New York’s Electric Utility Can’t Keep Up, And We Know Exactly Why
Only Political Failure Can Make Air Conditioning Controversial:
New York City is facing a summer heat wave, and ConEd, their electric utility, is warning residents not to use their air conditioning during the hottest hours of the day. That’s not just an inconvenience. It’s a policy failure decades in the making.
A text alert sent to New Yorkers this week urged people to “limit energy use between 2 and 10 pm” to help keep the grid from buckling, when it happens to be the hottest part of the day, and temperatures are expected to reach 100 degrees. This is 2025. Americans have been using air conditioning since the 1920s. Yet now, in one of the most advanced cities on Earth, we’re being told not to run basic cooling equipment when we need it most.
They also recommend using only one appliance at a time. Apparently, a family of four shouldn’t use their new electric stove and run their AC at the same time. Or, if they have two AC units in their two-bedroom apartment, they should actually only use one. Sorry, to the kids’ room!
Let’s be clear: it’s not the heat that kills people. It’s the lack of access to modern, reliable technology like air conditioning. And now, the very energy authorities tasked with keeping our lights on are asking us to dim them voluntarily.
For the past three decades, New York’s elected leaders have relentlessly dismantled a reliable, affordable electricity system. Back in the 1990s, fossil fuels powered roughly 60-65% of the state’s electricity. Nuclear supplied another 25–30%, according to a Power The Future study. That meant scalability, stability, and predictability.
But over time, those sources were politically targeted. Coal is gone. Oil is nearly gone. Nuclear is shrinking. Only a few years ago, Governor Cuomo took pride in closing Indian Point, a primary electricity provider for the city. Meanwhile, intermittent sources like wind and solar, cheered by politicians who never read a grid reliability report, have been forced into the mix at unsustainable levels.
Today, renewables account for significantly more of the state’s generation, despite their unreliability and inability to scale to meet heightened electricity demand. And yet, the political class has been hell-bent on pushing even more intermittent energy, no matter the cost to consumers.
The result? Warnings not to cool your home when it’s 100 degrees.
Let’s call this what it is: degrowth. It’s the intentional political choice to make people live with less, under the guise of climate virtue. We were promised a clean energy future. What we got is a fragile grid and an urgent alert reminding us to shut off our fans.
If there’s a brownout, or worse, a blackout, this week, it won’t be because of the weather. It will be because elected leaders abandoned common-sense energy policy. They drove out tried and true fossil fuels to bet on unreliable sources and crossed their fingers.
At Power The Future, we’ve warned for years that this path leads nowhere good. Now, New Yorkers are living it.
In a city of 8 million people, keeping the power on shouldn’t be a heroic feat. But thanks to political negligence, it might be.
June 23, 2025