Addressing Climate Change Impacts | Sustainability Report 2022

Climate Change Mitigation

Consolidated Edison Company of New York, Inc (CECONY) and Orange and Rockland Utilities, Inc. (O&R) are committed to managing risks related to climate change. As described in the other sections of this report, CECONY and O&R are working on a number of initiatives to help mitigate climate change. Some of these efforts include, but are not limited to, energy efficiency and building electrification programs, adoption of Company electric vehicles (EVs) and enabling EV charging infrastructure, decarbonization of the steam system, leak prone pipe programs, continuing efforts to expand distributed solar and other distributed energy resources throughout each service territory, and helping New York State achieve its ambitious energy storage goals.

For more information on these mitigation efforts please see the following sections in the report:

Climate Resilience and Adaptation

In recent years, CECONY (has adopted an ever more proactive, forward-looking approach to system resiliency to address increasingly severe weather due to climate change. After Superstorm Sandy, we upgraded our infrastructure to be resilient to a 100-year storm plus one foot of sea level rise and two feet of freeboard.

In 2019, we completed a multi-year Climate Change Vulnerability Study to understand local climate change projections, identify potential system vulnerabilities that could result from the changing climate, and explore potential adaptation options to protect our infrastructure.

In 2020 and 2021, CECONY continued to make progress toward strengthening our energy systems to address the adverse impacts of climate change and the potential for more extreme weather. Our efforts included applying forecasting and design processes that more fully incorporate the expected future impacts of climate change. Our Climate Change Implementation Plan, filed with the New York State Public Service Commission in December 2020, guided CECONY in identifying an adaptation strategy for climate resilience.

Our key 2022 climate change resilience accomplishments continue and include the following:

Integrating climate resilience into engineering, operations, and planning in the Company. The CECONY commodity Long Range Plans, published in January 2022, describe our 10-year climate resilience investments that will be made in concert with developing our core services and acting on our clean energy commitment.
In conjunction with recent climate legislation, all New York State electric utilities will conduct a vulnerability study and submit a 20-year climate resilience implementation plan by November 2023, with five-year rate impacts to be included for approval by the Public Service Commission. CECONY will build upon its 2019 Climate Change Vulnerability Study and commit to reviewing this study every 5 years. Working with NYSERDA, we will use the most up to date climate science to determine if there are any changes we need to make to our climate resilience planning efforts, and continue working on developing 20-year resilience investment plans.
Remaining active in the industry and working with our peers on understanding climate risks and how to adapt to them. We have taken a lead role in the Electric Power Research Institute’s Climate Resilience and Adaptation initiative (READi), and we continue to engage with peer utilities, and participate in resilience activities at the state and local level.

We recognize that our approach needs to be flexible as more is learned about climate change impacts. Continued collaboration, engagement and benchmarking with our stakeholders will be key to maintaining our ability to provide safe, reliable, and resilient energy to our customers in a changing climate.

For more information, please visit Our Climate Change Resiliency Plan, and find our latest Task Force on Climate Related Financial Disclosures (TCFD) here: Environmental, Social, and Governance (ESG) Resources | Consolidated Edison, Inc.