There was another, albeit more limited power outage in New York City last night, lasting into this morning. As of rush hour, there were still approximately 20K customers without electricity, but fortunately, the crippling heatwave that had plagued the area for the past week was easing up at the same time. None of that stopped Governor Andrew Cuomo from taking to social media immediately and blaming his favorite new villain, the utility company Con Edison.

We've been through this situation w ConEd time & again & they should have been better prepared—period. I am deploying 200 State Police, 100 generators & 50 Light Towers to assist with the 30K+ power outages in BK
I encourage NYers to check on neighbors- esp the elderly- tonight

— Andrew Cuomo (@NYGovCuomo) July 22, 2019

And he had plenty more to say on the subject as if this was all some choice that Con Ed had made on the fly. (NY Post)

Governor Andrew Cuomo on Sunday night blasted ConEd amid power outages across Brooklyn, claiming the power company should have been ready to handle the heat.

Cuomo even called for state police to step in and assist those without lights or air conditioning in Brooklyn…

Cuomo reminded city residents to be aware of those who might be in need of help.

“I encourage NYers to check on neighbors- esp the elderly- tonight,” he tweeted.

What Con Ed was doing was a combination of two things. One was a series of repairs required after the last blackout that required brief outages (which people were warned about in advance) to fix their equipment. And the second was a “phased” shut down in certain areas to avoid another complete collapse. Every building in the Big Apple was running their air conditioning at max for the past couple of days and there’s only so much juice on the grid.

And that’s the key fact in this particular passion play that you don’t hear the Governor or the Mayor talking about, though they have both long been aware of it. Con Ed has been warning for some time now that the grid was under too much of a drain and there wasn’t always going to be enough juice to keep everything running at 100% capacity unless more power was brought online.

In fact, Cuomo was specifically informed of this problem back in 2017 when he was pursuing his (eventually successful) quest to shut down the Indian Point nuclear power plant ahead of schedule. It was Cuomo and his pals who engineered the denial of operating permit renewals for that plant. One reactor is already offline and Cuomo has arranged to shut down another one next year. (The final one will go offline in 2021.)

Governor Cuomo is or at least should be aware that Indian Point provides a full 25% of the electricity used by New York City and there is nothing else in the pipeline to replace that energy on the grid. But that didn’t stop him from calling the plant “a ticking timebomb” in 2017 when he was vowing to shut it down. If you think the blackouts are bad now, just wait until Indian Point goes dark.

It’s not just electricity, either. Keep in mind that this is also the same brain trust that helped block a natural gas pipeline, only to have the utility inform them that it can’t accept any new customers in an area under development.

New York Democrats keep demonizing the energy industry over anything that doesn’t run on solar or wind. They fight them in court and do their best to hobble the energy producers. And then they start whining up a storm when the lights (and the airconditioning) go out after they were warned in advance that this would happen. New York, New York. So nice they say it twice. Get out while you can folks. That’s my advice anyway.