Sweating in the Dark

The Bronx Power Cut Wasn’t from the Weather, It Was from the Policy

Last week, Con Edison cut power to sections of the Bronx, Queens, and Staten Island not because a storm knocked out lines or a transformer failed, but because surging demand from air conditioners on a sweltering day overwhelmed the system. Officials framed it as a prudent, temporary measure to prevent wider collapse. New Yorkers, sweating in the dark, experienced something more revealing: a preview of the engineered fragility that awaits if net-zero policies continue their relentless push toward full electrification.

The heat should not have been an issue; New York often has very hot days in the summer. The power cut was the predictable result of a grid being asked to do too much with too little reliable base-load supply. A heat wave, or a winter deep freeze, expose this mismatch. Now add millions of electric vehicles charging simultaneously and millions of homes swapping gas or oil furnaces for heat pumps that draw massive power on the coldest days, and the Bronx event will no longer be an anomaly but rather the new normal.

It wasn’t always like this. For most of the twentieth century, America’s electric grid operated on straightforward engineering principles. Utilities were vertically integrated, regulated monopolies with a clear mandate: deliver reliable power at reasonable cost. They built excess capacity, maintained spinning reserves, and kept dispatchable plants—coal, hydro, nuclear, and later natural gas—ready to ramp when demand spiked. The Rural Electrification Administration (REA) showed what deliberate public investment could achieve when the goal was abundance rather than austerity. Farmers who once pumped water by hand or lit homes with kerosene gained reliable power that boosted productivity and living standards. The grid served people; it did not demand that people serve the grid by constantly adjusting their behaviour or persuading citizens to accept blackouts as the price of (climate) virtue.

That model delivered extraordinary reliability because it respected physics. Supply had to match demand in real time. Planners overbuilt for peaks and treated reliability as a non-negotiable engineering requirement, not a political bargaining chip.

Today’s trajectory inverts those priorities. Aggressive net-zero timelines in states like New York accelerate the retirement of firm, dispatchable generation while mandating rapid additions of unreliable wind, solar, and battery storage whose output cannot be scheduled. At the same time, policies drive electrification of transportation and heating. The result is a system asked to absorb enormous new loads precisely when the most reliable resources are being removed.

Meredith Angwin has diagnosed this fragility with unmatched clarity. In her seminal work, Shorting the Grid, she explains that modern electricity systems are not magic batteries capable of absorbing any amount of variable generation. They are complex machines that require firm power, resources that can be dispatched on command, to maintain stability across seasons and weather events. Wind and solar are good energy producers but poor capacity resources without massive overbuild or backup. Where it went wrong, Angwin argues, was in the combination of market designs that undervalue reliability attributes and policies that treat existing dispatchable plants as disposable. Forward capacity markets and renewable mandates created (and still create) incentives to retire reliable coal and nuclear units before adequate replacements existed. Grid operators and policymakers began relying on hope: hope that wind and solar would perform when needed, hope that batteries would scale affordably, hope that consumers would curtail usage during shortfalls. This is not engineering. This is not a rational approach to something as fundamental and critical for modern life as the grid; this is wishful thinking dressed up as progress.

Angwin’s central warning is that the grid’s stability depends on diversity and firmness, not ideological purity. When you remove baseload and peaking plants faster than you can replace their capabilities, you invite cascading instability. The Bronx curtailment is a small example. Scale it up with widespread EV adoption and heat pump mandates, and blackouts move from inconvenience to systemic risk. Demand response programs and virtual power plants, often sold as innovative solutions, frequently function as tools to manage scarcity by pressing consumers into serving the grid rather than the reverse. Angwin repeatedly emphasizes that true resilience comes from building supply that matches demand without constant behavioural coercion.

The fix, she contends, is straightforward but politically difficult: restore engineering-first planning; value firm capacity properly in markets; retain and extend the life of reliable nuclear and gas plants while pursuing new firm generation; accelerate transmission buildout to move power where needed. Finally, stop treating electricity as a political instrument for emissions targets and start treating it as the foundational infrastructure for modern life.

If these policies proceed without course correction, the instability will not remain localized. A hot summer afternoon in the Bronx becomes a cold winter morning across the Northeast when heat pumps strain the system at the same moment solar output is zero and wind is calm. Cascading failures become more likely when the buffer of dispatchable generation has been deliberately thinned. The costs will fall first on the least able to absorb them: working families, small businesses, and the elderly who cannot easily relocate or install private generators.

The historical lesson is clear. Grids that prioritized engineering reliability and treated electricity as a foundation for human flourishing delivered broad prosperity. Grids subordinated to rigid emissions timelines and market designs that undervalue firmness deliver higher costs, periodic shortages, and a quiet transfer of burden from producers to consumers. The Bronx event was a small demonstration of this shift. Ignoring the reason for it guarantees the power will go out again, and more often.

Policymakers still have a choice. They can restore the grid’s original purpose—providing abundant, reliable power that frees people rather than conscripting them—or they can continue redesigning it as an instrument of centralized climate targets. The lights in the Bronx went out for a reason. The sweating citizens who endured it deserve better than more darkness in the name of progress. America once lit up its farms and cities through deliberate, physics-respecting, “public good” investment. It can do so again but only if ideology yields to engineering and electricity is once again seen as critical infrastructure not just another commodity.

I’ll be speaking with Meredith Angwin on The Nemeth Report Podcast in a few days. Subscribe to the podcast to receive a notification when the conversation drops!