GOLDEN CRESCENT AND 1000 ISLAND NEWS

October 23, 2026   Francis Menton   In my post several days ago on October 18 , I recounted the story of how ignorant Chinese Communist Party ideologues in the late 1950s convinced themselves that they knew how to achieve limitless agricultural production by just ordering each community to produce large, arbitrary amounts of food. Do you want to double grain production? Then just plant twice as many seeds in the same acreage! The ideologues had no idea how agriculture actually worked in the real world. Within a couple of years, there was widespread famine, probably the largest in world history. Tens of millions died horrible deaths of starvation. At the end of that post I noted that, here in the West, equally ignorant ideologues were engaged, actually for a few decades now, in ordering up an energy transition to replace electricity generation by fossil fuels with generation mostly by intermittent wind and sun. Today’s energy transition ideologues have a lack of knowledge of ho...

  October 19, 2026   Takeaways by Bloomberg: Blackstone Inc. has raised $8.7 billion for a fund dedicated to cleaner energy, Blackstone Energy Transition Partners V, which is about 55% larger than its predecessor. The strategy invests in a broad range of sectors within the energy industry but generally excludes oil companies, and has already deployed a quarter of its capital into six investments. The new fund has attracted nearly one-third of its money from new investors, with Blackstone committing $150 million to the fund, according to David Foley, global head of the firm’s energy transition business.   Blackstone Inc. has raised $8.7 billion for a fund dedicated to cleaner energy, less than two years after wrapping up an earlier version of the strategy.   The latest fund, Blackstone Energy Transition Partners V , is about 55% larger than its predecessor, which closed with $5.6 billion in February 2025. Blackstone committed $150 million to the new fund, according ...

  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...