Making Energy More Affordable in New York
On behalf of Natural Resources Defense Council (NRDC) and the Evergreen Collaborative, Synapse examine strategies to improve energy affordability for New York households. As electricity prices and essential living costs continue to rise, the report identifies eight different policy interventions that can lower costs for upstate customers, downstate customers, and low-income customers. We quantify the impacts of interventions including requiring data centers to bring their own new, clean energy generation, accelerating clean energy deployment to alleviate capacity constraints, expanding initiatives and incentives for customer-owned power, reducing utility return on-equity, avoiding continued fossil investment, and other strategies. As a result of policy solutions deployable in the next four years, we estimate that residential customers with both electric and gas could save at least $341 a year by 2030.