Two years ago, in November 2023, my friend Roger Caiazza and I attended a conference put on by a local news source called City & State. They called their conference the “Clean Energy New York Summit: The Path to Sustainability.” I called it the Krazy Klimate Konference, and I wrote about it in a post on November 18, 2023 titled “At The New York Krazy Klimate Konference.”‍ ‍

Last year both Roger and I skipped the Konference, and this year Roger again wisely decided to stay home in Syracuse. But I was morbidly curious as to how this crowd of climate grifters and subsidy farmers would react to the rapid derailment of their gravy train during the first ten months of President Trump’s second term. And for me, the venue was only about a 10 minute subway ride away, at the southern tip of Manhattan. So I rounded up my daughter Jane (who had to trek in from Queens) to accompany me, and off we went.

This year they slightly re-titled the Konference to “Energy Infrastructure Summit: New York’s Path to Sustainability.” On the surface, it was remarkably similar to the program of two years ago, and to hear the words of the speakers, it was as if nothing was wrong. But with a little reading between the lines, the changes were big.

In the real world, the climate scam is rapidly falling apart, along with the related government-subsidized schemes for worldwide energy transformation. So how should New York react? After all, we claim to have the ultimate program of “climate leadership” for showing everyone else how easy it is to do this energy transformation thing. We’ve started with mandating under our Climate Act an electricity system having 70% of its generation from “renewables” by 2030 (a mandate known as “70 x 30”). The deadline for 70 x 30 is now just over four years away.

So, is this really happening?

Fortunately, our Public Service Commission has just come out with a Report with the long title “NEW YORK STATE DEPARTMENT OF PUBLIC SERVICE SECOND CLCPA [Climate Act] INFORMATIONAL REPORT ON OVERALL IMPLEMENTATION OF THE CLIMATE LEADERSHIP AND COMMUNITY PROTECTION ACT, WITH CORRECTIONS,” bearing a date of September 23, 2025. Today, I will take a look at that to see what we can learn about New York’s progress toward its goals.

Separately, a different bureaucracy called the New York State Energy Planning Board a couple of months ago (July 25) issued something called the 2025 Draft Energy Plan for the state. I had a post discussing that document back on August 11 (“New York’s Official Energy Plan Is No Plan”). That Draft Energy Plan then became subject to a period for public comment, so I took the opportunity to submit my Comment on September 25.

Let’s say that the PSC’s Report and my Comment on the Energy Plan are two very different takes on the progress toward New York’s energy transformation.

It was in July 2019 that New York State adopted its Climate Leadership and Community Protection Act. Our Legislature and Governor (it was Andrew Cuomo at the time) had officially designated us as the climate “leader,” here to show the unsophisticated rubes and provincials in the rest of the country how a small application of political will could transform our electricity system from majority fossil fuels in 2019 to 70% “renewables” by 2030 and 100% “zero-carbon” by 2040.

Now six years into the eleven available to meet the 2030 mandate, we actually get less of our electricity from zero-carbon sources than we did in 2019.

The reason is that the large (2 GW) Indian Point nuclear plant was forced to close under pressure from environmentalists, to be replaced by two natural gas plants of approximately the same total capacity.

Meanwhile the vision of massive amounts of power from the wind and sun has barely gotten off the ground; and in particular the vision of vast offshore wind capacity has essentially died with the withdrawal of federal support by the Trump administration.

In case you missed it, here is New York Governor Kathy Hochul’s breathless announcement from yesterday: “Governor Hochul Directs New York Power Authority to Develop a Zero-Emission Advanced Nuclear Energy Technology Power Plant.”

Does something here seem like it doesn’t quite fit? Yes, it was just four years ago, in April 2021, that New York completed the forced closure of the two perfectly functional Indian Point nuclear plants, with combined generating capacity of about 2 GW, for no other reason than relentless opposition from environmentalists and NIMBYs. And yet now the Governor is saying that the plan is to start over and build a new nuclear plant at some unspecified place.

Before getting to a few of the problems, let’s start with some of the excited language from the Governor’s press release: