As much of the East Coast was in the throes of a midsummer heat wave, more than 50,000 New Yorkers lost power over the weekend as the city’s power company, Con Edison, struggled to repair the power grid damaged earlier in the week by a transformer fire. Following the blackout, Democrat New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo leveled blame on Con Edison, stating, “We’ve been through this situation [with] ConEd time & again & they should have been better prepared — period.”

However, the lion’s share of the blame resides not with Con Edison but with Cuomo and his “green” energy policies. As The Wall Street Journal reports, “A new state law the Governor signed last week requires 70% of state electricity to come from renewables by 2030 and 100% from ‘carbon-free’ sources by 2040. Meantime, the Governor has blocked three natural gas pipelines and mandated the premature shutdown of the Indian Point nuclear plant that supplies a quarter of New York City’s power.”

In short, Cuomo and his fellow leftists pass virtue-signaling legislation that does little other than cripple the power company with nearly impossible “green” regulatory standards — standards that also effectively jack up the cost of electricity for all New Yorkers for an inferior product. And to top it off, Cuomo has the gall to blame the power company for failing to meet customer demands.

It’s another classic case of Democrats instituting leftist polices that inevitably fail, but they then turn and blame the failure for their polices on their constituents.