The New York State Energy Research Development Authority really doesn’t want you to know how much you’ll have to pay for Gov. Andrew Cuomo’s offshore-wind boondoggles.
Our recent editorial on this waste cited the Empire Center’s Ken Girardin, who’d found used the agency’s own public filings to deduce a cost to electric ratepayers statewide of some $6 billion for just the first wave of wind farms NYSERDA is subsidizing off the Long Island coast, vs. the ageny’s claimed $1 billion.
That prompted NYSERDA to point out a mistaken assumption by Girardin: He had treated one bit of NYSERDA “info” as less deceptive than it turns out to be.
Basically, the agency used arcane accounting tricks to report a low value for the state’s guaranteed wind subsidies. Alerted to the maneuver, Girardin now finds that the final price tag could climb even higher.
Offshore wind power is the most expensive alternative-energy source, and Cuomo has boosted these projects’ costs by requiring union labor. To hide the bad news, NYSERDA has to play games. Maybe that’s why, as the Empire Center also reports, its officials have the highest average pay of any state authority.
© 2019 New York Post
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