Photo courtesy Occipital Lobe. Those high natural gas and oil prices have raised the prices for wholesale electricity that Con Ed buys from power-generating companies, and naturally the company is passing those expenses along to us. The company says that residential customers will pay 22% more for electricity this year than they did last summer – almost a quarter of that spike is due to a Bloomberg-approved rate hike. Harlem flea market vendor Cruz Reyes,......

Map from the NY Times With the unusually hot weather (20 degrees above normal) baking the city over the past few days, Con Ed has been trying to keep the power on. The NY Times has taken information from Con Ed showing the change in peak electricity demand between last week and this past Monday and mapped it. An important thing to note is that the jump looks lowest in many midtown and lower......

Two companies are vying to be chosen to lay an electricity transmission cable from New Jersey to Manhattan and ultimately, both may wind up doing the job to feed the city's need for juice. The deadline is 2010, when the Charles Poletti Power Project in Astoria, Queens is scheduled to shut down. According to The New York Times, the EPA has identified that plant as the third-largest source of toxic pollutants in the city. Two......