Utilities, whether investor-owned or publicly controlled, must serve everyone in the community. And the Hudson Valley is far more than just a leftist environmentalist enclave—it’s home to working families, small businesses, and industries that depend on reliable, affordable energy to survive.
But Assemblymember Sarahana Shrestha’s Hudson Valley Power Authority Act (HVPA) is not a pragmatic energy policy—it’s an ideological experiment.
In an inauspicious preview of what “energy democracy” will look like, Shrestha has blasted any opposition to her Hudson Valley Power Authority Act agenda as “misinformation.”
But the real misinformation is her refusal to address the actual consequences of her bill: using the crisis of rising energy costs to justify a hostile takeover of Central Hudson, one that could increase costs, disrupt service, and impose a rigid ideological agenda that prioritizes wind and solar over affordability and reliability. Her bill treats 90,000 natural gas households and businesses as an endangered species—not customers whose needs should be met.
While Assemblymember Shrestha invokes Franklin Delano Roosevelt to support her arguments, she ignores a fundamental truth: FDR believed in abundant, affordable energy as a foundation for economic growth. When he advocated for public power in 1932, he was backing the creation of the Tennessee Valley Authority (TVA)—a model that thrived because it embraced a balanced energy mix, including nuclear, coal, natural gas, and hydro. TVA never pursued energy austerity—Shrestha does.
Shrestha’s rebuttal fails to address the following indisputable truths:
- Massena Electric customers still worry about their bills despite Shrestha’s claim in September that “no one worries about their bills anymore.”
- The informal evaluation of Central Hudson’s acquisition shared by Shrestha suggests potential shortfalls in servicing debt could be covered by either: a surcharge on ratepayers (i.e. higher energy bills) or state and county budgets (taxpayers). Either way, residents and businesses will foot the bill.
- Public officials are being pressured to unconditionally endorse the HVPA without any verified cost-benefit analysis or rate comparison between HVPA or Central Hudson.
- The HVPA Board and Observatory are stacked with politicians, activists and academics – not engineers or grid operators.
- Before a single meeting of the “democratic” HVPA Board and Observatory can be held, the HVPA bill has already mandated a study to set a timeline for the “phaseout” of natural gas infrastructure.
- Actually existing public utilities are blaming Shrestha’s “Build Public Renewables” Act for threatened rate hikes. (Will they be attacked by Shrestha for spreading misinformation?)
- Public power utilities regularly renegotiate PILOTs; there is nothing binding that says that tax payments will remain equal to what Central Hudson pays now in perpetuity.
- The HVPA campaign was crafted before input was sought from the IBEW Local 320, which represents hundreds of Central Hudson workers. Five months after the bill was introduced and publicized, an email blast was sent out asking if any DSA followers knew anyone who worked at Central Hudson.
Hudson Valley Residents Deserve Honest Answers
Hudson Valley residents and businesses don’t need blind ideology masquerading as an energy cure-all. They need representatives who are willing to tackle the underlying causes of high energy prices, shifting away from the destructive course that was set by the climate and energy policies of Andrew Cuomo and Robert F. Kennedy Jr. in the 2010s, and toward the truly anti-entropic and abundant vision of FDR. The HVPA remains an experiment that is too risky and costly to be conducted on our dime.