Green Energy Wall Coming Into Focus In New York?
August 17, 2025/ Francis Menton
It was back in 2021 that I started to ask which country or U.S. state would be the first to hit the “Green Energy Wall.” It has long been obvious to anyone who looks at the situation that the fantasy of a fully de-carbonized energy system, with everything run on electricity generated by intermittent wind and sun, could never happen.
But what would be the limiting condition that would put a stop to the madness? Would it be confronting the absurd costs of grid-scale battery storage? Or perhaps a string of blackouts caused by insufficient backup of the wind and solar generation?
Here in New York, we are starting to see some push back from politicians on the fantasy green energy transition, but the source may be the last thing you would have predicted. The immediate issue is the cost of upgrading local delivery infrastructure to transmit sufficient electricity for the imagined future of electrified buildings and vehicles.
Supposedly, under a statute known as the Climate Leadership and Community Protection Act of 2019, we are faced with a 2030 deadline to get some 70% of our electricity from “renewables.” Currently the percent of our electricity that we get from these “renewables” is around 44%, and almost half of that comes from the gigantic waterfall known as Niagara Falls. Without another Niagara Falls on the horizon, theoretically we should be building vast fields of wind turbines and solar panels to meet the statutory mandates; but that effort has stalled out, and the costs of wind and solar generation, and of backup to make the grid run all the time, have barely started to show up in consumer bills. Nor have various big new long-distance transmission projects yet come into consumer bills.
https://www.manhattancontrarian.com/blog/2025-8-17-green-energy-wall-coming-into-focus-in-new-york
