Watertown, NY—If you’re thinking about building a new home anywhere in the North Country, get ready to bundle up—and brace yourself for the latest brainwave from Governor Hochul’s Albany crew. Starting January 1st, it’s officially illegal to hook up new homes (under seven stories) to good old-fashioned natural gas. No more gas furnaces. No gas stoves. Not even a gas fireplace for those blustery Black River nights. Welcome to Hochul’s “all-electric” experiment. Hope you like playing Russian roulette with National Grid every time the wind howls off Lake Ontario.
Some home builders, like Dan Barnaba in Salina, are already getting ahead of the curve, building entire neighborhoods that run purely on electric heat and appliances. The rest of us in the North Country? We’re just hoping the next big snowstorm doesn’t take out the power and leave us shivering with nothing but a battery-powered blanket and Hochul’s empty climate promises.
This is all thanks to New York’s rush to ban fossil fuel equipment in new construction—part of a statewide crusade to “save the planet” by freezing out actual New Yorkers. Forget that seven out of ten homes in our region run on gas for a reason. Forget that electric baseboard heat and air-source heat pumps are still as new to most North Country folks as sushi at Stewart’s. Hochul and company say we’ll all learn to love it, once we’re sufficiently broke from those monthly electric bills.
Sure, they say it’ll cut greenhouse gases. But here in the North Country, we’re more worried about cutting the ice off our windshields and keeping our families warm through February. Nobody in Albany seems to remember that up here, winter is a survival sport—not a photo op.
Ask around the North Country, and you’ll find plenty of folks who’d rather trust a roaring gas furnace over a government grant or a heat pump that wheezes at twenty below. Funny how it’s always the city folks pushing the policies that leave the North Country out in the cold—literally.
Bottom line: If Hochul really wants to “inspire hope and transform lives,” maybe start by letting us keep the heat on.
Call to Action:
Speak up, North Country. Tell Albany we need warmth, not woke winter shivers. Keep our homes heated the way we know works—because out here, surviving the season matters more than scoring political points.
