As temperatures hit 100 degrees last week, New York City’s unconventional mayor did something pretty conventional: He urged people to use less electricity.
But when Mayor Zohran Mamdani urged residents to set their air conditioners to 78 degrees (a past practice of both Democrats and Republicans alike), he revealed something far more harmful than the heat index: how much Albany’s policies have driven New York City’s power grid to the point of collapse.
Several factors are at play every summer.
About 90% of homes today have air conditioning; as recently as the 1980s, most didn’t.
Portions of the electric system are extremely old by national standards, and the sheer physics of generating and distributing the appropriate voltage and amperage to every corner of such a dense and diverse cityscape borders on the miraculous.
Tighter ozone-emission rules began taking effect in 2023, forcing about a dozen of the city’s smaller power plants to close — making it even tougher to get juice to every corner.
Recall that the city nearly had rolling blackouts a year ago, as temperatures spiked and older plants broke down in the heat.
That’s why, as far back as the 1990s, mayors have made public appeals on the hottest summer days asking New Yorkers to set thermostats to 78 degrees.
Rudy Giuliani, hardly an “ecosocialist,” did it.
So did Mike Bloomberg, and Bill de Blasio, and Eric Adams.
To be sure, 78 isn’t an especially comfortable temperature in a withering heat wave, and the actual benefit for the grid is tiny.
And, as The Post reported, Mamdani’s City Hall didn’t exactly lead by example.
Fifteen out of 20 spots in municipal office buildings were found to be maintaining much cooler, and much more bearable, temperatures.
Critics were right to mock Mamdani’s hypocrisy.
But what they missed is that his call inadvertently revealed a problem he himself helped cause: the frightening weakness of NYC’s electric grid — a weakness that makes a 78-degree floor an urgent demand.
The state’s energy policy went off the rails last decade, when Albany set unreachable climate goals, then forced electric utilities to implement them.
Mamdani has fiercely defended that 2019 climate law at every turn, even as the negative consequences have piled up.
When Mamdani entered the Assembly in early 2021, Con Edison and others were tearing up a century-old playbook that had successfully balanced reliability and cost.
Suddenly the utility companies had to pull double-duty as climate crusaders — and as Albany’s bagmen to pay for their multi-trillion-dollar boondoggle.
That distracted utilities from their near-term maintenance obligations on the geriatric grid, as they spent ratepayer cash and untold attention on an abstract push toward economy-wide electrification.
Lawmakers looked the other way as delivery rates surged.
Assemblyman Mamdani was among the most extreme voices pressing energy policy even further in the wrong direction, particularly when it came to the actual generation of electricity.
He fiercely opposed allowing private companies to upgrade their power plants — something that could have reduced greenhouse emissions and trimmed electricity costs, if Albany hadn’t blocked the way.
Instead, the air in New York City is dirtier, electricity prices are higher and the grid is more fragile because of green policies Mamdani himself championed.
But those bad choices can get lost in the haze of online clout-chasing today.
Rather than dunking on him, Mamdani’s critics should be talking about how to put New York’s energy focus back on cost and reliability.
That means building new power plants posthaste, and peeling back the various climate policies that helped make electric bills jump by almost 50% in the city (and almost double in parts of Upstate) since 2019.
It’s less sexy than bashing the mayor over thermostat hypocrisy, but it speaks more directly to one of New York’s biggest self-inflicted challenges.
Mamdani prevailed in last year’s mayoral election because he was never made to explain how much his agenda would actually cost, or how he’d pay for it.
The mayor didn’t triumph in the market of ideas, nor did socialism itself.
Instead, his rivals failed to demonstrate that Mamdani’s policy prescriptions are demonstrably wrong.
That problem persists.
The green-energy policies that Mamdani and his allies support continue to threaten New York’s ability to keep everyone comfortable in the heat.
So we can’t afford to miss any chance to engage him in a substantive argument over his tax, spending and regulatory policies that will permanently change New York City for the worse.
Ken Girardin is a fellow at the Manhattan Institute.
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