Commentary: Lawmakers must stop pointing fingers and accept their role in rising utility bills
December 23rd, 2025
The utility companies aren’t to blame. Neither is the Public Service Commission. The state’s climate mandates are driving up costs.
By Justin Wilcox, For the Times Union
Dec 23, 2025
As utility bills rise across New York, state lawmakers are bracing for a problem of their own making. They see how frustrated ratepayers are with costs climbing faster than household budgets, and they know that with every legislative seat on the ballot next year, someone will take the blame.
As a result, legislators are already pointing fingers at the Public Service Commission, the utilities or any other convenient target — anything to avoid acknowledging their central role in driving up our monthly bills.
The reality they are deflecting from is simple: The Legislature has been adding billions of dollars in new mandates and climate-related spending to ratepayers through utility bills, rather than through the state budget process. Now that these costs are showing up as double-digit increases for many of their constituents, state legislators are abandoning responsibility.
The Climate Leadership and Community Protection Act is a clear example. Passed without a thorough cost analysis, it established sweeping mandates with no implementation plan and an unknown price tag. Agencies and regulators were left to fill in the blanks, and since its adoption, the Legislature has insisted that any backlash be directed elsewhere.
But with a recent PSC report, the picture is finally coming into focus. In 2023, the CLCPA surcharge on a typical residential electric bill ranged from 4.6% to 10.3%, meaning some households saw a double-digit increase in their bills solely because of the CLCPA. The impact grows even sharper in the 2024 dataset, where certain large industrial users now face CLCPA-driven cost burdens as high as 20.3% of their total bill. These are not projections, estimates, or hypotheticals; these are real numbers appearing on New Yorkers’ utility bills.
Yet rather than acknowledging their role, lawmakers portray the PSC as the villain or point to the utilities as if the utilities had decided to impose these costs. Regulators and utilities aren’t choosing to raise bills; they’re following laws the Legislature wrote.
When the state directs billions toward offshore wind subsidies, statewide transmission projects, renewable energy tiers, battery storage incentives, electric vehicle infrastructure, building electrification programs or the Clean Energy Fund, those costs come out of your pocket.
Hiding these costs in utility bills may be convenient for lawmakers, but it doesn’t make them disappear. As more mandates are phased in, more costs will be added, and when ratepayers demand answers, the state will once again insist that the PSC or the utilities are to blame.
New Yorkers deserve better. If the Legislature wants credit for ambitious policies, it must also fund them transparently and accept responsibility for their financial implications.