Buffalo, N.Y. (WBEN) - As Republican lawmakers in New York State publicly decry Albany's energy plan ahead of its implementation this coming January, one Democratic lawmaker in the State Assembly feels no energy plan should be forced on the people until more work is done to ensure it is beneficial for the community at large.
Bill Conrad, representing Assembly District 140, has not been thrilled with the state's push to go all-electric, and the lack of proper understanding of what's taking place within the public.
"I certainly have been writing pieces and editorials and communicating to people, I talk to a lot of people in the HVAC community. There's a number of issues," said Conrad in an interview with WBEN. "Gas bans, the HEAT Act, we've kept that out for the last three sessions. There's been a huge push for that, and we said no as a Western New York delegation. And thankfully, the speaker listened. We did not put that up for a vote."
One of the biggest thing Conrad and the Western New York delegation did was when all-electric buildings were being discussed, lawmakers made sure there were carve outs for places like hospitals, restaurants and schools because of the infamous Christmas Weekend Blizzard of 2022.
"Also, we put in a piece in that particular budget bill that said you have to have the grid say you have 100% reliability. Well, when you have winter storms like we do, and power outages, you can't guarantee that," Conrad noted.
Conrad has also been fighting with the State Department of Environmental Conservation (DEC) about hydrofluorocarbon (HFC) regulations, because he feels it has been a changeover that was more extreme than what the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) under President Biden had put in, in a timeline that wasn't attainable.
"There's lots of these, I would say, hiccups that are happening as agencies, boards and different groups interpret the CLCPA [Climate Leadership and Community Protection Act], which, again, was passed in 2019 before my tenure. And that's very frustrating," Conrad added.
One things Conrad was happy about recently was the New York State Energy Research and Development Authority (NYSERDA) not dismissing a need for gas during a recent meeting.
"They know they need it for the next 40 years. And with the energy consumption that's about to be projected that we're starting to see, we're going to see a 100% increase in the next five years, mainly due to data centers and other things," Conrad noted.
"We used to judge megawatts based on a household. Now it's per-person, so the need for energy is increasing and the updating and so on. There's lots of angles to this, there's lots of things going on. It's a lot of energy to make sure that our public is aware, and that's where I find it the most frustration for the folks. I get calls to my office, I talk to people in the street. My staff gets stopped at board meetings and other things asking questions, and the building policy code was not what we had put in law. That's the real frustrating thing for me."
If the state does not feel it is ready to make the jump to all-electric, Conrad strongly feels there is no need to push it through and implement the energy plan come Jan. 1.
"We've seen that with the school buses, we've seen it with the ACT [Advanced Clean Trucks] trucking rule. Now the HFCs is on the thing. You've got lots of these things starting to come to roost, and I would agree with NYSERDA's position on their energy plan that we can't just dismiss it in the next 40 years. We're going to need it," he said.
Conrad adds New York should focus on insulating and energy consumption as a community, and make that more of a priority than forcing a policy from up top.
As the days continue to dwindle before the new year, Conrad says he talks to his colleagues on both sides of the aisle all the time with the hope of coming to some sort of sensible energy plan that will benefit all New Yorkers.
"I would say across the board from Pat Gallivan - he and I were working on the HFC thing together - I talked to Paul Bologna, I've talked to Sen. [Rob] Ortt, we share a district. We're constantly talking, [Joe] Sempolinski, we talk all the time, and this is one of the biggest topics all the time," Conrad added. "It's about, 'We're worried about the HEAT Act, we're worried about this all-electric buildings code.' There's nothing we could have done at that particular point."
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