GOLDEN CRESCENT AND 1000 ISLAND NEWS

  Voters are revolting against high energy prices across the country, and Republicans are taking most of the blame as the party in power in Washington. But an under-reported story is that Democrats are on defense in the Northeast, where utility bills have spiked because of green energy mandates and progressive hostility to fossil fuels. It’s about time. Electricity and heating bills have shot up more in the Northeast than elsewhere. Over the last six years, residential electric rates have climbed by about 20% to 30% in most states, yet far more in Maine (92%), New York (59%), Rhode Island (45%) and Massachusetts (43%). Some households are paying hundreds of dollars more a month than they did a few years ago. Heating bills are also expected to surge this winter because of the Northeast’s reliance on oil. The Energy Information Administration recently estimated that winter energy bills will increase 21% this year for households that use heating oil. Roughly half of households in Mai...

  Dear Friends of the PPA, Last Month, Kelly Fitzpatrick - who is Chair of the Steuben County Legislature - wrote a letter to Kathy Hochul describing the way ORES overturned local laws, allowing 650’ turbines to be built in the Town of Fremont. Many of the Town's residents are now suffering from documented medical problems caused by proximity to the turbines. She tells how people in the area have actually needed to leave their homes. Ms. Fitzpatrick asks for NYS to mitigate these serious health impacts. You may be thinking that you are too far away to be impacted by the Prattsburgh Wind project. But if it gets built as planned, the wind companies will want to put up other projects, and next time they could be bigger and affect all of us. In any case, economically we are all affected when our neighbors’ property values go down and some are driven out of their homes. Let's pick up the momentum created by this powerful letter and share it - with your Town Board, your neighbors, an...

  While campaigning for Governor of Massachusetts four years ago, Maura Healey boasted that as state Attorney General she had “stopped two gas pipelines from coming into this state.” Now she’s pleading with the Trump Administration to expedite permits for a pipeline expansion. Add Gov. Healey to the list of Democrats mugged by energy reality. “On several occasions we have discussed our mutual desire to get more U.S. natural gas into New England to reduce reliance on higher-cost imported fuel and lower costs for customers,” she wrote Energy Secretary Chris Wright last week. Her letter beseeches the Administration to move “quickly” and with “urgency” on the federal review needed to expand the Algonquin gas pipeline. “This addition, together with other recent expansions, would have provided enough gas capacity on this line to meet total household heating needs this past January,” Ms. Healey writes. She says it also could save 600,000 utility customers $40 million a year, and “any fe...

  New York Energy Alliance   @NYEnergyAllies   One nuclear reactor being turned back on is generating four times more electricity than New York's utility-scale solar fleet in 24 hours.   Look at the dark band at the bottom of the chart. That's New York's nuclear fleet, and on Monday it was noticeably taller than it's been all fall.     The reason is FitzPatrick. Constellation's 853 MW reactor on Lake Ontario, near Oswego, finished a three-week refueling outage on October 3. While it was down, New York's nuclear fleet averaged about 2,450 MW. On Monday it ran at 3,290 MW, flat around the clock, at 3 AM, at noon and at 7 PM.   That one reactor added about 20 GWh to the grid in a single day: More than all of New York's wind combined (15 GWh). Nearly four times the state's utility-scale solar (5 GWh). About half of all solar statewide, rooftops included (41 GWh). With FitzPatrick back, nuclear supplied 21% of the state's power on Monday, up from roughly...

  American offshore wind’s existential crisis was laid bare at this year’s Climate Week. California and New York officials gathered on Tuesday at the New York Bar Association in Manhattan to tell attendees of the annual climate action mega-event about their efforts to hold the Trump administration to account. After Trump regulators upended wind projects off the East Coast and struck buyout trades with energy developers to ditch ocean wind leases, both states filed fresh legal action against the administration, targeting what they said were egregious abuses of taxpayer dollars that canceled once-promising projects that would’ve given gigawatts of power to grids expecting energy demand to spike. “Every megawatt in offshore wind power is not a megawatt of fossil fuel generated power. That’s really important. That means fewer emissions that contribute to respiratory and cardiac disease,” Lem Srolovic, bureau chief of the New York attorney general’s environmental protection bureau, s...

  A federal judge ruled in early August that the Trump administration’s freeze on vertical height clearances for wind turbines was likely illegal. More than a month later nearly all of the wind energy projects remain on pause, as federal officials add new red tape that industry representatives say runs afoul of the court’s edict. Let’s catch-up quickly on the American wind sector’s existential dilemma: the federal government has control over airspace higher than 200 feet from the ground and wind farm turbines essentially always enter that sphere of control. For at least a year and a half, the Trump administration through the Department of Defense and the Federal Aviation Administration has slowly gummed up what industry and former government officials have said was once a rote, benign bureaucratic process for ensuring turbine rotation didn’t interfere with flight patterns or radar at nearby airports. So, Trump is delaying key approvals even for wind projects on private land, a wo...