This story originally appeared in New York Focus, a nonprofit news publication investigating power in New York. Sign up for their newsletter here.
NEW YORK STATE · August 7, 2024
New York’s Energy Transition Faces a Staffing Shortage
The state’s energy regulator has more work than ever — and far fewer employees than it did three decades ago.
By Colin Kinniburgh , New York Focus
After her electricity got shut off for the sixth time in two years, on New Year’s Day 2020, Julia Schell couldn’t take it anymore.
She’d already been relying on benefits like food stamps to make ends meet, and she had a son to provide for in Manhattan’s Alphabet City neighborhood. Her energy bills sometimes spiked for no apparent reason, and she occasionally fell behind on paying them. Over and over, when she sought help from the city to keep her lights on, she felt herself trapped in a maze of bureaucracy.
This time, Con Edison didn’t restore her power for two days. She reached out to local politicians who connected her with the Public Utility Law Project, or PULP, a consumer advocacy group that petitioned to reduce what she owed. The group eventually set her up with a state-run discount program for low-income residents. She now gets close to $50 a month off her bill, cutting it roughly in half.
“That money goes directly into feeding myself and my son,” Schell told New York Focus this spring. (Con Ed spokesperson Jamie McShane declined to comment on Schell’s case, but said the company does not disconnect residential customers in severe cold or hot weather.)
Even with the advocacy group’s help, Schell might never have seen those savings if it weren’t for an agency that she’d never heard of: the New York State Department of Public Service, or DPS, which keeps watch on virtually all of New York’s utility companies, whether they distribute energy, water, or telecoms. The 500-person agency oversees the program Schell uses, which has provided roughly one million low-income customers with bill discounts since it began in 2016.
DPS does much more than keeping energy bills affordable. Agency employees field daily complaints from irate customers, inspect gas pipelines for safety, and manage a slew of efforts to help transition New York away from fossil fuels.
And the agency’s responsibility has grown. But its resources have barely budged. According to interviews with former agency commissioners and staffers, budget documents, and state data, DPS’s budgeted staffing levels stayed flat over the last decade, while vacancies and turnover increased. Those shortages have held up everything from clean energy permits to the distribution of pandemic-era aid for customers in debt, New York Focus found. And, as outrage at utilities has mounted, small nonprofits have found themselves picking up the agency’s slack in its role as a public watchdog.
“We need to make sure that people are getting the right amount of benefits so that they can afford their utilities.”
—Laurie Wheelock, Public Utility Law Project
As of January 2023, the agency had 462 full-time employees — far behind its peak of more than 700 in the 1990s. DPS staffing took a hit during the pandemic, when then-Governor Andrew Cuomo ordered a hiring freeze across all state agencies. According to agency spokesperson Jim Denn, DPS has made “a concerted effort to fill vacancies” since then. Those efforts have paid off with 43 new hires so far this year, he said, aided by a recently launched program that temporarily waives certain hiring requirements across state agencies. But dozens of positions remain vacant.
“Staffing at the Department has been sufficient to meet the Department’s core mission,” Denn wrote in an email. DPS declined repeated requests to make officials available for an interview.
The department’s funding levels are ultimately decided by the governor and legislature, who boosted DPS’s operating budget by $30 million this year — its first big bump since at least 2008 — to back up new climate legislation that gives the department even more responsibility for the state’s energy transition. That includes a nearly 20 percent increase in funding for personnel.
DPS is “clearly shy” of the staffing it needs in certain positions, said John Howard, who previously chaired the commission that the department works alongside.
Staffing isn’t always top of mind for the legislature when it gives the agency new responsibilities, admitted Senate energy committee chair Kevin Parker.
“I don’t think that any of us, when we’re putting bills in … are saying, ‘I wonder if they have enough staffing for this?’” said Parker, when asked about shortages this spring. He said he is aware of DPS’s staffing challenges and has championed increasing the department’s funding.
“I think they need more people,” he said.
dps staff’s role tends to be overshadowed by the Public Service Commission, its public-facing counterpart whose seven members decide the fate of tens of billions of dollars in utility spending each year. Utilities pass most of those costs to New Yorkers through their monthly bills. The commission, a version of which exists in every state, is meant to serve as an independent check on the companies, which hold a monopoly on distributing energy in the areas they serve.
In some ways, the commissioners’ role mirrors that of judges: They’re appointed by the governor, serve fixed terms, and can rule freely on matters brought before them. But their power lies mainly in yes-no votes at public monthly meetings. It’s DPS staffers who do the legwork of actually crafting the rules — for things like raising customers’ cable bills or ensuring the safety of a new pipeline — that the commission votes on.
“The department staff are the worker bees,” said Laurie Wheelock, executive director of PULP, the group that helped Schell with her bills.
“It’s a really, really important agency, both in terms of energy affordability and the transition to renewable energy,” said Jessica Azulay, program director of the climate group Alliance for a Green Economy. “The amount of responsibility that they hold for this transition is very large.”
When an electric company wants to hike the rates it charges customers, to cover major projects, it seeks approval from the Public Service Commission. These rate cases are the commission’s bread and butter — as well as DPS’s. The department’s staffers review the companies’ spending plans, the climate impacts of their projects, and comments from advocacy organizations and the public. That sometimes means reading and responding to hundreds of thousands of pages of documents so the agency can adjudicate arguments on everything from interest rates to the greenhouse gas emissions associated with replacing gas pipes.
Over the last decade, the number of parties registered to intervene in such cases has nearly doubled, and the number of public comments filed has multiplied more than tenfold, leaving DPS staff with more work than ever. Ten years ago, major electric and gas rate cases routinely wrapped up in 11 months, as they’re supposed to. Since the climate law and pandemic, they have averaged 16 months.
These delays can end up pinching customers. In one recent case, the upstate utilities New York State Electric and Gas and Rochester Gas and Electric — owned by the same parent company — negotiated to increase their average customer’s bill by roughly $20 a month, resulting in hundreds of millions of dollars in added annual revenue for the companies. The case took nearly a year and a half to settle — wrapping up six months after the deal was supposed to kick in, which meant customers saw even steeper bill increases up front as the utility made up for the months of missed revenue.
Some New York energy experts say DPS’s staffing shortages have contributed to the delays. They also worry that the agency is losing expertise. Officials in key positions have retired, and the department has often struggled to fill their shoes, according to sources familiar with the agency’s workings who spoke to New York Focus on condition of anonymity. Retirements at state agencies have ticked up in the last decade, peaking at the height of the pandemic in 2021. DPS was not immune: The department’s average age and tenure have dropped over the last decade, according to state workforce reports.
“Our tax dollars pay for experts to be on staff at DPS. Why do we have to go out and raise private money, and then hire a private company?”
—Kim Fraczek, Sane Energy Project
“What you lose over time is, ‘Oh, yeah, I remember three rate cases ago, this is how we handled this issue,’” Howard, the former commission chair, said.
Denn, the agency spokesperson, said DPS has procedures in place to ensure continuity. “Following retirements, the Department engages in succession planning to prepare for departures,” he said, adding that DPS “has robust training and development programs to prepare staff for greater responsibility in the organization.”
But training younger staff can only go so far. As Howard noted, it’s difficult to retain new employees — especially technical staff, like the engineers, accountants, and lawyers who do the agency’s core work.
“One of the most difficult things for DPS,” Howard said, “is that folks are hired, get a few years’ experience, and then they’re worth more in the marketplace than they are being government employees.” (Competitors in the job market include the very utilities that DPS is tasked with regulating.)
The department’s ability to weather these staffing troubles will be put to the test by one of the most important climate bills passed in this year’s legislative session. The RAPID Act has given DPS a raft of new responsibilities: The agency will now house the state’s renewable energy permitting office, and staffers have one year to set rules for how the office will approve new transmission lines. The mandate is key to helping New York increase its capacity to deliver cleaner energy across the state — a critical step in meeting the state’s goal to reach zero emissions by 2050.
Marguerite Wells, executive director of the renewable energy lobbying group Alliance for Clean Energy New York, said the RAPID Act will only succeed in its goal of speeding up the buildout of transmission lines “if the regulations are very carefully crafted.” Otherwise, it could backfire.
The final version of the RAPID Act did not directly address staffing issues.
DPS — along with the state’s energy research and development arm NYSERDA — has also been in charge of monitoring and advancing the state’s progress toward a zero-emissions grid. It admitted in a report last month that, at its current pace, New York will not be able to build enough wind and solar to reach 70 percent renewables by 2030, as the state’s landmark 2019 climate law requires.
The agency oversees a variety of lesser-known climate initiatives, too, including a pilot program to electrify heating and cooling using what are known as “thermal energy networks.” The 2022 law creating the program, which had broad support from environmentalists and labor unions, did not allocate any new staff for its implementation.
Kim Fraczek, director of the climate group Sane Energy Project, has seen the consequences. For six years, her group has raised objections in rate cases and other proceedings where it sees threats to the state’s climate mandates. In response, she said, DPS staff has put the onus back on the advocacy group to propose alternatives — a tall order given the resources and technical expertise required to do so.
Once, the group actually did, raising thousands of dollars to commission an independent review of a proposal from National Grid. Climate advocates charged that the proposal, for a heating and cooling network in Brooklyn, failed to meet the 2022 law’s mandates. Following the study, DPS directed National Grid to significantly revise its proposal.
“Our tax dollars pay for experts to be on staff at the Department of Public Service,” Fraczek said. “Why do we have to go out and raise private money, and then hire a private company?”
“I don’t think that any of us, when we’re putting bills in … are saying, ‘I wonder if they have enough staffing for this?’”
—Kevin Parker, State Senate Energy Committee
The legislature has failed to boost DPS staffing for other big mandates, like the hundreds of millions of dollars in aid it has approved for customers who fell deep into debt to their utilities during the pandemic. The latest round of that funding, approved in May 2023 as part of the state’s budget, took nearly a year to reach customers.
In February, DPS staff blamed the delay on accounting errors made by utilities. The head of DPS’s audit department said that the agency simply didn’t have the resources to audit utility data in detail.
The Public Utility Law Project, Sane Energy Project, and others like them have pitched in a heavy share of oversight work in recent years. PULP’s staff has roughly doubled since 2018, but it still finds itself stretched thin, between assisting individual customers and weighing in on an increasing number of proceedings. PULP has participated in seven rate cases this year alone, compared to its pre-pandemic average of two to three annually, Wheelock, its executive director, said.
She said it’s key for DPS to have the resources to rigorously enforce affordability mandates, particularly as clean energy spending continues to grow.
“It’s going to be very necessary that this [program] be tip top and in good shape for the climate change work that needs to be done on the state level,” Wheelock said. “We need to make sure that people are getting the right amount of benefits so that they can afford their utilities.”
Correction: A previous version of this article stated that John Howard was Public Service Commission chair until this spring. In fact, his time as chair ended prior to that, though he remained a commissioner until this spring.