When we talk about energy infrastructure, the picture most people see is concrete and steel – a transmission line, a substation, a power plant, a data center the size of a small city. What they don’t see, and what New York is uniquely positioned to lead on, is the infrastructure you don’t have to build. That’s energy efficiency. And in 2026, it remains the state’s most underappreciated resource – treated as a program to trim rather than infrastructure to protect.
I have argued that efficiency is not a discretionary program but core infrastructure for a modern, competitive and resilient energy system. The response told me the frame is landing. People in this industry already know we cannot build our way out of the demand we are facing, and that the moment calls for leaning in – visibly, and at scale.
You can see it in the work. New York’s Public Service Commission (PSC) recently directed Con Edison to meet a forecasted New York City capacity shortfall by evaluating energy efficiency and demand response alongside transmission and generation. Whatever that proceeding concludes, the instruction itself is the point: efficiency now has to be answered for, not assumed away. The New York Power Authority’s efficiency portfolio is scaling toward $300 million a year. NYSERDA, Con Edison, and National Grid together run one of the most ambitious low- and moderate-income efficiency portfolios in the country. The institutions are doing the work. The question is whether our political vocabulary catches up – and whether we fund it to grow.
New York is the right place to lean in. Residential electricity rates run roughly 50 percent above the national average, close to half a million households are 60 days or more behind on their bills, large-load interconnection requests are growing as never before, and federal support for state energy programs faces real uncertainty.
The political mood is unambiguous: bills are too high. It is reshaping rate cases and coloring every state energy decision. New Yorkers are right to be frustrated.
The question is what to do about it. Cutting efficiency programs in the name of affordability is the exact wrong move – it lowers a budget line by sacrificing the very bill savings that budget was meant to deliver. It is the policy equivalent of trying to lose weight by eating more dessert.
Efficiency is the rare intervention that works on both sides of the affordability equation at once. A weatherized home – with modern insulation, sealed ducts, high-performance windows, and efficient appliances – simply uses less energy. Bills go down. Comfort goes up. And every kilowatt-hour and therm we do not use is one less unit the grid has to build for, generate, and deliver – less new transmission, fewer peaker plants, and less pressure to socialize the cost of data center load growth onto residential ratepayers. No other resource moves both numbers in the right direction at once. Almost everything else trades one off against the other.
It is also the only resource that can move today, at scale – cheaper than generation, faster than transmission, and consistent with every priority in today’s energy debate: abundance, reliability, competitiveness, lower costs.
None of that is an argument against building. Demand is rising, and some new infrastructure is coming. The question is how much, and whether we size it honestly. Efficiency is a planning resource, not a contingency resource: it won’t solve a firm reliability need that materializes next winter, but it determines how large that need is in the first place. Count efficiency and flexible load before you set the capacity number, not after the steel is ordered. Skip that step and you overbuild, and ratepayers carry the excess for decades. That is the difference between building and building smart.
Treating efficiency like infrastructure changes the politics around it. You don’t defund a bridge mid-construction because the budget got tight – the cost of stopping is higher than the cost of finishing. The same logic applies to the weatherization and grid-interactive building work now underway across New York. These are not expenses; they are assets, producing returns – avoided generation, transmission, arrears, shutoffs, peaker emissions – for years after the money is spent.
New York has, to its credit, made real moves in this direction – the Regional Greenhouse Gas Initiative backfill that stabilized EmPower+ through 2027, and the PSC’s recent multi-year authorization of billions for utility and NYSERDA programs, with weatherization recognized as a first step toward both affordability and managing load growth. The task now is to do more, faster.
Two things would help most.
First, fund efficiency with the certainty the moment requires. Programs like Clean Green Schools, the Weatherization Assistance Program, and EmPower+ are central to affordability and belong in every budget conversation – not as a discretionary add, but as a baseline. Contractors, manufacturers, and families cannot plan against a program that might not exist in eighteen months. Stable, predictable funding is what turns a program into infrastructure. And we should be honest about the sequence: make the programs we have deliver what they were designed to, and the case for scaling them makes itself.
Second, make the programs we have reach the people they’re for. Access is not adoption. New York has just committed billions to weatherizing homes over five years, with a substantial share aimed at the low- and moderate-income households furthest behind on their bills. Whether that money delivers depends on whether those households ever get into the program. Too many won’t – not because they don’t want lower bills, but because the burden is on them to find the form, understand the eligibility, and trust the offer. That is a delivery-design problem, and it is solvable. Utilities already hold the data that identifies who needs this most; they should use it to go to the customer, instead of waiting for the customer to come to them. And the contractors who do this work – most of them small businesses across the state – need steady volume and predictable rules.
The Alliance to Save Energy was founded in 1977 on a bipartisan premise that still holds: the country is wasting energy it cannot afford to waste, and the smartest infrastructure investment is often the one that lets us avoid building the next plant. Nearly fifty years on, the argument has only gotten stronger. Federal resources are tightening, demand is climbing, bills are rising, and states are the front line.
New York can lead this. It already has the institutions, the appetite, and – increasingly – the framing. What it needs now is the courage to call efficiency what it is: infrastructure, and to fund it the way it funds everything else it builds.
