New York needs to pull the plug on its suicidal green energy goals before the blackouts hit

“If we miss it by a couple of years, which is probably what will happen, the goals are still worthy,” says Gov. Hochul in response to official notice that New York won’t meet its 2030 green-energy goals.

She’s whistling in the wind: The state is decades from meeting the goals. It’s simply burning billions, slamming consumers and disastrously undermining its reliable-energy capacity in pursuit of a fantasy. 

The New York State Energy Research and Development Authority, the entity charged with upping “clean energy” production, was the first to admit that 2030 won’t happen, albeit burying it in a dense “progress” report.

State Comptroller Thomas DiNapoli did a better job of sharing the truth in an audit still couched with cheery language.

At least DiNapoli was upfront with some damning facts:

• As of 2022, about 29% of electricity generated in New York came from renewable sources.

• Three-quarters of that came from hydropower — which, he didn’t spell out, can’t possibly grow much: We built every conceivable dam long ago.

• Which means that, to meet the 70% goal, solar and wind would need to grow from less than 10% of capacity to more than 40% even if demand remained the same.

Except that other green mandates for electric heat, cooling, cooking and cars vastly increase the amount of power needed.

Not to mention the inconvenient truth that AI computers — now seen as central to the future economy — demand huge amounts of power: Past forecasts of future electricity needs are hopelessly outdated.

The only way for New York to get the power it’ll need is to build more fossil-fuel plants — lots of them.

So the the state Climate Plan’s goal to cut carbon emissions (40% by 2030 and 85% by 2050) are a complete joke — or a mandate for economic suicide.

Meanwhile, New Yorkers’ utility bills are already soaring.

And maybe you notice the Con Edison warning during the last heat wave that customers needed to limit energy use to avoid blackouts?

This mess is the result of then-Gov. Andrew Cuomo’s rush to win green cred in 2019 as he eyed a future presidential run; Hochul has since only doubled down to polish her own image.

This, after Cuomo pandered on another front in forcing the shutdown of Indian Point, a zero-emissions nuclear power plant — then turned around to subsidize Upstate nuke plants to avoid a major increase in carbon emissions.

Another wrinkle: New York’s plans depend on a vast expansion of offshore wind power, yet the costs to build those plants are soaring as other states rush to the same end.

That’s why companies keep opting out of contracts to build them, demanding far greater subsidies when the work is re-bid.

And state officials’ failure to level with the public on all this, per DiNapoli, makes it “impossible” to assess the financial burden on New Yorkers “who are currently struggling to pay their utility bills and who have faced rising costs over the past two decades.”

By the way, and Nantucket is now grappling with beach debris and navigation hazards after a 500-foot wind blade broke off from a plant being spun up nearby and shattered in the ocean.

The investments needed to reach the Climate Act’s outdated goals run north of $300 billion; the practical barriers are even more daunting.

Meanwhile, China keeps building coal plants to power its AI and to manufacture solar panels and electric vehicles and EV batteries — dwarfing whatever emissions reductions New York, California and so on might achieve.

Just as Hochul & Co. are telling flat-out lies about President Biden’s condition, they’re blowing pure smoke about the “energy transition.”

Tell the truth and pull the plug on this insanity.