Keeping the Lights On for Whom?

Con Edison, Blackstone’s Big Score, and the Case for Public Power

Joel Sucher, 6–23–2026

On June 16, Governor Kathy Hochul stood in Queens to celebrate the completion of the Champlain Hudson Power Express — a 339-mile underground transmission line snaking from the hydropower reservoirs of Quebec down through Lake Champlain, beneath the Hudson River, and into a converter station in Astoria. It was, she said, “one of the first projects I championed as Governor, and a game changer when it comes to keeping the lights on, helping build a cleaner future and holding costs down.”

Standing alongside her was Jon Gray, President and Chief Operating Officer of Blackstone, the world’s largest alternative asset manager, with roughly $1.1 trillion under management. Gray called CHPE “a transformational project — bringing vital energy from Quebec to Queens — that will help lower emissions and meet almost one-fifth of New York City’s power needs.”

What neither said out loud: at the very moment New York was celebrating this clean energy milestone, nearly 414,000 Con Edison customers — in the same city, in the same Westchester communities — were at least 60 days behind on their utility bills, carrying a combined debt of more than $871 million. For them, keeping the lights on is not a policy achievement. It is a daily emergency.

These two facts — Blackstone’s triumphant infrastructure payday and the quiet catastrophe of hundreds of thousands of New Yorkers drowning in utility debt — are not unrelated. They are two sides of the same coin: what happens when the delivery of an essential public good is organized primarily around the extraction of private profit.

The Numbers Don’t Lie

The scale of the arrears crisis is staggering by any measure. Nearly 414,000 residential Con Edison customers are more than two months behind on bills, owing a collective $871 million. That includes 3.7 million electric and 1.1 million gas customers in New York City and Westchester; roughly one in nine residential customers in arrears deep enough to trigger shutoff proceedings.

And the bills keep going up. In January 2026, the state Public Service Commission approved new Con Edison rate increases — 9 percent for electric, 6 percent for gas — to take effect immediately, layered on top of a 12 percent electric rate hike the PSC approved in 2023, which itself followed a 13 percent increase approved in 2020. The rate case also revealed something that rarely gets discussed frankly in Albany: Con Ed was seeking, and received, a 9.4 percent return on equity for its shareholders — a figure that a coalition of elected officials from New York City and Westchester called “higher than previous increases” and flatly unreasonable given what ratepayers are already bearing.

New York State Assemblymember Sarahana Shrestha and State Senator Kristen Gonzalez put it bluntly in a February op-ed: “One-in-four residents experience a high energy burden, an unprecedented number of utility bills remain unpaid and families have to choose between keeping the lights on and putting food on the table.”

Enter Blackstone

Against this backdrop, the triumphalism surrounding CHPE demands scrutiny.

CHPE is developed and operated by Transmission Developers Inc. (TDI), a portfolio company of Blackstone. The line went into commercial operation on May 13, 2026, ahead of schedule, and is now governed by a 25-year contract with the New York State Energy Research and Development Authority (NYSERDA) — a contract with a strike price of $97.50 per megawatt-hour in its first year, with annual escalation built in. Over the life of that contract, the revenue flowing to Blackstone’s portfolio company will be underwritten, ultimately, by New York ratepayers through NYSERDA’s clean energy surcharge mechanism.

To be clear: CHPE is, on its technical merits, a genuine achievement. The 339-mile underground and underwater line — running through Lake Champlain, beneath the Hudson and Harlem Rivers, on railroad rights-of-way — is an engineering feat fifteen years in the making. At full capacity, it delivers 1,250 megawatts of clean Canadian hydropower to New York City, enough to power roughly one million homes and meet up to 20 percent of the city’s electricity needs. It is expected to reduce carbon emissions by 37 million metric tons through 2040. These are not trivial numbers.

But here is the structural question the celebration papers over: who captures the value?

The electricity flowing through CHPE is clean, but it is not free. The 25-year NYSERDA contract guarantees Blackstone’s investment a revenue stream that escalates annually, paid by the state’s ratepayers. The converter station sits in Astoria, Queens — a community that bears the physical footprint of the infrastructure while its residents remain among those most burdened by utility costs. And the broader pattern is one in which private capital — in this case, one of the most profitable private equity firms on the planet — positions itself as indispensable to the public interest, then collects guaranteed returns for a generation.

Jon Gray’s rhetoric about transformation and clean energy sits awkwardly alongside Blackstone’s business model, which is built on extracting maximum returns from long-duration infrastructure assets. Blackstone is not a public utility. It is not accountable to ratepayers. Its board answers to its investors.

A History Worth Remembering

None of this is new. The battle over who controls New York’s energy infrastructure — and who profits from it — is nearly a century old.

In 1931, in the depths of the Depression, Wall Street holding companies were profiteering off energy while ordinary New Yorkers struggled to pay their bills. Governor Franklin D. Roosevelt responded by creating the New York Power Authority as a public counterweight to private utilities like Con Edison. The result was immediate: electricity rates fell. NYPA, which today operates 17 generating facilities and more than 1,550 circuit miles of transmission lines — producing more than 80 percent of its power from clean renewable hydropower — continues to provide some of the cheapest electricity rates in New York State, and among the lowest in the nation.

The lesson of 1931 is available to anyone willing to look: public power is structurally cheaper than private power, because it does not carry the overhead of shareholder returns, executive compensation packages, and the imperative to maximize profit.

Con Edison’s own rate filings illustrate the point. Property taxes are cited as the largest driver of the current electric rate hike — Con Ed estimated its customers will pay over $3.2 billion in property taxes in 2026. But the second-largest driver, and the one that most directly reflects the utility’s private structure, is capital expenditure and the return on equity the PSC allows Con Ed to collect on every dollar it invests in the grid. At 9.4 percent, that return is not a neutral technical parameter. It is a wealth transfer — from the 3.7 million customers who have no choice but to use Con Edison to the shareholders who own it.

The Hochul Contradiction

Governor Hochul has tried to hold two positions simultaneously: champion of clean energy infrastructure and protector of beleaguered ratepayers. The CHPE celebration and the January rate hike approval happened in the same policy environment, under the same governor, regulated by the same Public Service Commission she appoints.

Her 2026 State of the State proposed a package of utility reforms — tying executive compensation to affordability metrics, requiring “gold-plated rate case” alternatives that keep costs below inflation, demanding greater transparency. These are not nothing. But they are reforms within the existing private utility framework, not a challenge to it.

Meanwhile, the Build Public Renewables Act of 2023 gave NYPA new authority to build and finance renewable energy projects directly — a genuine expansion of the public power model. Shrestha and Gonzalez have called for going further: unleashing NYPA with genuine ambition to compete with and ultimately replace private utilities for the provision of clean power at affordable rates. “NYPA has not demonstrated a willingness to act with the ambition that is necessary,” they wrote — a polite way of saying that having the authority is not the same as using it.

When Trump and then-Mayor-elect Zohran Mamdani met at the White House in November 2025, they found an unlikely point of agreement. “We have to get Con Edison to start lowering rates,” Trump said. That two politicians with almost nothing else in common could agree on this point captures the degree to which Con Ed’s pricing has become a cross-ideological political liability. But populist complaints about high bills, however sincere, are not a substitute for structural reform.

What Public Power Would Actually Mean

The case for public power is not sentimental. It is arithmetic.

NYPA sells electricity to the 51 municipal electric and rural cooperative systems around New York State at rates that, even after recent increases, remain the lowest in the state. The Preference Power rate — the statutorily authorized price at which NYPA sells hydropower to municipalities — sits at $14.57/MWh in 2026, rising to $23/MWh by 2031. Compare that to the $97.50/MWh strike price in CHPE’s NYSERDA contract, or to the blended residential rates Con Edison customers pay — and the difference is not marginal. It is structural.

A publicly owned and operated distribution utility serving New York City would eliminate the shareholder return on equity — currently 9.4 percent on billions of dollars of rate base — as a line item in customer bills. It would eliminate the compensation structures that Hochul herself has identified as excessive. It would, over time, be able to pass through the cost savings from public generation assets like CHPE directly to ratepayers, rather than allowing private intermediaries to capture that value.

The counterargument — that a public utility would be subject to political interference, would lack the capital to invest in the grid, would be less efficient than a private operator — runs directly into the evidence. NYPA has maintained and expanded one of the largest public power systems in the country for nearly a century. Municipal utilities across the country consistently outperform investor-owned utilities on reliability and affordability metrics. And as for capital: public authorities issue bonds backed by ratepayer revenue streams. That is precisely what NYSERDA just did for CHPE — guaranteed Blackstone 25 years of revenue. The only question is who captures the upside.

The 414,000

In the end, this is not primarily a story about infrastructure finance or regulatory policy. It is a story about 414,000 households — in the Bronx and Brooklyn, in Yonkers and Mount Vernon — where someone is making the calculation every month between paying the Con Edison bill and paying for something else: rent, groceries, medication, the school trip.

The arrears are not a failure of individual financial discipline. They are the predictable consequence of a system in which the price of an essential service is set, in significant part, by the need to generate returns for private shareholders; returns that, in the case of the latest Con Ed rate case, the utility’s own lawyers argued should be set at 9.4 percent.

The PSC largely agreed.

Jon Gray stood in Queens and called CHPE transformational. And in a narrow technical sense, it is: 1,250 megawatts of clean power where there was none before is not nothing. But transformation of the energy system that actually serves the 414,000 — the households behind on their bills, the residents of Astoria who live next to the converter station, the low-income customers in the Bronx who pay the highest utility burden relative to income in any borough — requires more than a new cable under the Hudson.

It requires asking who the grid is for.

In 1931, Franklin Roosevelt had an answer. He built NYPA because he understood that when private capital controls an essential public good, it will price that good to extract maximum return — and ordinary people will pay. Ninety-five years later, 414,000 Con Edison customers are paying the interest on that unlearned lesson, month after month, in the dark.

Note: I’ve been on Con Edison’s case for many years (and vice-versa). Links to previous reporting can be found in this Medium story

[embed]The Same Old Con: Why New Yorkers Need Public Power Now More Than Ever By Joel Sucher, 4–29–2026joelsucher.medium.com

Joel Sucher — a 1978 Guggenheim Fellow in Film — is a co-founder of Pacific Street Films (together with Steven Fischler) and has written for a number of platforms including American Banker, In These Times, Huffington Post, *Forward, [Covert Action](https://covertactionmagazine.com/author/joelsucher/) and Observer. com.*