We're Not Short on Power. We're Just Too Sanctimonious To Generate It.
Northeastern states import massive amounts of electricity from Canada while strangling domestic energy production with regulations.
The headlines framed it as another Trump tariff story: Ontario Premier Doug Ford threatening a 25 percent retaliation on American energy exports. But the real story of the Northeastern energy crisis is more than cross-border drama and goes back well before the tariffs and trumpeting.
Ford's threat is the latest lash in a decades-long ritual of energy self-flagellation. U.S. regulators and lawmakers have been kneecapping American electricity production with regulation after regulation, smothering new projects in the name of preservation, wetlands, or the northeastern bulrush sedge—often before they even break ground. Instead of building up capacity, we import Canadian power to keep the emissions off our ledgers like mafia accountants, cleverly skirting the law while they convince the world they're making us cleaner, greener, and smarter, even as the lights flicker and the bills climb.
The people paying the price are not in press conferences or policy meetings. They're at home, choosing between groceries and the gas bill. I met them last winter in North Philly. I was there to run focus groups on the impact of rising energy costs.
A father talked about replacing Olive Garden dinners with SpaghettiOs, ashamed that Little League wins no longer earned a night out. A grad student turned her one-bedroom apartment into a boarding house—three people sharing the space just to keep the lights on. A restaurant owner described her kitchen working in winter coats because they couldn't afford to run the heat. These weren't sob stories. They were quiet portraits of sacrifice and grit.
Since then, prices have jumped another 7 percent despite our reliance on Canadian imports.
In 2024, the U.S. imported 27,200 gigawatt-hours of electricity from Canada—enough to cover up to 20 percent of New York's supply or 15 percent of New England's total winter load—because we've made building new power here nearly impossible and incentivized imported power through regulatory loopholes that allow us to ignore any emissions that happen outside the U.S.
It's a simple formula: export emissions, import virtue. Meanwhile, domestic energy projects in the Northeast stall, sputter, or collapse.
We're sitting on 469 billion tons of coal, 2.9 trillion cubic feet of gas, and centuries of nuclear fuel. But in the U.S., building power plants now requires a legal team and a decade of hearings. We've turned power generation into a theater of guilt—where producing energy in the U.S. is too sinful to permit but importing it from somewhere else lets us feel pure. It's not policy. It's penance.
In 2021, New York shut down the Indian Point nuclear plant—one of its last sources of zero-emissions baseload power. That same year, the state began ramping up electricity imports from Canada to fill the gap, bringing in 7,600 gigawatt-hours. Hydroelectric power alone couldn't handle the demand, so Ontario's gas plants fired up to meet the demand, releasing an estimated 1 million tons of carbon dioxide. But because those emissions occurred north of the border, New York claimed a drop in its own energy-sector emissions.
And that's the game: When Canadian hydro falters, Canadian gas steps in—but the emissions vanish on U.S. climate ledgers.
Vermont (importing over 80 percent of its electricity), Massachusetts, and much of the rest of New England operate from the same playbook. The grid operator they belong to (ISO-NE) imports around 15 percent of its winter peak from Canada. When hydro output dropped 18 percent due to drought, gas peaker plants and fossil fuels saved the day. In 2023 alone, utilities in Quebec, Ontario, and New Brunswick generated an estimated 13.4 million metric tons of carbon dioxide—none of which appear on the emissions ledgers of states like Massachusetts and Vermont, despite their heavy reliance on imported power from those provinces. Meanwhile, the 1,200 megawatt Commonwealth Wind project was canceled outright after the developer paid $50 million to walk away, citing financial infeasibility and permitting delays.
This is not a glitch in the system—it is the system.
A 1999 rule by the Environmental Protection Agency allows states to treat imported electricity as emissions-free, regardless of how it's generated. It's a convenient accounting trick that lets politicians hit climate targets without reducing actual emissions. At the same time, domestic energy projects face a labyrinth of legal, regulatory, and activist roadblocks—thanks to laws like Title V of the Clean Air Act and a permitting system that treats any new infrastructure as a threat until proven otherwise.
We've built a political culture that worships the optics of clean energy while punishing the act of actually producing it. Across the Northeast, domestic energy projects don't just struggle—they're buried. Offshore wind collapses under lawsuits over fishing rights and ocean views. Small modular reactors gather dust in regulatory limbo. Pipelines are killed over silt and wetlands. Nuclear plants drown in litigation.
In 2016, New York vetoed the Constitution Pipeline, leaving the Marcellus Shale untapped. Two years later, during a brutal cold snap, Massachusetts imported liquefied natural gas—from Russia—rather than lay pipe from Pennsylvania. A proposed 42-megawatt biomass plant in Springfield, Massachusetts, was blocked on a technicality in 2021 after years of permit delays and concerns over "environmental justice." Clean, local energy was too controversial. Imported emissions? No comment.
Altogether, the region has canceled enough projects to generate 42,000 gigawatt-hours a year—more than 50 percent above the power we imported from Canada in 2024. We're not out of energy. We've just outlawed reality.
We pretend it's progress. We pretend the air is cleaner. We pretend that exporting emissions is environmentalism. It's not. It's theater for climate lobbies, campaign soundbites, and activists who measure success in press releases, not power output. The emissions remain. Only the guilt is outsourced.
So no, Ford's tariff threat isn't the story—it's just the headline. The real story is what made that threat possible: our addiction to imported virtue, our refusal to build, and a regulatory culture that punishes the very act of producing energy. We're not short on power. We're just too sanctimonious to generate it.
