VIDEO: 10 Facts About ConEd Every New Yorker Should Know

It's finally cooled off here in New York City after a brutal heatwave last week. Though we never lost power, ConEd did brown us out for several days, reducing our voltage to keep the grid on life support and melting all our ice cream.

Thousands of New Yorkers did lose power, however. Mostly in the Bronx, Queens, and southern Brooklyn. At least three people died in their homes. Perhaps more; heat-related deaths tend to be hugely undercounted.

This is ConEd's fault.

No, ConEd didn't cause global warming—though they're not exactly trying to stop it, either.

But ConEd is foremost responsible for the abject state of NYC's electric grid, which is among the oldest grids in the world and in dire need of repair.

An ancient electric grid fares poorly in extreme heat. This is well-known. And yet ConEd's spent the last twenty years ignoring the explosive elephant buried under New York's streets, choosing instead to raise rates on customers and shuttle evermore money to BlackRock, their largest shareholder.

Now the public is paying for it in more ways than one.

I've been reading up on ConEd. Going beyond the basics to uncover the many shady ways they screw over their customers, obstruct the clean energy transition, and deploy their leverage as a state-granted monopoly to withhold information that the public desperately needs to know.

I fucking hate ConEd, and I'm going to spend the rest of the summer talking about it.

Green Juice readers and viewers can look forward to tons of content covering a variety of nauseating topics, such as...

• How the electric distribution wires buried under New York City are coated in flammable oil and paper that's degraded over the course of 40+ years, and that's why manholes are now exploding at random all over the city
• How ConEd is demanding private battery developers pay what's effectively a bribe of tens of millions of dollars to plug their grid-saving technology into the energy grid
• How ConEd's massive natural gas business heavily incentivizes them to make sure NYC keeps burning climate-killing gas forever, lest ConEd enters the dreaded Utility Death Spiral
• How ConEd refuses to provide vital information to the public about the state the of grid in order to inflate interconnection fees
• And more!

The thing is, none of the above is unique to ConEd.

ConEd is just a for-profit utility company doing what for-profit utilities do.

Chances are, your utility is doing all of this stuff, too.

But I'm just a myopic New Yorker, so I'm calling it like I see it.

Welcome to Fuck ConEd Summer.