to address the issues raised in our Statement, and particularly how much ratepayer money was getting approved to then be wasted on infeasible goals that would not be met. Con Edison and Department of Public Service each put up about ten witnesses to answer our questions. But when asked, not one of them would admit familiarity with the state letter or that they had read it. Not one of them would answer whether the rate increase proposal contained ratepayer funding to support goals that the state itself had conceded were “infeasible,” or would agree to quantify how much ratepayer funding was to be wasted on chasing infeasible goals. And then it went on downhill from there.

But meanwhile, there has been other news on the New York Climate Act front. On November 25 a Washington think tank called the Progressive Policy Institute put out a Report with the title “NEW YORK’S CLIMATE CROSSROADS: ASSURING AFFORDABLE ENERGY.” The Report takes serious note that New York’s “climate” regime is in big trouble.

I am not greatly familiar with PPI. Although they do not appear to be from the lunatic fringe, they are definitely a left-wing group, and from reviewing their website, they clearly share the fundamental belief of the Left that the government can, and therefore must, solve all human problems. And with the word “progressive” is in their name, they are not seeking to avoid association with the crazy wing of the Democratic Party.

And yet PPI has definitely taken a step outside the reservation here. With the orthodoxy enforcement that has been pervasive in the left-side climate space for two decades or more, there has been almost no criticism from that perspective of any or all efforts to achieve a forced march to climate net zero utopia. So it is no small event that PPI has now gone on record telling New York that its grand climate plans are crumbling.

OK, they don’t use exactly those words. But they also are not scrupulously avoiding reality in the way of, say, the New York Times.

I’ll give you a few choice excerpts. Here is the opening line:

New York has established some of the nation’s most ambitious decarbonization targets, positioning itself as a leader in climate policy. However, the immense economic burden and practical challenges of implementing these mandates threaten their political viability. As the costs of this transition fall heavily on ratepayers and working families, a critical tension emerges between state-level climate objectives and the everyday financial realities faced by New Yorkers.

Just yesterday the official party line was that the “renewables” wind and solar were cheaper than hydrocarbon fuels for generating electricity, and therefore if your bills were going up it could only be because of nefarious deeds of some combination of evil actors, like the utilities or the oil companies, or maybe Donald Trump. So that opening statement from PPI represents a very significant shift toward reality.

On the 2019 New York Climate Act:

An assessment of New York’s progress against the 2019 Climate Leadership and Community Protection Act (Climate Act), using the state’s own metrics, reveals a clear and undeniable pattern of failure across its most critical mandates. . . . New York is not on track to meet its targets. Progress on offshore wind and energy storage, two cornerstones of the state’s grid transformation strategy, is severely behind schedule. This poor performance is not an anomaly but a symptom of deeper, systemic pressures that are converging on the state’s energy system.

And then PPI goes so far as to describe the current situation as a “looming crisis” of both grid stability and and affordability, brought about by the state’s own poorly-conceived policies and mandates:

The Looming Crisis: A Collision of Supply, Demand and Cost: New York is not on track to meet its targets. Progress on offshore wind and energy storage, two cornerstones of the state’s grid transformation strategy, is severely behind schedule. This poor performance is not an anomaly but a symptom of deeper, systemic pressures that are converging on the state’s energy system.

Well, guys, welcome to the right side of history. Now that we have this crack in the dyke of left-wing unanimity for strict net zero mandates, perhaps the flood will begin.

Objection Filed Against Con Edison Request for Rate Increase

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.

Aerial view of a city skyline featuring wind turbines in the foreground with skyscrapers and a waterfront in the background.

From The Manhattan Contrarian

By Francis Menton

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.

On Wednesday (November 26) we filed a document setting forth our position, titled “Statement of Independent Intervenors Roger Caiazza, Richard Ellenbogen, and Francis Menton In Opposition to the Joint Proposal.” To view our Statement, go to this link to the docket of the proceeding before the New York Public Service Commission, and click on Document Number 214.

Some procedural history on where we are: Con Edison started this rate proceeding back in January 2025, by requesting rate increases of about 10% each year for the years 2026, 2027 and 2028. Anybody with an interest in the matter (like a ratepayer) was allowed to intervene, and shortly there were about 100 parties, three of them being Messrs. Caiazza, Ellenbogen and myself. Other parties range from New York City, Westchester County, Amtrak, the MTA, and various advocacy and environmental groups, to state legislators and individual ratepayers.

In June the State Department of Public Service paused the proceedings to begin settlement negotiations. My colleagues and I opted to join those, but as the price of joining we were sworn to confidentiality as to the discussions. And thus I have had nothing to report for about five months. However, the settlement negotiations ended at the beginning of November when all the big players entered into what they call their “Joint Proposal.,” often abbreviated “JP.” The JP got filed on November 5, and is Item 183 on the Public Service Commission docket. The JP itself is some 300+ pages long, and I would not recommend trying to read it; however, a Summary of the Joint Proposal, 6 pages long, was filed the next day on November 6. It is item 185 on the docket.

The good news about the JP, I suppose, is that Con Edison has been induced to reduce its request for a rate increase from about 10% per year to about 3% per year. (My own inference from watching the process is that Con Edison always knew that 3% was the most it could get, and only put up the 10% number at the beginning to have something to back off from.). The bad news is that there is still lots of spending in the Proposal to support “climate” things like building and vehicle electrification, and worse, they refuse to break out which of the spending is for these “climate” purposes versus the main job of assuring safe and reliable electricity.

So with that background, here are some choice excerpts from our submission. From the introductory section:

The Independent Intervenors object to the JP because it seeks to implement large rate increases for projects not necessary for or germane to reliability and safety of the electrical system and that are instead intended to support extraneous goals that are impossible and infeasible. The bases for the objections of the Independent Intervenors include:

• The JP supports spending for purposes of building electrification and vehicle electrification, but there is not enough zero-emissions electricity generation capacity available to the downstate region to accomplish those goals reliably, and therefore any spending on Company delivery infrastructure for these purposes is wasteful. The Independent Intervenors object to spending ratepayer money supposedly for the delivery of electricity, when the electricity does not in fact exist.

• Spending by the Company to support building and vehicle electrification is actually counterproductive for Climate Leadership & Community Protection Act (CLCPA) goals because there is and will be little zero-emission generation available to the Company service territory during and after the JP period. Therefore, building and vehicle electrification will increase rather than decrease GHG emissions.

And from the concluding sections:

THE JP IS UNJUST, UNREASONABLE, AND CONTRARY TO THE PUBLIC INTEREST

There is nothing “just” or “reasonable” in:

• Imposing on the ratepayers billions of dollars of costs for purposes having nothing to do with system reliability or safety, and instead supporting goals that are infeasible (as admitted by the State itself) and impossible to achieve such that the public’s funds will be completely wasted.

• Imposing huge costs on ratepayers to build new infrastructure for the delivery of new zero-emissions electricity that in fact does not exist and will not exist in this state during the time period of this rate case and for many years thereafter.

• Hiding and concealing potentially billions of dollars of costs in a rate increase that have nothing to do with system reliability and safety and instead are going for infeasible and impossible goals.

• Providing potentially billions of dollars of ratepayer funds to support electrification projects supposedly to reduce GHG emissions, but that will instead increase GHG emissions because of the characteristics of the system that cannot be changed in any relevant time frame.

In the intervening sections between the introduction and conclusion, should you be interested, there is lots of detail about such things as failure to get zero-emission generators or transmission lines constructed, and actual emissions data from the downstate electricity system showing that you actually increase emissions by banning natural gas heat.

I do not know if the objections of myself and my colleagues will get much if any traction in this proceeding. And even if we do get some traction, this proceeding is somewhat peripheral to the central goals of New York’s “climate leadership” initiative of generating lots of zero-emissions electricity (and, supposedly, showing the world how that can be done). Still, we may get at least some of the vast collection of New York energy bureaucrats to look critically at one corner of this ridiculous situation. Maybe.