Green Infrastructure Bites New Yorkers

At Manhattan Contrarian, Francis Menton, reports that what he calls the "green energy wall" is becoming apparent.

That is, Menton has long expected that something about the wildly expensive and impractical (not to mention, rights-violating, hence immoral) green energy agenda would eventually announce itself to voters loudly and painfully. In his view, said wall would present a turning point, putting "a stop to the madness."

While I certainly don't see such a wall as determinative -- Too many free marketers grossly underestimate the power of people wanting to do what they think is right -- such a wall can at least force such marches to doom to pause, and represent a chance for dissenters to speak up.

Menton is somewhat surprised at what part of this nutty scheme first showed up on the public radar, but here it is:

[T]he big utilities have come forward with large demands for rate increases. So why the need for big rate increases if not from new generators or long-distance transmission? The answer is that the rate increases mainly relate to the portion of the consumer bills referred to as the "delivery" charge, as opposed to the charge for generation. The utilities seek funds to add delivery infrastructure like substations, transformers, and cables to deliver vastly increased amounts of electricity for things like vehicle charging stations (for both cars and trucks) and for the electrification of building heat.

This is not a complete surprise: Canada and California both realized ages ago that their grids couldn't keep up with even a tenth of their citizens' cars moving to electric power.

I'd say the real surprise is how long it took for this problem to surface. Perhaps New York's EV mandate is newer, and this isn't really that long. Perhaps utilities dragged their feet, hoping the stupid mandates would pass and they wouldn't need to build so much new infrastructure.

Who knows? What we do know is that mere politicians, lacking the profit motive to guide their thinking and decisions, are practically guaranteed to cause crises when government and economy are not kept separate.

-- CAV