A legislative hearing into spending by the state’s sprawling energy agency featured a surprise guest who offered sober warnings about Albany’s energy policy.

Thursday’s meeting of the Assembly Energy Committee was billed as an oversight hearing looking at the New York State Energy Research & Development Authority (NYSERDA, which manages that state’s energy subsidies).

After two hours, the committee heard from John Howard, a seasoned Albany hand whose career included time as that committee’s executive director and as a top aide at* dealing extensively with NYSERDA. He retired from his post on the Public Service Commission, which regulates the state’s gas and electric utilities, earlier this year.

Howard has been generally supportive of the state’s goals to use more renewable energy and lower greenhouse gas emissions. But he leveled pointed criticism at how New York was getting there, beginning with how the state adopted the 2019 Climate Leadership and Community Protection Act, which set major goals for emissions reductions on a timetable that Howard said is currently “impossible, regardless of the costs.”

Howard called the 2019 adoption of the Climate Act a “rush to judgement” which “was almost like an environmental name-that-tune.”

“State after state that says, ‘Well I can decarbonize in 20 years.’ ‘Yeah, well I can decarbonize in 15 years.” And then there’s this rush to be first in the nation. Not best in the nation. Not cheapest in the nation. First in the nation.” However, Howard said, officials failed to tell New Yorkers how much it would cost.

He noted the state is “hemorrhaging population,” and that Albany’s energy policy wasn’t being implemented in a vacuum.

“New York is not a nation-state. If we make it uncompetitive for people to live here…they will find a place to live. It just won’t be here,” Howard said, urging lawmakers to “take a deep breath.”

He expressed particular concern about costs faced by large energy customers, and pointed out that nearly every other state has avoided Albany’s approach of allowing a separate agency (NYSERDA) to cut deals for renewable energy and pass the bill to the PSC, which has generally rubber-stamped NYSERDA’s requests and baked costs into customer electricity bills.

“These contracts often have 25-year lifespans, with utility customers obliged to pay every penny. And who approves the individual contracts? NYSERDA alone is given that authority by the Public Service Commission to procure these resources through its own competitive bidding process. The comptroller does not review individual renewable contracts prior to execution, regardless of their magnitude.”

The state, Howard said, has moved away from its long-standing policy under which “beneficiaries pay” and instead moved to spread the costs statewide, even to areas such as Western New York where most electricity already comes from zero-emission sources (primarily hydroelectric and nuclear). And those costs are considerable: Howard warned NYSERDA will be putting New Yorkers on the hook for “well in excess of $100 billion” as it looks to build more wind, solar and battery projects, all with minimum scrutiny and no votes by the Legislature.

Howard illustrated the absurdness of NYSERDA’s practices by comparing the lax oversight of the Authority to how the state has:

• required comptroller and attorney general review over contracts, citing the reconstruction of I-81 in Syracuse as an example;
• required utility companies to justify the replacement of each telephone pole they install; and
• criticized the Buffalo Billion economic development program, which Howard said “paled in comparison” to NYSERDA’s energy deals.

“There is too much commitment of government-directed spending without proper review,” Howard said, recommending that lawmakers give the state comptroller and the PSC more control over NYSERDA’s business dealings.

He also said lawmakers should be voting on NYSERDA deals. “When you decide to make major fiscal commitments…it’s something you guys should do, not somebody else.”

Howard jabbed state officials for their lack of forthrightness about costs.

“When the government takes your money you wouldn’t ordinarily* normally give them, we call that a what?…it’s a tax. If we don’t want to call it a tax, that’s fine. I certainly understand politically, from the Legislature, calling hundreds of billions of dollars of state commitments not tax dollars is on the right side of politics.”

Howard directed some of his criticism at the Public Service Commission itself, noting that commissioners struggle to function independently, that getting details about NYSERDA’s dealings was “daunting” and often unsuccessful and that many major decisions are made by the PSC’s chair, who helms the body at the pleasure of the governor.

State emails previously obtained by the Empire Center show that prior to Howard’s appointment to the PSC, then-chair Audrey Zibelman in 2016 directed staff not to answer questions from individual commissioners on certain items flagged by Zibelman. Instead, staffers were told, Zibelman needed to be notified about these inquiries and to review any responses before they were sent to commissioners like Howard, even though the commissioners were Senate-confirmed state officers.

Howard urged lawmakers to “be extraordinarily cautious of the impacts to New York state’s future economic competitiveness.” As he put it: “Unbridled increases in industrial and commercial energy costs will concede the continued exodus of businesses to lower cost locations.”

*Text updated to correct quotes using uploaded committee video.