In a fresh sign that New York’s state climate agenda is pure fantasy, contractors key to making good on a major piece of the so-called plan just filed to charge 54% more to build their offshore wind farms. 

Taxpayers won’t be on the line for that, but ratepayers will. 

That’s the bottom line of New York’s “net zero” climate plan to drastically reduce carbon emissions.

It aims is to stop burning natural gas and other fossil fuels (even for cooking and heat), vastly increasing the use of electricity — even while magically switching the state’s electricity generation from mostly fossil-fuel-based to all-alternative energy.

Since we can’t add significant hydro power and won’t build more nuclear plants, that means ginormous increases in solar and wind power — plus new transmission lines.

And vast energy-storage capacities, for which affordable technology doesn’t even exist yet.

State officials pretend this will “only” cost a few hundred billion bucks (it’ll actually cost far more) but don’t dare appropriate enough tax dollars for it, which means they’re mandating outlays that must eventually show up in utility bills. (That’s what “Con Ed will pay” means, since it and other utilities have nowhere else to get the cash.) 

This is the truth about the state Climate Leadership and Community Protection Act; recent hikes in your utility bills are just a taste of what’s coming unless and until the law gets changed.

That is: State law orders bureaucrats to shut down fossil-fuel power plants and utilities to get ever-more power from alternative sources that mostly aren’t even on the drawing board yet.  

And as the wind-farm price-hike “request” filed in the runup to the holiday weekend (plainly so that few would notice it) indicates, the state’s leaders even lowballed the cost of the early rounds of building that alternative capacity.

Even if they weren’t going to soar past initial estimates, the costs to New Yorkers don’t remotely match the benefits to them.

Fact is, making New York and California and New Jersey and every other blue state — heck, the whole country — carbon-neutral will make only a minuscule dent in global carbon emissions: China’s still building coal plants at a record clip and doesn’t even pretend it’ll stop any year soon.

By the way, no one’s even talking about the big risks to New York’s plan.

One of them is the simple fact that the transition means the peak electric load will stop being in the summer, when power’s needed to run air-conditioning.

Instead, if the plan works as intended, most blackouts will come in the deepest part of winter, when everyone’s relying on electricity for heat.

Extreme cold already kills more people than extreme heat; that death toll will now grow.

Gov. Kathy Hochul and the state lawmakers imposing this idiocy will be long out of office when the bills in dollars and blood really start coming due.  

They’re now just telling eco-conscious voters what they want to hear, trusting the public to forget that everything always costs more and takes longer, with fewer benefits, than politicians (and the bureaucrats who answer to them) claim.

The only real question is how much harm is done by this madness in the name only of fighting climate change before New Yorkers wake up to the truth and put a stop to it.