A number of green energy companies and advocacy groups have petitioned the New York Public Service Commission (NYPSC) to renegotiate contracts with state utilities as rising costs could threaten the viability of numerous projects, according to UtilityDive.- The requests to increase prices in established offshore wind and other green energy contracts in New York could bump up residential electricity rates by 2.5% and 1.5%, respectively, or a cumulative $4.67 per month, according to New York State Energy Research and Development Authority (NYSERDA).
- “New York has outlined ambitious targets for clean energy generation and transmission, and the projects that have sought these modifications to their contracts are crucial parts of those targets. If these projects are not able to move forward, yes, it would endanger the goals New York has established,” Anne Reynolds, executive director of Alliance for Clean Energy New York (ACENY), told the Daily Caller News Foundation.
A number of green energy companies and advocacy groups have petitioned the New York Public Service Commission (NYPSC) to renegotiate contracts with state utilities as rising costs could threaten the viability of numerous projects, according to UtilityDive.
The NYPSC, the state’s utility regulator, is reviewing requests to adjust deal terms for more than 90 offshore wind, solar and onshore wind projects that would sell power to New York and are projected to supply 25% of the state’s load by 2030, UtilityDive reported. Numerous companies and advocacy groups supporting the developments are seeking to increase the prices of their previously-inked deals to combat rising supply costs and interest rates, with some saying that the costs may threaten the financial viability of their projects if they are not allowed to increase their prices to generate more revenue.
Orsted, British Petroleum (BP), Equinor, the Alliance for Clean Energy New York (ACENY) and Clean Path New York (CPNY) all filed petitions with the NYPSC requesting permission to renegotiate their contracts on account of these unexpected costs, UtilityDive reported. The spiking costs could threaten the viability of numerous green energy projects that the state is set to depend on for electricity production in the coming years.
On average, offshore wind developers are seeking to boost their contract prices by 48%, onshore wind companies are hoping to raise their prices by an average of 71% and solar companies are hoping to increase their prices by 63%, according to the New York State Energy Research and Development Authority (NYSERDA).
The requests to increase prices in established offshore wind and other green energy contracts in New York could bump up residential electricity rates by 2.5% and 1.5%, respectively, or a cumulative $4.67 per month, according to NYSERDA. A coalition of New York utility providers has also suggested that the NYPSC make minor changes to contract terms on a project-by-project basis, or that the utility regulator use inflation-sensitive formulas to make adjustments to the deals.
“Like other developers at the forefront of this emerging US industry, Equinor and BP have seen the estimated costs of our projects rise sharply due to inflation, supply chain disruptions, permitting and interconnection delays, rising interest rates and other outside factors,” an Equinor spokesperson told the Daily Caller News Foundation. “While we have worked to manage these issues, given the unique moment in our global economy, this is an industry-wide issue that cannot be overcome at the project level.”
The problems facing green energy companies in New York may spell trouble for the Biden administration’s climate agenda, which is similar to that of New York. The state’s goals of decarbonizing its electricity production by 2040 and reducing greenhouse gas emissions by 85% relative to 1995 levels by 2050 are slightly less ambitious than the Biden administration’s aim to have the U.S. energy sector reach net-zero carbon dioxide emissions by 2035 and the overall U.S. economy reach net-zero by 2050.
“New York has outlined ambitious targets for clean energy generation and transmission, and the projects that have sought these modifications to their contracts are crucial parts of those targets. If these projects are not able to move forward, yes, it would endanger the goals New York has established,” Anne Reynolds, executive director of ACENY, told the Daily Caller News Foundation.
“The cost to ratepayers is an immense concern,” Reynolds continued, adding that “the need to combat the ongoing climate crisis necessitated the aggressive timeline that New York has established, but the burden of paying for this should not fall entirely on the ratepayers” and that ACENY is “working with [its] legislative partners and like-minded organizations to prevent this from happening.”
Green energy companies have requested that utility regulators across the U.S. relieve them of some inflationary burdens on their projects, including developers in California, Connecticut, Hawaii, Indiana, Maine, Maryland, Massachusetts, Michigan, New Jersey, New Mexico and Rhode Island, according to NYSERDA.
“Our decision to petition for renegotiation is driven by unrelenting economic challenges and we do not take this step lightly. “Equinor and BP’s offshore wind projects are on track to power 2 million New York homes with renewable offshore wind power,” a BP spokesperson told the DCNF. “We remain strongly committed to our projects and our partners in New York and are optimistic that together we can find a path forward in the weeks and months ahead.”
Orsted, CPNY, Democratic New York Gov. Kathy Hochul’s office, NYPSC and the White House all did not respond immediately to the DCNF’s request for comment.
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Two Storms, One Harvest
Every food crisis in living memory has been a one-shock event. The 2008 price spike was a commodity bubble. The 2020 shortages were a logistics failure. The 2022 grain scare was a war on one exporter’s ports. Each time, the system bent, adjusted, and recovered, and each time the experts assured us afterward that global markets are simply too big and too diversified to fail.
What nobody in Washington seems eager to discuss is that 2026 is shaping up to be something the modern food system has never actually faced. Two independent shocks, one climatic and one geopolitical, are converging on the same harvest cycle at the same time. Not sequentially. Simultaneously.
Start with the weather. The Pacific Ocean is currently building toward what forecasters now openly call a record event. NOAA’s Climate Prediction Center puts the odds of at least a strong El Niño near 88 percent, with roughly two in three odds it reaches “very strong” status, the tier reserved for perhaps three or four events in the entire satellite era. Every major global model now projects a median peak in Super El Niño territory, and most of them project it exceeding the 2015-16 event, which until now held the modern record. Sea surface anomalies were already brushing the super threshold in mid-July, months before these events normally peak. The atmosphere has already shifted into El Niño mode, and the event is forecast to crest in late fall and early winter.
This is not about “climate change.” It’s about the standard cycles of weather, and the cycle we’re currently in is one that has likely devastated societies in the past. We’re better prepared as a society today, but not all Americans are equally prepared.
Serious households have started doing the quiet math on their own. Grocery bills tell part of the story, and the forecast maps tell the rest, which is why long-term food storage has moved from fringe hobby to mainstream line item in the family budget, with established suppliers like Heaven’s Harvest seeing demand from people who five years ago would have rolled their eyes at the idea. That instinct is not paranoia. It is pattern recognition, and the pattern is worth walking through carefully.
Editor’s Note: Heaven’s Harvest IS a sponsor, but the warnings of this article are real and would be written even if we didn’t have a survival food sponsor. With that said, those who take advantage of what they offer can use promo code “Patriot” for 15% off.
The Fertilizer Clock Is Already Running
While the Pacific warms, the second shock has been unfolding in the Strait of Hormuz. The conflict with Iran turned the world’s most important energy chokepoint into a contested waterway, and the consequences reach far beyond the gas pump. Roughly a third of global fertilizer trade moves through Hormuz, and the disruption sent urea prices up 86 percent year over year by March, with a 53 percent jump in a single month.
The World Bank projects energy prices rising about 24 percent in 2026 and fertilizer about 31 percent. By its own accounting, fertilizer prices ran 35 percent higher in the first five months of this year than the same period last year.
Here is the mechanism the nightly news will not explain. Fertilizer is not a grocery item. It is a time-delayed input. The nitrogen a farmer in Iowa or Punjab could not afford to apply this spring does not show up as a problem this spring. It shows up as a thinner harvest six to twelve months later.
The World Bank’s own food security brief concedes that the effects of reduced applications earlier this season “are likely to become visible only later in harvest outcomes.” Translate that from institutional language into plain English and it means this. The damage is already done, it is already in the ground, and we are simply waiting for it to arrive on the shelf.
Now check the calendar. Six to twelve months from the spring planting season lands us squarely in late 2026 and early 2027. Which is precisely when the strongest El Niño in the instrumental record is forecast to peak, bringing its signature droughts to Southeast Asia, Australia, southern Africa, northern Brazil, and South Asia, the very regions that grow the world’s rice, sugar, and oilseeds.
The World Bank warns openly that a strong El Niño “could disrupt multiple crop belts simultaneously” on top of the conflict-driven input costs. Their baseline projection assumes the Middle East disruptions ease by autumn. What in the last two years of Middle East history suggests that assumption is safe?
The System Has No Slack Left
The comfortable answer is that global markets always adjust. But adjustment requires slack, and the slack is gone. Global cereal production is expected to decline from last year’s records even before El Niño does its work. The UN World Food Programme, hardly a den of right-wing preppers, is calling this the most significant disruption to its supply chains since Covid and the invasion of Ukraine, and its supply chain director put the stakes bluntly.
Today’s supply chain challenges are tomorrow’s hunger crisis.
There is also a political dimension that markets cannot price. When food gets scarce, governments do not behave like economists. They behave like politicians. Export bans, hoarding mandates, and panic buying at the national level turned the modest rice shortfall of 2008 into a global crisis, and analysts are already warning that import-dependent nations are the first dominoes.
The 2015-16 Super El Niño, a far weaker event than what is now forecast, threw tens of millions into food stress across Africa and Asia. This one is projected to be stronger, and it arrives with fertilizer already rationed by price and shipping lanes already contested by missiles.
What Joseph Knew
Scripture does not treat preparation for lean years as faithlessness. It treats it as wisdom delivered in advance to those willing to act on it.
Behold, there come seven years of great plenty throughout all the land of Egypt: And there shall arise after them seven years of famine; and all the plenty shall be forgotten in the land of Egypt.
Joseph did not respond to that warning with a hashtag or a committee. He stored grain during the years of abundance, and when the famine came, Egypt stood while its neighbors begged. The lesson is not that famine is certain. It is that the time to prepare is precisely when preparation still looks optional.
Nobody who filled a pantry in a year of plenty has ever regretted it, and nobody standing in an empty aisle has ever been glad he waited for certainty.
None of this calls for panic, and panic is the enemy of sound judgment anyway. It calls for the same unglamorous prudence our grandparents considered ordinary. Keep some cash margin, know your local growers, and put real food in deep storage while it is cheap and available, because the entire arc of this story is that cheap and available is a closing window.
Families looking for a straightforward place to start can visit Heaven’s Harvest and use promo code Patriot for 15 percent off long-term storable food. The forecasts may yet soften, the strait may yet reopen, and we should pray they do. But hope is a fine thing to hold and a foolish thing to eat.