Thousands walked away from the Brooklyn Marine Terminal Wind Farm today, abandoning work on the enormous turbines and blades, and pouring into the streets. Joined by hundreds of thousands of supporters, they made their way up the ramps of the Brooklyn-Queens Expressway, choking it off from Bay Ridge to Williamsburg.
Briana Rabbani, a shop steward with the Renewable Energy Laborer’s’ International Union of North America, told us that workers decided almost unanimously to strike last night after a routine investigation uncovered graft on a vast scale. Three miles off the coast, an undersea cable bringing power from one of the locally made windmills was found to have an illegal tap cable attached to it. Others were discovered as well. It appears that Tesla has been secretly siphoning New York’s publicly owned power, and the unions believe figures within the Public Power Authority had likely known all along, receiving kickbacks while arguing for suppressed wages in the contracts of past years. The workers decided that enough was enough.
“We fought hard for these union jobs that produce wind and solar power for New Yorkers, not for shareholders,” says Rabbani. “We’ve been getting a lot of shit from people about why we don’t make the bills more truly affordable for low-income New Yorkers—and we’ve been saying that, hey, power just isn’t cheap to produce. Well, now it turns out we were undermined by corruption. We’re shutting it down!”
Tomorrow, organizers say, the strikes will roll to Queens, then the Bronx. Organizers promise that not a single wind turbine will leave Brooklyn docks until the recently discovered parasitic undersea cable siphoning off power to the private grid is detached from the Public Power grid—and the workers’ lost wages are repaid. Mayor Nurse is supporting the unions, while a crisis council is called with union leaders, along with the City Council and NYPA leadership.
Programmed to Fail
And yet, it turns out that an unknown portion of this celebrated engineering crew was covert operatives—former Tesla engineers who had presented false credentials.
The discovery of the siphon helps explain the particularly bumpy ride that public power has taken in recent years. Public sentiment has been gathering against the unions as power bills have continued to rise in the 2040’s. Ironically, this is what led to the complete audit, including an investigation of the undersea cables.
Public Power watchdogs have long pointed out that the Authority ought to be able to pay higher union salaries and benefits while offering electricity to New Yorkers at fair prices and with income-based discounts, based on their calculations of megawatts produced. For years, they’ve asserted that something doesn’t add up. Unable to point to evidence until now, however, anti-union critics like Green Future Choice were quick to sink their teeth into NYPA’s jugular, calling for its dissolution.
How We Got Here
Twenty years ago, renewables surged under President Biden, but then largely deflated by the Trump-Musk administration’s pro-fossil fuel decrees. All the same, the switch to renewables quietly continued, and jumped forward when a number of states took steps to secede from the United States of X in 2033—one year after the massive flood of 2032.
After a deal was reached with the splintering federal government to retain partial Medicare benefits in exchange for partial payment of taxes, and emergency funding was raised to replace FEMA, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez was elected to a coalition government for the Northeast Territories, and New York experienced a cultural shift toward greater sectionalism. This made it possible not only to return to climate goals set in the early 2020s, but to make Public Power—the dream of democratically controlled utilities— a reality.
We've been getting a lot of shit from people about why we don't make the bills more truly affordable for low-income New Yorkers—and we've been saying that, hey, power just isn't cheap to produce. Well, now it turns out we were undermined by corruption. We're shutting it down!
It happened fast. Groups like Uprose in Brooklyn led the switch to public energy, and windmill production tripled. Today, the state has made good on its promise to retrain fossil fuel workers into wind and solar jobs, and is on track to reach 100% non-carbon energy by 2050, even as the steady rise of energy costs has begun to fracture the alliance.
Last year’s battery fire was an additional setback, as were the cyberattacks over the past two decades that hit the NYC grid. But today, the Public Encryption Firewall is robust. However, physical tap lines into undersea public cables had not been well-considered.
New York is proud of the engineers who built the semi-autonomous power grid, which is today powered by 100% renewables. This year, the thermal heating system is also going city-wide.
Tesla Spies and Undersea Subterfuge
Organizers promise that not a single wind turbine will leave Brooklyn docks until the recently discovered parasitic undersea cable siphoning off power to the private grid is detached from the Public Power grid—and the workers' lost wages are repaid.
And yet, it turns out that an unknown portion of this celebrated engineering crew was covert operatives—former Tesla engineers who had presented false credentials.
Following last week’s discovery, teams of forensic electrical engineers have identified hundreds of undersea transmission sites where high-voltage direct current cables transporting offshore wind-generated electricity to terrestrial substations and along the coast were covertly tapped/spliced into unauthorized UXA Tesla-type conduits. These conduits siphoned off an estimated several terawatts of electricity while maintaining near-undetectable loss readings. The forensic engineers found that inline power conditioning modules had been placed on the main lines, which manipulated current and voltage signatures, effectively masking the output readings by stabilizing fluctuations and compensating for phase distortion in the power flow analytics. This system prevented the siphoning from being discovered.
“Our enemies are pretty clever,” says Rabbani as she leads a cadre of blade-polishers down the BQE. “But when we stay together, we always win.”