On Dec. 18, two government bodies — one in Albany, the other in Manhattan — were both holding votes related to New York City’s looming electricity shortage.
Unfortunately, one was actively trying to make it worse.
The City Council that day passed Introduction 994, which, beginning in 2030, will require every private landlord, upon a tenant’s request, to install air conditioning in at least one room.
Mayor Eric Adams hasn’t yet indicated whether he’ll sign or veto the bill before he leaves office this week.
About 9% of New York City homes lack AC — and while excessive heat indeed carries negative health effects, the council’s vote paid short shrift to the question of how the city can power a few hundred thousand additional cooling units during the hottest days of the year.
A “reasonable worst-case” estimate by city officials warning that the measure could push up electricity demand by hundreds of megawatts — the output of a medium-sized power plant — got little attention.
Council members saw the concentration of un-air-conditioned units in particular pockets of the city as justification for their vote, rather than a cause for concern about its effect on the grid’s reliability.
After all, the cost of any neighborhood-level grid upgrades will be socialized across all city electricity users.
And councilmembers aren’t responsible for the reliability of the electric grid, so why worry their heads about it?
Contrast that with the discussion happening at the same time, 100 miles up the Hudson River, at the Empire State Plaza.
There, the Public Service Commission, the seven-member board that regulates the state’s gas and electric utilities, was grappling with a November report that showed a narrowing margin between New York City’s peak electricity demand and the amount of electricity available to meet it, beginning in the summer of 2026.
Two factors are shrinking the cushion on which the grid operates.
New York state government, since 2019, has pressed owners to close “peaker plants” in and around the city that burn natural gas or diesel (and create considerable amounts of ozone) to meet demand on the hottest summer afternoons.
But the state’s goals clashed with reality — so much so that its grid operator had to step in and exempt several of these small plants from the environmental restrictions, keeping them running beyond a spring 2025 deadline.
And the peak demand these plants exist to meet, meanwhile, keeps ticking up.
PSC chairman Rory Christian, an engineer who began his career in the private sector, noted that the grid’s reliability standards had to be tightened after the adoption of air conditioning stressed the NYC grid decades ago, leading to heat-driven blackouts in August 1959 and June 1961.
“Today we recognized the need to avoid such conditions occurring again,” Christian said, as the panel ordered Con Edison, the city’s electricity provider, to develop a plan for maintaining reliability.
Christian is tackling that problem with one hand tied behind his back.
The PSC is still bound by Gov. Andrew Cuomo’s 2019 Climate Leadership and Community Protection Act, which functionally prohibits new power plants from coming online.
The PSC’s order to Con Edison specifically says it may only look for “clean and non-emitting solutions.”
It’s possible, if not likely, that Con Ed will come back to the PSC with an eye-wateringly costly plan for upgrades to the local transmission and distribution system, with a heavy reliance on deploying batteries throughout the five boroughs.
The city finds itself in this tough spot after years of incoherent energy advocacy by city pols who want to electrify everything — while generating nothing (beyond small rooftop solar set-ups) in the city limits.
Councilmembers crusaded against the zero-emission Indian Point power plant in northern Westchester County, which was prematurely shuttered in 2021 (and replaced by gas-burning generators).
The city now gets close to 80% of its electricity from burning natural gas, but pols continue to fight against upgrading existing power plants with more efficient, more reliable units.
Their alternatives — hydroelectric power from Canada and wind turbines off Long Island — don’t provide enough juice to keep New York City’s air conditioning running today, let alone if the city starts relying on electricity for heat in the winter.
Driving up summer electricity demand with yet more air-conditioning units when Con Edison is already struggling to meet today’s needs would be as problematic as it sounds.
The City Council, like many others in New York government, must come to grips with its energy policies’ many contradictions.
The PSC, at least, has taken the first step and acknowledged that New York City’s energy picture has problems.
It has, quite charitably, not listed the City Council as one of them.
Ken Girardin is a fellow at the Manhattan Institute.
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