Countdown to Zero: Backup Power

New York is falling behind on its climate goals. Is there any way to catch up? 

Sean Dague would like to use his refrigerator to lower your energy bills. 

A few years ago, after buying a fridge, the Dutchess County resident did something few people do: He read the manual. (He’s a software engineer at IBM, so he does that.) In it, he learned that, when the grid was under strain, the local utility could send a signal telling it to temporarily use less power. He found similar language in the manual for his hot-water heater.

This feature could save Dague money and make it less likely that utilities would need to rely on fossil-fuel-reliant “peaker” plants, such as Danskammer, north of Newburgh. If every “smart” appliance were connected this way, it could save money for everyone and reduce the greenhouse gas emissions that cause global warming.

Alas, there was a major obstacle. Central Hudson doesn’t participate.

“When you talk about what it costs to get electricity to people, you also have to talk about demand flexibility,” says Dague, who lives in LaGrange. “We have the technology to do it.” 

This flexible grid technology is also known as virtual power plants (VPP). Across the river, Orange & Rockland Utilities recently ran a pilot program in which customers who installed solar panels received a free or heavily discounted battery. In exchange, they agreed to allow the utility to draw power from the battery when the grid is strained, such as during last summer’s “heat dome.” 

Dague is a volunteer organizer with the Citizens Climate Lobby, which recently worked with Assembly Member Anna Kelles, a Democrat whose district includes Ithaca, on a bill that would create VPPs throughout the state. 

This past week, MIT unveiled an online tool developed with Heatmap News and CleanEcon called The Electricity Price Hub, which tracks electricity prices by ZIP code. Things don’t look so bad in New York: The state is mostly a soothing green. But click on utility bills, and a dark orange blob appears: the service area for Central Hudson, indicating that its customers are, by far, paying the highest utility bills in the state.

VPPs are among many tools that can lower bills and help transition New York away from fossil fuels, the primary goal of the Climate Leadership & Community Protection Act (aka the Climate Law), enacted in 2019. The law sets ambitious targets, including getting 70 percent of its energy from renewable sources by 2030 and 100 percent zero-emissions energy by 2040. 

As we reported last week, the state is behind in its targets. Enforcement regulations that would have penalized industries for high emissions — with fines that would pay for renewable energy projects and rebate checks to consumers — were scrapped just before they were scheduled to take effect.

Arguing that New York was breaking its own law, a group of environmental organizations sued the state in 2025 — and won. Now, Gov. Kathy Hochul wants to roll back some targets to make them easier to meet and change how the state calculates emissions. This methodology, which many states use, would put New York much closer to reaching its goals. 

The governor is working with the Legislature to amend the law as part of the 2026-27 budget, which is due this coming week. Hochul cites a series of unforeseen setbacks: a pandemic, wars, inflation, tariffs and President Donald Trump’s disapproval of renewable energy projects. As a result, she says, the law has become too expensive to implement by the 2019 deadlines.

Not every state is backing away: 50 gigawatts of renewable energy were added in the U.S. last year. Wind, solar and battery storage continue to grow. “It’s good business, right? These are profitable,” said Erin Baker, faculty director of the Energy Transition Institute at the University of Massachusetts Amherst. “They suppress prices for ratepayers. The example I always give is Texas: It has the most wind energy production and the second-most solar in the country. Its batteries are growing like crazy. They’re not doing it for environmental reasons. They’re doing it for business reasons.”

The New York Independent System Operator (NYISO), the entity that oversees the grid, released a report earlier this year explaining how consumers in states that rely on natural gas, including New York, are more vulnerable to severe energy price swings. NYISO has also been sounding the alarm for years that the state is disconnecting fossil-fuel sources more quickly than it’s adding renewables. Even with major projects coming online, such as the Champlain Hudson Power Express cable under the Hudson River and the Empire Wind farm that Trump tried to stop, NYISO warns that, unless more renewable power can be added quickly, the state will need to repower inactive fossil-fuel plants. Doing so would push the state even further from its climate goals and cause price shocks.

“It’s frustrating to hear the governor’s office saying, ‘What we need to do is go and change some rules, so we look better,’ ” said Dague. “Or we could do all those things that get us clean, affordable energy.”

Fuzzy math

Not all greenhouse gases are created equal. Methane, the primary component of natural gas, packs a powerful punch when it’s first emitted. But within six years, it’s half as potent. Carbon dioxide, on the other hand, isn’t as powerful initially, but its impact lasts much longer.

When measuring emissions, the standard practice is to calculate their impact over 100 years. But as the impact of methane has become clearer, many scientists argue the standard should be 20 years, because that’s when the most damage occurs. The guidelines for the Climate Law use a 20-year standard, but so far, only New York and Maryland measure that way.

Hochul would like to return to the 100-year timeline, which would put New York back at “almost No. 1” for low emissions. “It’s always fun to be nation-leading,” she said in February. In response, a group of 65 climate scientists, including Radley Horton, a Philipstown resident and professor at the Columbia Climate School, wrote to Hochul last month and urged her to stick with 20 years. 

“Methane is a far more powerful greenhouse gas for the time it remains in the atmosphere, but its consequences are largely limited to the first few decades after emission, while the effects of a release of carbon dioxide last for thousands of years,” they wrote. “The short-lived greenhouse gases, particularly methane, are the biggest and most important controls we have to turn down the rate at which our planet warms. This is because if we stop allowing them to be released into the atmosphere, then they will be removed by various processes in the next decades — not centuries, as is the case with carbon dioxide — and we will have rapidly slowed the rate of climate change.” 

The scientists also urged Hochul not to change another methodology to measure what are known as “upstream” emissions. Under the Climate Law, the state counts emissions created by power generated out of state, such as fracked natural gas from Pennsylvania, West Virginia and Ohio. The logic is that the emissions wouldn’t happen if New York wasn’t buying the gas. “Excluding them doesn’t make them disappear from the atmosphere; it simply removes New York’s incentive to reduce them,” the scientists wrote.

Assembly Member Dana Levenberg, a Democrat whose district includes Philipstown, doesn’t want to see any mathematical changes to the Climate Law. 

“It’s like a political accounting check to make it easier for us to meet our goals without actually reducing the impact of our emissions,” she said.

Levenberg said that, instead of changing the law because the state lost in court, New York officials should sit down with the environmentalists who sued. “Negotiating with the people who are trying to hold us accountable is a better strategy than rolling back our deadlines,” she said.

The curtain rises

Elizabeth Evans, newly retired after a career as a lab researcher, was living in the Adirondacks with time on her hands when she heard Bill McKibben speaking on television. McKibben, an environmental journalist and activist, said he had helped start an organization called Third Act, for people over 60.

Activism, he explained, takes time and money. Retired people often have both. Its purpose was to organize people to attend municipal meetings and travel to state capitals to lobby for legal protections for the climate and democracy. “You can’t have a stable climate without a stable democracy, and vice versa,” said Evans, who is a leader in the Upstate New York chapter that includes Putnam and Dutchess counties.

“Our generation benefited from fossil fuels for most of the decades of the last century,” she said. “There were reasons that made sense at the time, but now the dangers and the downsides of burning fossil fuels have become clear.” 

Evans and her colleagues have been engaged in Albany and in towns throughout the state speaking about a Climate Law bright spot: solar power. “The cost and affordability of solar have dropped dramatically in the past five years,” Evans said. “Ten years ago, we couldn’t have made this case.”

In the Climate Law, New York set a target of 6,000 megawatts of new distributed solar by 2025. It hit the goal a year early and is on track to reach 10,000 megawatts by 2030. 

State Sen. Pete Harckham, who chairs the Environmental Conservation Committee, believes that, instead of rolling back its goals, New York should double down. He introduced a bill, the Accelerate Solar for Affordable Power Act (ASAP), that would set a target of 20,000 megawatts of solar by 2035. It would also reform the interconnection processes that are causing dozens of renewable projects to languish in NYISO’s queue. 

“A kilowatt of wind or solar is far cheaper than a kilowatt of natural gas or nuclear,” Harckham said, touting a report from Synapse Energy Economics that calculated that revised solar targets, plus the current target of 6,000 megawatts of battery storage by 2030, could save consumers over $1 billion annually.

Third Act is advocating Harckham’s bill, as well as the Solar Up Now New York Act (SUNNY), which would allow for “balcony solar,” or portable panels that plug into a standard outlet and provide up to 800 watts of power. The technology has exploded across Europe; 3 million units are in place in Germany alone. In the U.S., however, only Utah has legalized the technology.

Evans said that she has heard widespread enthusiasm for balcony solar, which makes it puzzling that there isn’t more enthusiasm from the state. “Why can’t we have that type of technology?” she asked. Dague believes the biggest roadblock for the Climate Law may be a lack of vision. “We can imagine flying cars, but we can’t imagine cars without tailpipes,” he said.

“The war in Iran is the second time in five years that we’ve had these crazy swings in energy prices,” he noted. “That should be a clear indicator that this cannot be the future we’re committed to.”