My Oped In Today’s NY Post: Land-Use Conflicts Are Derailing Albany’s Alt-Energy Fantasies

Nearly 10% of all the rejections/restrictions in the Renewable Rejection Database are in New York. Only Ohio has recorded more.

This solar project in Scottsbluff, Nebraska, was heavily damaged by a hailstorm in 2023. Credit: Nebraska Public Power District

Last week, an editor at the New York Post asked me to write an oped about a report commissioned by the New York Affordable Clean Power Alliance that found that the state would not meet its alt-energy targets. I was pleased to be asked. I have been writing about the local opposition to wind and solar in New York for a long time. In 2012, I published a piece in the Post about the backlash in the upstate towns of Meredith and Bovina, which were fighting a proposed wind project. Both towns passed measures banning Big Wind. That battle was the focus of the excellent documentary, Windfall, by Laura Israel.

Here's the first part of today’s article:

New York’s headlong push for an all-renewable electric grid is running out of gas.

Or, to be more accurate, it’s colliding with New Yorkers who refuse to allow their farms, forests and neighborhoods to be paved with oceans of solar panels and planted with forests of 600-foot-high wind turbines.

A new report commissioned by the New York Affordable Clean Power Alliance, which represents solar energy, wind energy and independent power producers, concludes that the Empire State’s electric grid faces “hurdles in maintaining reliability” due in large part to its failure to meet “ambitious renewables targets.”

The state has “fallen short” of those eco-friendly goals because of such “challenges” as “local opposition” and “lack of transmission capacity.”

Local opposition? You don’t say.

You won’t hear much about it in legacy media outlets, but New York has been an epicenter of the backlash against Big Solar and Big Wind for two decades.

Read the entire article here.

Media Hits

• Yesterday, I did a podcast with friend Tammy Nemeth about energy policies in Britain, land-use conflicts, why energy matters so much to women and girls, and more. You can watch it here.

• Last week, I was on the Spectator podcast, talking with Michael Simmons about the blackout that shut down Heathrow Airport last month. We touched on several issues, including the lack of sufficient diesel-fired backup generation. But I focused much of the discussion on Heathrow’s net zero plan. By my calculations (with ChatGPT’s help) the planes that fly through Heathrow burn about 183 million gallons of jet fuel per year. And yet the airport has a net zero plan. How very British of them. You can watch it here.

• Finally, I was quoted in the Washington Times yesterday in an article about the Rocky Mountain Institute, which as I reported here in February, used junk science to help justify its effort to ban gas stoves. During the Biden years, the group, which was founded by Amory Lovins, garnered millions of dollars in federal funding. Susan Ferrechio reports that the Department of Energy has canceled two Biden-era grants totaling nearly $7 million. She quoted me saying that Rocky Mountain Institute is an “anti-hydrocarbon, anti-consumer elitist group.” Yup.

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