Tuesday morning’s chilly weather likely had many in Kingston thinking about their heating needs, and how much it will cost to keep from freezing to death until the return of air-conditioner season.

For those who heat with fuel oil, the news is good — as per the New York State Energy Development Authority’s dashboard, home heating oil is down about 15 percent from last year. But if you heat with gas or electric, you may want to start knitting yourself some long johns. That’s because Central Hudson Gas & Electric’s newest rate hikes have taken effect: Electricity is up 7.85 percent, which works out to about $12.65 more a month for the average user. Gas is up 9.19 percent and an extra $12.25 a month for the average user. While your Editorial Team gets as antsy as anyone about the climate when the winter seems unusually warm, we don’t think it’s exactly a sin to hope for an abnormally mild season, if only so the already hard-pressed Kingstonians will save at least a little money.

Energy — how it’s made, how it gets to us, how much it costs and how much our using it further impacts the planet — is a pretty hot topic these days. It’s also very complicated, even to the point of creating ironic conflicts and sticky situations. A recent development regarding Central Hudson underscores this point.

The Poughkeepsie-based and Canadian-owned utility’s billing fiasco has made CH everybody’s target over the last few years, from angry customers to politicians looking to score points with voters. The PR situation for the corporate side of the enterprise (the people who actually work out in the field have near-universal respect) doesn’t look promising as the utility is seeking another rate hike after the current one expires at the end of next June. (The stock of CH’s parent company, Fortis Inc., is up over 13 percent since this time last year, in case you were worried.)

The utility’s latest headache comes courtesy of County Executive Jen Metzger, who is urging the state Public Service Commission to reject CH’s Climate Change Resilience Plan, a five-year list of projects and promises the utility that Metzger likes to call Fortis-Central Hudson to underscore its non-local ownership will undertake and fulfill in regard to making its grid tough enough to withstand the bizarre and often-extreme weather we’re seeing in recent years.

But Metzger has some notes. In comments to PSC Chair Rory M. Christian, she wrote that “the plan falls short in several areas,” including coordination with local governments and emergency services, and “a failure to identify critical infrastructure for priority consideration in planning and investment.” Furthermore, she wrote that the plan “contains few innovative solutions to bolster the resilience of our communities to the impact of climate change … ”

As per Metzger, Central Hudson’s plan as written focuses on the arborial arts (tree-trimming) and making transmission lines more able to withstand bad weather. That’s nowhere near enough, she wrote, presenting the example of a utility in Vermont which established “microgrids” by setting up batteries to keep homes electrified in case major lines go down. Microgrids have worked well, according to Metzger, and bring added power-management benefits which cut down on the use of fossil-fueled “peaker plants.”

While Central Hudson’s plan includes two microgrids in the Town of Wawarsing, Metzger would like to see more. A lot more. “A residential battery storage program would protect residents from power outages while providing load-balancing benefits that support grid reliability and reduce operational costs,” she wrote. “The company’s plan for undergrounding lines is likely to be very limited because of cost, and only two microgrids are planned … leaving most residents still vulnerable to outages.” Residential storage systems (a.k.a. big batteries like the ones they have in Teslas) should be offered free of charge to customers in remote and vulnerable-to-power loss locations and those who depend on the electricity being on for their medical devices to work.

In our inexpert view, this seems like a good idea. In fact, one member of the Editorial Team proposed a microgrid system in a Hudson Valley One/Kingston Times editorial more than 10 years ago, written in the wake of the massive power outages caused by Hurricanes Irene, Lee and Sandy. While we are not really in a position to meaningfully evaluate whether Metzger is right about CH’s resilience plan, we wonder if she’s not working at cross-purposes here, the other purpose being keeping energy costs down for her constituents.

Like they say on Facebook, it’s complicated. On one hand, utilities do need to do more to brace the grid for God knows what weather clusterf—s are on the way to our area. On the other hand, the community is groaning under the weight of energy costs, a situation that would likely be made worse by making CH spend more money on resiliency. Progressives rail, and not without justification, about “regressive taxes” like the sales tax which makes you pay the same whether you’re swimming in money or drowning in debt. Well, the electric bill is like the ultimate regressive tax, taking money out of everything and sitting on our collective chest like the sleep demon in Fuseli’s painting “The Nightmare.” And a nightmare it will be when the PSC gives CH more rate hikes next year; to get them, the utility will likely cite, among other things, increased resiliency costs.

We wonder why our leaders seem to have an awfully hard time seeing the disconnect between decrying what a business charges while at the same time demanding much more from them. You see the same disconnect in housing — adding to housing providers’ costs with rent control and Good Cause Eviction, and then wailing about the lack of affordable housing. When your paycheck comes from taxes, maybe you just can't make the connection, or prefer not to.

Energy is complicated, and difficult: see also the imbroglio caused by Gov. Hochul’s admitting that there’s no way the state will meet the clean-energy goals set forth by her predecessor five years ago. If there’s a way to build resiliency without increasing rates, we’d love to hear it. If there’s not, we ask our leaders to be very mindful of how their well-intentioned plans may bring some decidedly un-demure unanticipated consequences.