A batch of bills have landed in Albany proposing to solve New York's energy affordability crisis. They are packed with activist wish-list items, bad ideas that make for good headlines copied from California. All have one gaping omission: the price tag.

If you look at any of the recent energy or environmental bills proposed in Albany, you will find most lack a fiscal note — the legislative staff analysis of the cost to implement the law. While families are struggling to pay bills and energy affordability is a kitchen-table issue, this is the equivalent of having your checkbook and credit cards taken on an unlimited shopping spree or casino visit.

If New Yorkers find this familiar, it is because it is the playbook that created the affordability crisis. Legislators now say they are going solve it the same way they caused it — by loading exorbitant policy costs onto utility bills, then blaming everyone else.

How the Climate Leadership and Community Protection Act hurts New Yorkers

Start with this figure in mind: $7,000 a year for 25 years for every man, woman, and child in New York. That is the cost of the Climate Leadership and Community Protection Act, or CLCPA).

For Hispanic households, who on average pay 24% more for energy than the median U.S. household, this is yet another avoidable burden — if elected officials make the right choice.

Unfortunately, many touted the CLCPA as a big accomplishment when the cameras were rolling, then disappeared when the cost became an electoral risk.

Their response to affordability so far has not been to address the costs they put into law — it's been to rehash failed policy ideas that turn up like bad pennies. We're watching the legislative equivalent of “Sharknado 4” in real-time: we all know it's bad, the reviewers warned us, but the producers keep making sequels anyway.

The sequel’s trope always involves kicking the dog — wherein legislators blame utilities for the high costs the laws they passed add to customer bills.

There are some proposals that could have been borrowed from Venezuela, by way of California: instituting rate caps or cutting utilities’ return on equity, or ROE), the amount of profit regulators determine they may make in return for maintaining a safe, reliable energy system.

In New York, utilities are incentivized to earn more only if they create efficiencies or deliver operational performance that lowers the burden on ratepayers. Several bills have been proposed which will destroy this incentive and kill a win-win arrangement in which utilities are required to share earnings above their authorized ROE with customers while delivering the best service possible.

One bill copies a California process of determining a single ROE for all utilities, which will add a new annual cost that is better served by the existing, transparent rate-making process. That giant sucking sound you will hear is the investor capital critically needed to maintain and upgrade the grid fleeing New York for states with higher returns. New York already is in the bottom 10% of ROEs nationwide. There are more like-minded proposals, and every one of them will raise your bills and worsen reliability.

This outcome is familiar to many Hispanic families who, like mine, fled socialist nations where government interference destroyed functioning institutions.

This legislation does not drive affordability in NY

Believe no one who says these bills will create affordability. One state senator praised neighboring Connecticut for how it handled ratemaking in a state where residents pay the third-highest bills in the nation, in part caused by more than $1 billion-a-year in public benefits charges tacked onto their bills by lawmakers.

Perhaps the senator was unaware that the chief regulator she praised caused all five of the state’s utilities to have their credit ratings cut, before she resigned in disgrace for lying under oath and had most of her decisions invalidated in court.

In New York, state-mandated charges can account for more than half of a customer's bill and "have nothing to do with investments in the poles, people and wires that keep New Yorker's lights on and homes warm,” a recent article said.   

You cannot protect ratepayers from costs you're forcing them to pay. When you've mandated at least $350 billion in climate spending, piling on more isn’t helping.

New York has already seen prices rise because of misguided energy policies like the CLCPA. No one should greenlight a sequel.

Julio Fuentes is a New York city native and is chairman of the National Hispanic Energy Council.

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