Kingston, NY – Central Hudson, a corporate monopoly that delivers energy to much of Mid-Hudson Valley, submitted a rate case filing on July 31, 2023, to request an increase of delivery rates by 31.9% for electricity and 29.2% for gas. The Public Service Commission (PSC), the state body responsible for regulating investor-owned utilities, met today to approve increases of 16.5% and 20% respectively – an average increase of approximately $13 per electric bill and $12 per gas bill. Assemblymember Sarahana Shrestha released the following statement:

“Allowing the state to regulate privately-owned utilities was a compromise proposed by a business magnate in the early 1900s, when public ownership of energy was an increasingly popular demand,” said Shrestha, “The idea was that utilities would retain the right to make profits, but the state would regulate them to ensure fair rates. The reason this compromise was pushed by the utilities is that it would also diminish the demands for public ownership, which it did. Almost a century later, what we’ve seen is a total failure of that compromise: corporate utilities get rate increases and provide poor service, while large holding companies amass them across the world as purely profit-making assets.

I can attest as the only state legislator who joined the Central Hudson rate case as an intervener and got a close look at the ways in which utilities can pass costs to ratepayers, that state regulation of corporate monopolies is wholly inadequate to ensure fair rates and public well-being. We should be deeply concerned that not only are for-profit utilities ill-suited to provide energy as a service, they’re a huge impediment to a just energy transition that needs to happen quickly. Every June is hotter than the one before, climate-caused disruptions are already here, and no number of cooling and warming centers will adequately protect people in our new reality. At a time when every building should be able to have comfortable temperatures as we move away from fossil fuels to stabilize weather patterns, the unpredictable cost and reliability of electricity under corporate utilities is a major obstacle. Energy cannot serve its basic function of healthy lives and a stable economy as long as it’s in the service of profit. Corporations like Central Hudson will always pursue false solutions that allow rate increases – that’s the logic of profit.

My intervention in the Central Hudson rate case was not without some wins. For example, the PSC agreed with my testimony that ratepayers shouldn’t bear the cost of Central Hudson putting solar panels on their facilities, and instead of approving rate increases for multiple years through settlement negotiations, rates were approved for only up to June 2025 through a litigated track. The problem is that the scope of these wins through the existing regulatory system is often too little and too late, considering the role energy plays in our daily lives and in the continued viability of our neighborhoods. My office will continue to intervene in future rate cases, including the one Central Hudson plans to file next for increases in subsequent years after June 2025, but to truly protect ratepayers, we must right a past wrong and restore energy as a public good. We’ll be starting with my bill, the Hudson Valley Power Authority Act, to replace Central Hudson with a publicly-owned utility.”